Sunday, 23 December 2018

A UK poetry submission schedule for early 2019

I shall try to submit to several of these (mostly UK) competitions and submission windows -

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Saturday, 15 December 2018

A UK/Eire prose submission schedule for early 2019

As more magazines introduce submission windows, and competitions increase their significance, it's worth planning ahead. I shall try to submit to these (mostly UK) competitions and submission windows -

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Wednesday, 12 December 2018

Gran Canaria

An all-in deal that includes alcohol is a challenge to one's will power, especially if there aren't many other distractions. I think I coped - alcohol doesn't fuel my style of creativity. I saw my first whale in the wild, and the dunes were sometimes Saharan. We went through the gay nude part of the beach on the way.

I read "Mislaid" by Nell Zink, "Bearings" by Isobel Dixon, "Honeycomb" by M.R. Peacocke (the sunset suits her pamphlet) and "The things I would tell you" by Sabrina Mahfouz (ed) - writing by British Muslim women. I wrote 3 little pieces - about 1200 words all told.

The interior of the island is raw geology with a few little villages in the process of abandonment or touristification. Here's a little community stage that might not have been so different years ago. No Moroccan influence, though the mainland's not that far away.

History and culture weren't easy to find. There's little evidence left that there was an indigenous (Berber) population, and churches are few and far between. But the island's not short of interest - "Secret" is a Swingers' Club by a Spar shop, in a themed block of buildings (Holland, Italy, etc).

We visited Tirgan, Teror, Fataga, Cruz de Tejeda, etc.

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Friday, 30 November 2018

The state of UK poetry

In a recent Guardian article Sandeep Parmar noted the poetry concerns of some writers -

  • "contemporary poetry is in a rotten state,” according to Rose Tremain in the TLS. “Having binned all the rules, most poets seem to think that rolling out some pastry-coloured prose, adding a sprinkling of white space, then cutting it up into little shapelets will do. I’m fervently hoping for something better soon.”
  • In a recent interview, poet and editor Robin Robertson also railed against current poetry, which for him divides into two extremes: “light verse” or “incomprehensible”

These are time-worn moans. I have some sympathies with them but no more so than decades ago. Here are some extracts from poetry publications I've recently read -

  • "it's not until we quiet again that we clock the car we're in is not in fact the thing we thought was moving" (Sam Buchan-Watts). Not even good prose.
  • "Like others/ you wait/ in queues/ for the drought to end" (Arundhathi Subramaniam). Four line-breaks disguise nothing
  • "And love grows angel in the gloom/ with your calls through resistant stars" (Ishion Hutchinson). Eh?

To those complaints could be added

Poetry's commonly attacked from without for being prose chopped up or for being difficult. Are these criticism from within more worrying? (Tremain may not be a poet, but she's been part of the Literary and Creative Writing scene for years). I think they signal a shift in the nature of the literary world, and of the mainstream.

  • The eco-system - As more Creative Writing students graduate, the number of potential literary readers and writers increases. Thanks to the internet, they no longer form an archipelago. Members of a minority need no longer live in the same geographic community to sustain each other.
    Readers and writers are more in touch with each other. Writers run workshops, attend festivals, and engage via social media.
  • The poetry - The notion of "mainstream" has often been contested. Here are two attempts to describe it
    • "The conventional or mainstream poem today is a univocal, more or less plain-spoken, short narrative often culminating in a sort of epiphany. Such a form must convey an impression of closure and wholeness no matter what it says", Rae Armantrout, "Sagetrieb", 11.3 (1992)
    • "the [mainstream] work appears spoken in a natural voice; there must be a sense of urgency and immediacy to this 'affected naturalness' so as to make it appear that one is reexperiencing the original event; there must be a 'studied artlessness' that gives a sense of spontaneous personal sincerity; and there must be a strong movement toward emphatic closure", Charles Altieri, "Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry", CUP, 1984, p.10
    If by "mainstream" people mean accessible poetry which has literary credibility, then I think the old mainstream has been squeezed. Perhaps once upon a time there was (as viewed from within) a majority style and several minority styles, but now more than ever that "mainstream poetry" is one style amongst many others.

So I can see why writers might feel that poetry has changed, that mainstream poetry is under attack. It would be an exaggeration to claim that there is a new mainstream, but a new shared set of influences may be leading to a loose consensus. For a start, the building blocks of poetry have changed. These books indicate the shift -

  • Close calls with nonsense (Stephen Burt). An unpreachy look at the factors and fashions involved with recent North American poetry.
  • How to write a poem (John Redmond) A book for beginners that provides building blocks more in keeping with contemporary poetry - a Jori Graham poem is successfully discussed

The new mainstream has more styles, and is written by more types of people. I see this as enrichment rather than dilution. It's as likely to involve Oulipo wordplay as Confessionalism (and one person is more likely to write either). It may have one foot in academia, though the other might be on local radio for National Poetry Day. I don't think "The Poetry Review" represents it. Magazines like "Under the Radar" may.

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Saturday, 24 November 2018

The state of the UK/Eire short story

Suppose you were asked about the state of sport rather than short stories - what would be a reliable indicator? How many gold medals were won in the Olympics? How many people jog? How many people watch football? How many pages of media are devoted to sport?

Judged by these sorts of criteria, stories aren't doing well. When did you last read one? When did you last buy a story book? Can you name any living story writers?

Every so often there are articles about the revival of the short story. They're soon followed by articles about false dawns. Alice Munro's Nobel win didn't turn things round. Nor did Tom Hanks' book.

Why are there so few outlets? I asked a publisher about this and he said that short-stories are like poems - only people who write them read or buy them. His magazine's guidelines say "Our preference is for literary fiction". Ambit Magazine says "We’re not afraid of genre fiction, but it should probably have an interesting relationship to the genre at hand – a straight-ahead detective or horror story probably won’t appear." Maybe it’s only literary short stories that are suffering. When demand for them slackens, so does supply. Why write stories if nobody reads them?

All is not lost. The BBC is trying to generate interest with the £15,000 National Short Story Award and the Young Writers' Award. Hensher in the introduction to his latest anthology suggested that competitions would be ok if the rest of the story eco-system were healthy. A few more story collections are being reviewed - see Fen by Daisy Johnson (Vintage, 2017). More small presses are dipping their toes into story collections. And Flash is a growth sector, though surely one can't really compare a 250-word piece with an Alice Munro story. It's like comparing Twenty20 cricket with test matches.

But is England the best place to be? Dublin has "The Irish Writing Centre" at 19 Parnell Square with a shop and many events. Edinburgh's Scottish Storytelling Centre is along the Golden Mile. England's catching up - the National Writing Centre has recently started in Norwich - see https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/. Its NCW Podcast is worth subscribing to.

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Tuesday, 23 October 2018

Aldeburgh poetry

I've always intended to go to more literature festivals, in particular those that specialise in poetry and Flash. Especially this year I regret not being able to get to the Aldeburgh poetry festival. It's not so far away from where I live, but it seems always to be on a weekend when I have to work.

2018's festival is curated by Poetry School / Paul Stephenson and involves many people I've talked to (albeit briefly), including Helena Nelson, Julia Webb, Chrissy Williams, Fiona Moore, Robert Peake, George Szirtes, Jane Commane and Matthew Stewart.

Also there's a session entitled "A Cambridge Quartet of First Collections" with Rebecca Watts, Adam Crothers, Claudine Toutoungi, and Alex Wong. I've seen some of them perform locally though I've not read their books.

I suspect that much of the valuable interaction at these events happens outside of the standard sessions. Next year my work commitments will be changing, so who knows, I might manage to visit for an extended period and imbibe the atmosphere.

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Saturday, 29 September 2018

Neglected writers - Hempel and Berlin

I've a list of writers that I want to read. Some of them have been rather neglected by readers at large. Here are two whose books I've recently found -

Amy Hempel

"The Dog of Marriage" (Quercus) contains all her stories up to 2008. 400 pages for £9.99. A bargain. Here's a sample (the narrator's a widow, Nashville's a dog)

Here's a trick I found for how to finally get some sleep. I sleep in my husband's bed. That way the empty bed I look at is my own.
Cold nights I pull his socks on over my hands. I read in his bed. People still write from when Flea had his column. He did a pet Q and A for the newspaper. The new doctor sends along letters for my amusement. Here's one I liked - a man thinks his cat is homosexual.
The letter begins, "My cat Frank (not his real name) ..."
In addition to Flea's socks, I also wear his watch.
It's the way we tell each other.
At bedtime, I think how Nashville slept with Flea. She must have felt to him like a sack of antlers. I read about a marriage breaking up because the man let his Afghan sleep in the marriage bed.
I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we needed - not sex - but sex was how we got there. (p.21)

It's fast, with jokes and feeling. Names mentioned in the book's introduction came to my mind too - the wit of Lorrie Moore, the concision of Lydia Davis (some of Hempel's pieces are a page long, a few are much shorter). I suppose she's a bit of a writer's writer.

My favourite pieces include "San Francisco", "In the cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" (her most famous piece), and "Weekend".

Lucia Berlin

"A manual for cleaning women" (Picador, 2016) has 43 stories (about 400 pages) for £9.99. She had a lively start to life (3 failed marriages and 4 sons by the time she was 28) and was an alcoholic for decades. From the age of 10 she had scoliosos, which was often painful. For a while she was an elective mute. Her mother had alcohol problems and may well have killed herself. Her output was intermittent - she did many jobs because she needed the money - but she ended up being a creative writing prof, dying in 2004.

As the introduction to the book notes, her stories don't hang around. The first story begins in a laundromat. In the second paragraph the narrator recalls Mrs Armitage from a previous laundromat she visited - "I was a young mother then and washed diapers on Thursday mornings. She lived above me, in 4-C. One morning at the laundry she gave me a key and I took it. She said that if I didn't see her on Thursdays it meant she was dead and would I please go find her body. That was a terrible thing to ask of someone; also then I had to do my laundry on Thursdays". It's zappy, with the speed of stand-up or Flash. Indeed, there are pieces which are little longer than a page. All I know of her life is from the notes in this book, but that's enough for me to view the pieces as thinly disguised autobiography - overlapping attempts at using the source material of her life.

There aren't many happy stories. In "Carmen" for example Mona is living with Noodles, an addict. She has kids and she's pregnant. She agrees to be a drug-mule, flies off, nearly gets raped, returns with a condom of heroin. Her waters break as Noodles tries the new supplies. She gets herself to hospital, has a baby girl, but the baby dies moments after birth.

"Point of View" , "A manual for cleaning women", "Toda Luna, Todo Año", "So Long", "Wait a minute" and "Homing" are my favourites, though they're not all stories.

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