Working from home

About 25 years ago, with paternal leave looming, I set myself up to work from home, remotely logging in using a modem that shared the line with the phone. If the phone was used while I was connected, I got logged out.

That was pre-Web. Now many more facilities are available without having to use command lines and Terminal windows. A browser's all you need. Video links have added a new dimension - I've used whatsapp, MS Teams and Zoom in the last week alone. Now that files and whiteboards can be shared, online seminars are easier.

But really, I've only dabbled with home-working up to now. I'm beginning to experience the problems that people who work full-time from home complain about - finding a place to work, separating work from family life, isolation, etc. I still can't bring myself to use Facebook and Twitter for small talk, though I wouldn't rule it out.

The writing groups I'm involved with can't meet physically. We tried to organise a Zoom session but there weren't enough takers so we're exchanging files by e-mail. As coordinator I'm trying to collate the comments to the anonymised texts, which is interesting. Ten poets are bound to disagree on a piece. However, several of them might decide that the same lines require comment.

The movie of the book

These movies of poems in "Moving Parts" and elsewhere hark back to 2005 when I first owned a digital camera. File sizes and speeds were still worth worrying about then, and I used only free software, so the results don't compare at all well with many more recent YouTube offerings. The audio is especially bad, so I suggest you buy the booklet

• Crows Nest
• Paradox
• In the soul's darkroom
• Formal Dance
• Still life
• Escape
• Misreading the signs
• urspache
• a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA14lIi9yGo">8x8
• e^iπ+1=0

For comparison, see Tony William's far classier "Video-poem of The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street"

Or Matthew Stewart's - Tasting Notes or Nine Arches Press on Youtube.

Time for some ego-boosting

I've had a wave of rejections. Time to remind myself that there's hope yet.

Literary firsts

First competition win

First time I was offered a book contract

First entry in British Library catalogue

My first book launch

First time I wrote a blurb

First time I saw a book of mine in a bookshop

Review extracts

• "A very satisfying collection"
• "A fine intelligent collection"
• "remarkable for their freight of experience, assured grasp of line, and a poetic sensibility as confident as it is unusual"
• "unmistakeable authority of experience"
• "precision and tactile immediacy"
• "a wonderful ear"
• "an intense and rewarding read"
• "he writes exceptionally well about children"
• "What’s most winning, for me, is his really human touch"
• "The strength of the personae in the pamphlet is the thing that attracts attention"
• "The language is deceptively plain but is deftly spiced with originality"
• "skilled metre is matched by a deep understanding of the measured world"

Frustrations of the writer

Before

• You're in the mood to write, and have the time, but you have nothing to write about. You read through a list of prompts without success.
• You're bursting with ideas, but have no pen, pencil, paper, computer, phone
• You're bursting with ideas, but you're at the wheel driving the family around the M25

During

• You had a good draft, but each addition makes it worse. Somewhere along the line you've lost the scent. You know that eventually you'll have to start all over again
• The original excitement has gone. You have to complete the piece mechanically

After

• A piece of your rubbish is accepted on the same day that a piece you're proud of is rejected.
• Someone asks what actually happens after the end of one of your stories
• Just after you've sent a story off, submissions for a themed issue that would have suited your piece perfectly are requested
• An editor writes "This is a great read -- it's extremely entertaining and very witty" and rejects you. An editor writes "I've read the poems many times now, with the greatest interest" and rejects you. An editor writes "in its own right it is very good work" and rejects you. An editor writes "I enjoyed reading it. It was interesting and engaging" and rejects you.

Promises to keep

In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth wrote

I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which, by the act of writing in verse, an Author in the present day makes to his reader: but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement ... they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.

When people describe their texts as poetry nowadays, what promise do they make? The traditional idea is that if a text foregrounds language more than usual, it's considered poetry. If it contains a poetic idea (Deep Image) or tries to be beautiful or moving, it's poetry. If it's short, and the culture doesn't support mini-prose, it's poetry.

"Pardoning the turkey", a poem in a Rattle issue, is by Caroline Barnes. It begins thus -

Like a priest about to bestow a blessing, the President raised his hand over the blue and crimson head of the snow-white turkey, flashed his winning smile at the cameras, and said: By the power vested in me,

It has the layout of a poem, though the line-length is determined by a ruler more than syllable-count. The language isn't heightened, and if there's a Deep Image, it's a long time in coming. Had it been presented as prose, I wouldn't have suggested improving it by breaking it into little lines. So why was it sent to a poetry magazine and formatted as poetry?

Categorising a text as poetry is to suggest that it might have hidden depths. It's a suggestion that there might be more to the text than meets the eye, that the reader should spend a while re-reading it. Line-breaks are a way to indicate that the author wants the reader to process the text as poetry. But suppose the reader treats all short literary texts as if they need to be carefully read - what then is the point of the line-breaks? If they're given the same amount of attention as the words, can they offer any value back? Given the charitable status granted to poetry by readers, any text is likely to seem more significant when read as a poem, so I think that it's only fair to raise the bar for text with poetic pretensions.

Sometimes authors set up expectations then thwart them. For example a piece can start in one genre (comedy, say) and then surprise the reader by becoming tragedy. Or a strictly rhyming piece can slowly fall apart to match the mood. But I didn't think that's happening here.

There are two sides to promises. The author may have one notion of poetry/genre. Various audiences will have others. Especially if one's playing with expectations, it matters how you gauge your audience. Picasso said to a friend that one day an artist would display a blank canvas. He didn't do so himself, because he didn't think the public were ready. Art and writing aren't just about having ideas, they're about timing, and identifying your audience. The text is part of a conversation. Perhaps your audience exists only in the future.

"Pardoning the turkey" might be using couplets to break lines because that's a default way to present words in poems. The line-breaks aren't meant to be expressive, nor is the enclosing white space, just as prose line-breaks and the enclosing margins aren't emotive. Perhaps the reader is supposed to ignore the format rather than be puzzled by it, because experienced poetry readers have become used to ignoring formats. Perhaps this shared understanding is the basis of the promise.

My A Theory of Line-breaks post gives more examples and statistics.

Waxing poetical

many lines read like attempts to get as many “poetry words” as possible into a single sentence. “A sepia/ penumbra clears round a moon of blood” comes close but “Shadow-green patina, faint turquoise wash/ over wafer-thin kaolin” probably takes the biscuit. Such lines are interspersed with fridge-magnet wisdom: “The past is not lost/ but covered up by time."

That comes from a review by Paul Batchelor about Padel's poetry. Recently I read the following in a poem

Awestruck, he obeys and dogtrots after her,             language now lost, but one pudgy digit an arrow on the cusp of pointing

It's about a child who sees a colourful mobile. He tells his mother about it but she just tells him to get a move on. It's a common enough episode, and could have been conveyed in a more mundane, minimalist way. Here it's poetized by livening the verb choice and saying things in a rather prolix, dramatic way - "cusp of pointing" is particularly figurative. Of course, the layout is part of the poetizing (indeed, the sole purpose of the layout might be to stop reading the piece as "mere" prose).

This souping-up of language is what can happen during re-writes. In some eras it was discouraged in both poetry and prose, in others it was ok in poetry but considered too flowery or distracting for prose. It can appear ornamental, the way forced rhymes do. Or it can be praised for its density and richness.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with these features. Fashion and personal taste influence choices. Some fads come and go so rapidly that you need to be a bulk reader of poetry to notice them. On his moves in contemporary poetry page from 2010, Mike Young lists some popular poetisms - e.g. "Exposed revision" ("I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise") and "Comparing something to itself".

Nell Nelson at the end of her yearly submission windows sometimes provided a snapshot of features that repeatedly cropped up in the thousands of poems she'd recently read - see thirty poem snags and are your modifiers dangling. Examples include "Certain kinds of 'trendy' titles, leading into list poems" and "References to Edward Hopper (and especially 'Nighthawks')"

I'm going through a phrase of flattening the language, of studiously avoiding melodrama. What this means in practice is that the outcome looks more like prose.

Ahead of my time? Or behind?

I came 2nd in my local writing club's competition last year, with a story 23 years old. This year I came 1st (£100) with a story 20 years old. I've entered newer stories in the past, with little success. Have I got worse as a writer over the years?

Clare Pollard in an article pointed out how an interest in translation can lead to escaping the limitation of local trends. She admits to admiring Somali poems "which can seem clumsy ... the politically charged rhetoric ... the seeming bagginess, the extreme alliteration, the shifts in address, the digressions" thinking that "they just use techniques which are currently deemed 'unfashionable' on Creative Writing courses."

Literature has its fashions. The "From Apocalypse to The Movement" module at Warwick looks at one lurch in style. Of course there are many parallel tracks of development happening at different speeds, but if you're the wrong type of writer for your era you'll be fighting against the tide.

Because culture isn't frozen in time, one option is to wait for it to change. I notice at local writing clubs that my conventions don't always match those of other members. Sometimes mine are more literary - in particular I puncture the sense of immersion - but often I'm just out of step. My guess is that the literary styles that I employed years ago are now becoming mainstream, and the styles I currently use were popular 20 years ago, and may well be so again.

The moral, as usual, is not to throw away old stuff, even if it's been rejected a few times. Old pieces may need tweaking though, especially if you're going to transplant them to the current era. Mobile phones in particular are plot-busters.