To be precise, I now have a recording in the Poetry Archive, that magnificent project started by Andrew Motion, while he was laureate, to record poets reading their own work. (Though I also got to read a bit of George Herbert while doing it, which was immense fun, because they let you read one poem from someone who lived too early to be recorded.) There's a CD, from which you can find sample poems on the web page. Thanks to all concerned.

This is the website of a campaign trying to get a dedicated Russian Arctic Convoys Museum set up near Loch Ewe in the North West Highlands of Scotland, where many of them sailed from. They're currently running a week of fund-raising events. There's also a link to the e-petition for a medal to be issued to the few veterans of the convoys left alive. Yes, you'd think there would already have been one, for one of the most arduous and dangerous theatres of WW2, and there is, but President Gorbachev, bless him, issued it; the UK government has always been averse.

My father was in the convoys; he was on HMS Scorpion during the battle of North Cape when the Scharnhorst was sunk,and after he died I wrote a sequence of poems about his war medals (which was published in Poetry Wales). This is the one about the convoys:


Russian Convoys Medal (North Cape)

Mid-afternoon
             no daylight left,

the Arctic Ocean
             a monotone

far below
             the edge of Europe.

Warm rooms cut
             deep in the rock,

café, souvenir shop
             and a plaque burnished

for all the young men
             sick as dogs

who could not come in
             out of the storm.

"Hell of a place
             to spend Christmas"

- though, he'd always add,
             worse for the prey,

the shapely Scharnhorst,
             her radar blinded,

pack closing in
             and no way home.

Tokens for the Foundlings is an anthology of poetry about childhood published by Seren for the benefit of the Foundlings Museum in London, with all royalties paid to it. The museum, established by Thomas Coram in 1739 with the support of Hogarth and Handel to rescue foundlings whose mothers had not means to support them, was both the first orphanage in Britain and the first public art gallery.

The poems, all on the subject of orphans or aspects of childhood, come from many poets including Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore, Stephen Knight, Don Paterson, Elaine Feinstein, Dannie Abse, Seamus Heaney, David Harsent, Carol Rumens, Kate Bingham, Michael Longley and George Szirtes among others. But possibly the most moving is one written in 1759 by an anonymous mother who left her child at the Foundling Hospital. Some women left tokens with their children, as proof of identity in hopes (usually unfulfilled) that they might one day be able to reclaim them. This one left a poem. The punctuation's hers:

Hard is my Lot in deep Distress
To have no help where Most should find
Sure Nature meant her sacred Laws
Should Men as strong as Women bind
Regardless He, Unable I
To keep this Image of my Heart
'Tis vile to Murder! Hard to Starve
And death almost to me to part
If Fortune should her favours give
That I in better plight may Live
I'd try to have my boy again
And train him up the best of Men.

From a Guardian article on Eastercon: "I think we've sorted out the gender thing," says John Medany. "Look around. Half of the attendees are female."

Now for all I know, he may be right; I haven't been to the con. But that isn't the way to judge it. If half of the speakers are female, then yes. Anyone know if that's so?

Stupid deaths, stupid deaths,
Hope next time it's not you.

The above is of course the jingle of Death, in his slot in Horrible Histories exploring gruesome and unlikely ends. I don't suppose this was in Meredith's mind when he chose his title, but it occurs to me whenever Wil Daniel is exercising his pub quiz talent for citing examples of the same. Nor are the only examples historical, like Aeschylus (brained by a falling tortoise) and Henry 1 (surfeit of lampreys). In the course of the novel, a man falls unaccountably from a bridge; another drowns because his friends don't know the one thing about him that would tell them he was in trouble, while a third troubles the coroner as a result of a bizarre shooting. Not to mention Wil himself, constantly rolling cigarettes while dying of lung cancer, as stupid a death as one could well imagine.

This novel is full of trajectories (balls, arrows, stones), which may be launched by humans but are then often unpredictable and out of their control, and journeys which frequently don't go where they meant to either. There is more than a hint, indeed, that the only sure end of all these journeys is death, and that, this being so, it is the time spent in motion, rather than the end of it, that matters.
( more behind cut )

... for the Cultural Exchanges festival in the European Competition for Best Innovations in University Outreach and Public Engagement - terrible mouthful, but many folk in fandom have enjoyed participating in this festival, especially via Ian Hunter's three Slash Study Days. I'll never forget Gemma Bristow's talk on Aldington and Dorothea Schuller's on HD, at the third festival. It's always been very well run by the young students, too. I hope they win!

The writer Paul Magrs, (Dr Who books, YA books and many prose works for adults) has posted a brilliant all-purpose email on his blog for the use of authors who get asked to do unpaid work at literary festivals. Having agreed to appear for free at a festival, doing 4 events over 2 days, he then found they wouldn't even pay his train fare, at which point, unsurprisingly, he pulled out. This was not some sort of free festival, by the way. Though he doesn't name it in the blog post, he subsequently did on Facebook, because they were still advertising his presence and he wanted to explain to anyone who expected to see him why he wouldn't be there. The festival in question, an SF/fantasy affair, is charging attenders £45 for a ticket to all events. I wonder if said attenders realise that the authors they came to hear won't see a penny of it?

The excuse often made by such festivals is that authors will find their appearance "profile-raising" and will sell more as a result. As a commenter on the blog points out, try that one on your plumber and see how far you get. The caterers, electricians and other backroom people who enable these festivals to happen will all expect, quite rightly, to get paid and would not consider working otherwise. Yet authors, the raison d'etre of a literary festival, are with increasing frequency expected to donate their services. Quite often, too, and certainly in the case of this festival, there will be "guests of honour" who do get paid, presumably at the expense of those who don't (the year Bill Clinton appeared at Hay, he was rumoured to have been paid £10,000, while most of the writers present went home with a white rose.)

At least, though, Hay does, or then did, pay expenses. Actually expecting an author to be out of pocket by attending is a new one on me, but I suspect it may increase. Paul Magrs did the right thing by pulling out, but I really wish more writers would refuse to be treated in this way. I don't think writers should even agree to appear without a fee, unless for charity or at a festival to which entrance is not charged. It's demeaning and it's unprofessional.

It's also a dangerous precedent to set. Organisers may tell you: these are hard times, they can't afford to pay writers "at the moment" (the implication being that if your charity enables them to survive, things might get better in future). Well, if they can't afford to pay those who constitute the most important part of their festival, they had better by all means go out of business. And as for the future, let us not forget that once upon a time, young people who entered professions, especially in the media, got paid. These days, they are expected to work for nothing as "interns" and somehow keep themselves or be kept by wealthy London-based parents in the meantime. This disgraceful modern version of sweated labour has become the norm and it will be very hard to change it back. If authors let unpaid work become their norm, they may well find the same. Many non-authors have real difficulty understanding why writers want and deserve payment; I have heard people seriously suggest they should do it for love and that it somehow undermines their commitment to their art if they want to put food on the table as well. But such folk are romantic fools; festival organisers are not, or shouldn't be.

Some few lucky authors may be able to afford to appear for no fee (though I suspect they won't be the ones asked to do so). But they should refuse anyway, on principle and out of solidarity with their fellow-writers.

Yup, the back of a toilet door. The brilliant Jen Hadfield worked that out some time ago and instituted Shetland's Bards in the Bog programme to bring poetry to the ultimate captive audience. It's a very popular programme and I'm delighted that I'm part of it this time round - the current 6 poems are the first in the list on the attached link. There are some great poems in there; I can recommend "Immigrant" by James Sinclair and "Come Ben Trow" by Mary Blance. They have to be no more than 12 lines; this is mine:

Winter: Hoswick

In the fields
                   more geese than sheep
in the bay
                   more seals than boats
in the sky
                   more night than day.

- over at the Poetry Daily website. First published in Poetry Wales, it's called The Sailor Who Fell From The Rigging. Not massively upbeat, but then so few of them are...

Greatly chuffed that Rosie Shepperd, who gave me an interview and some poems for the blog here, is a winner in the Poetry Business competition and has a pamphlet out with Salt next year. Rosie is a really exciting, different, individual poet. I said in the interview that if I had to choose one word to describe her poems, it would be the 19th-century slang coinage "slantendicular", meaning not just askew but somehow subversively askew. Massively looking forward to that pamphlet.

Nancy Mattson is a Canadian-born poet of Finnish extraction, who lives in London. She thus falls into the Displaced Writers category that a lot of my favourite poets come from; there's something about having a sense of displacement, rather than a sense of place, that gives a poet's language and observation an extra edge, almost as if they don't have a comfort zone.

Her collection Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press 2012) provides, in its organisation, a fascinating example of how, in writing, one chance stimulus tends to interact with others and lead in all sorts of unexpected directions. She sees an exhibtion of early 20th-century Russian women artists; at first no poems emerge but later an encounter with a portrait by Sonia Delaunay, another Russian woman artist of the same period, throws up a connection with Finland, and leads the poet back in time to her antecedents, particularly the story of a Finnish great-aunt whose personality comes over strongly but whose fate is shadowy.
( more behind cut )

Please watch this vid. It's fun, uplifting and informative but more than that, whenever a new person watches, money goes towards the reopening in Pakistan of girls' schools closed down by Ignoramuses Ltd, aka the Taliban. As the video points out, they are terrified that their world will change if girls learn to read, write, earn money of their own and think for themselves - and the best of it is, they're quite right; it will, and the sooner the better. The vid doesn't actually need sound on either, if you're watching at work. The more new viewers, the more money for girls' schools, so do share if you can.

The Guardian, on a slow news day, recently reported a two-month-old lecture by the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill, in which he seemed to take issue with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy (the press is only ever interested in poetry if they can present it as a "spat between poets"). For the record, you could easily take issue with both. Duffy had said that poetry and texting had a lot in common, being both forms of condensed utterance, which is the sort of daft thing people my age say when they are trying to sound as if they totally get Da Yoof, man. Hill pointed out, very fairly, that textspeak was not condensed but truncated, and that there's an important difference. He then went on to ruin his case by comparing Duffy's own lexis to Mills & Boon, which it isn't, and by going to the other extreme, ie pretending to be a High Court judge who'd never heard of Da Yoof.

Silliness all round, but I do think it raises an interesting question, namely whether the new media of tweeting and texting, with their very restricted word limits, are potentially useful media for poets. ( more behind cut )

O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords
To wat their cork-heeled shoon,
But lang or ere the play was played,
They wat their hats abune.

(Sir Patrick Spens, Anon)

At quarter to six the old cook came on deck,
Saying: fellows, it's too rough to feed you.
At seven p.m. a main hatchway caved in,
He said: fellows, it's been good to know you.

(The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot)

Moral? Not sure really - if it worked once it'll work again in a new setting? Or maybe: however contemporary you are, the more you read, and are aware of what's been done in the past, the more resonance you can create by using its echoes?

Great song, anyway.

Sue Rose's first collection of poems, From the Dark Room was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011 and I reviewed it here. Sue Rose is a professional translator who lives in Herne Bay; she has been widely published in magazines and has won prizes in several competitions.


Hard Skin

She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle, broken years ago and prone to aches.

I slide my nail under the white crusts
of skin on her toe tips, lifting wide strips, small flakes
like dried glue, worrying at the tiny tags
around her toenails, the brittle scales on her heels.

She huffs at the length of my nails, seizes
a pair of scissors and prunes them, twisting
my feet this way and that, brusque and careful,
though we both sometimes draw blood.

On this sofa we are intimate as lovers
with the callused contours of each other's feet,
mine accruing the mottled patina of hers,
the papery instep, the armoured ball.
( interview and more poems behind cut )

Links
More of Sue's poems (including 'Caravaggio's Virgin' and 'Globe', referred to in this interview) can be found at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon and others are at Poetry pf

Agent 160 is a new theatre company led by female writers and trying to rectify an appalling statistic - only 17% of produced theatre work in the UK is written by women. They are launching their first productions this February in Cardiff, Glasgow and London -

CARDIFF: Chapter Arts Centre, February 17 and 18 at 7.30pm.
LONDON: Theatre503, February 19 and 20 at 7.45pm.
GLASGOW: The Arches, February 22 and 23 at 7.30pm. and their web page gives booking links.

They also have a blog which is running interviews with the writers, and the first one, with Sam Burns, is here. The said Sam is my daughter, as it happens....

The immediate cause of this post is that, as you can see here, the government has a consultation underway on proposals, basically, to put their hand in authors' pockets and filch the small sums some of them get when their work is copied and used for educational purposes. Those of us who are authors ought certainly to support ALCS's efforts to maintain the principle that writers deserve to be paid for their work.

But there's more, as Mr Carson used to say; when I saw this, I could predict with some certainty what the reactions of many Joe Publics on newspaper forums would be, namely the folk who honestly seem to hate and resent any artists, but especially writers, actually earning anything from their work. Whenever any writer complains online about people nicking their work, someone commenting below the line is sure to protest that authors should think it an incredible privilege to be published and read at all; if they were "real artists" they wouldn't have filthy mercenary motives like making a living (I've seen it, in more or less those words, more than once). Others will suggest they ought only to be paid once, after which it should be in the public domain and copyright shouldn't exist at all. This principle would certainly make a considerable difference in the price of medicines and commercial inventions, but no one ever seems to suggest applying it there.

Nor is it just Joe Public. A while ago on Facebook, a writer complained that having done some freelance work at a university, for an agreed fee, a year had passed and she hadn't seen the colour of their money. Some snooty academic commented that it was the ethos in academia to share one's knowledge for free and if professional writers couldn't live with that, they should avoid working in an academic environment. Ooh, get him, who like all these academics nobly sharing their knowledge for free has a permanent, secure, full-time job - unlike many writers. Anyway, since when does one apply this "ethos" to people coming in from outside? If the University of Wherever find they need the services of a plumber or electrician, do they expect these obliging fellows to supply their expertise free? Not if they've any sense, they don't!

But writers are different. Perhaps this is a hangover from the irritating Romantic image of the writer starving in a garret, but I don't think that is the whole of the reason. I suspect that very, very many people want to be published writers so desperately that they resent bitterly those who are, and feel these writers should be more grateful for what they themselves want - as if getting published were purely a matter of luck and in no way down to talent and hard work. You'd think, in these days, folk who want to be published and can't find an outlet could just do it themselves; self-publication has never been either so cheap or so easy, but maybe that doesn't give them the seal of approval they need.

That's my guess, but has anyone else any theories on why so many people seem to want writers to prove their authenticity by starving in garrets?

Seems to be a wot-I-read-last-year meme going around. I'm not including re-reads which would take forever, only ones read for the first time. I read quite a lot of new books, because I'm on the Amazon Vine programme which means I get stuff free providing I review it. But a lot of that, I don't especially want to read again. Books I shall re-read include:

Poetry

From the Dark Room by Sue Rose, which I reviewed here

The anthology of Scottish island poetry, These Islands, We Sing ed. Kevin Macneil, which I reviewed here

The City with Horns by Tamar Yoseloff, reviewed here

The Suitable Girl by Michelle McGrane, reviewed here

Other

Sixty-Six Books: 21st-century writers speak to the King James Bible. I couldn't really review this because my daughter Sam Burns is one of the playwrights in it. But it's a great read; the text of the Bush Theatre's mammoth performance of playlets, one engaging with each book of the Bible.

Arctic Convoys 1941-45 by Richard Woodman. This was published in 2007; it's a subject I'm reading my way through out of personal interest (my late father was very proud of his medal from Mr Gorbachev's Russia; his own country never did get around to striking a medal for those involved in one of the most arduous and dangerous of sea campaigns).

The book I'm most looking forward to reading in 2012 (apart from anything by Louise Gluck) is The Book of Idiots by Christopher Meredith. Apart from the fact that the title intrigues, it's promised to be "both serious and blackly comic" and knowing the author, it'll deliver.

Here is a new blog on cult fiction by the poet and novelist Matthew Francis, and on the strength of the first entry it looks like being very interesting. I'd never heard of either this book, The Man on a Donkey, nor of the author, HFM Prescott, and the summary's fascinating. I especially like Matthew's observation "We read historical fiction not just to get a story, but to know what life must have been like for people in a remote time" which seems to me very true.

I like literary blogs on specific themes, and this looks like being a welcome addition - I'm looking forward to his next entry, on Riddley Walker. My other fave in this line is Tim Kendall's blog War Poetry, which ranges very widely and is never afraid to say just what it thinks.

There's an article by Marjorie Perloff in the current PN Review (vol 38 no 3) which it's taken me a week to get around to reading, purely because the title, "Towards a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context" was so off-puttingly reminiscent of the most boring type of academic dissertation. But as often happens, it concealed a riveting and thought-provoking article, on what a lot of people nowadays think poetry is, why they're wrong, and why this misconception leads to such truly awful poetry.

The trigger was a workshop for high school poets, held at the White House under the auspices of Michelle Obama and attended by four practising poets, of whom more anon. The introductory remarks, by Mrs Obama and others, stressed the importance of poetry as a teenage escape from real life – "whenever I didn't want to deal with the nonsense of the neighbourhood I would write and write" – and preparation for more important, real-life, adult activities –"it was my writing that prepared me for what I've had to do in my life as an adult". Despite the presence of published poets, it isn't seen as a career in itself; it isn't even for itself. What it is for is self-expression; Rita Dove tells the group "Only you can tell your own story". Some of the students then get to read their own poems. Not surprisingly, given these criteria, they are truly dire. No doubt they were good therapy, and useful as such, but as poems they are quite unredeemed by any sense of rhythm, structure or even feeling for words (witness the one which uses "exceeded" for "succeeded"). All they do have going for them are originality and authenticity, which are clearly seen as cardinal virtues when trying to write a poem.
( more behind cut )