distances

after what seemed like an eternity in the making i’m delighted to announce that distances, the photobook i’ve done with roxana, finally arrived in four surprisingly heavy cardboard boxes as of this morning. it’s so new i don’t even have a thumbnail of the cover!

if i say so myself, it’s a beautiful looking thing. the poetry is more towards stoneandsea than a lazarus but, despite the poems being older now, i can see both works in them.  expect little in the way of punctuation and long, skinny poems. how to describe the photography? i’d start by looking up something like sumptuous on the thesaurus. i’d hope roxana’s work needs no introduction but if you’re not familiar with it follow the link and have a treat.

i can’t comment on the translation aspect as, no matter that i promised roxana my romanian would be up to it by the time this came out, i haven’t really progressed beyond buying the cds and a firm commitment to the dodgy world of google translate. roxana, i do apologise! but, equally, roxana speaks more than enough languages for the both of us! the brief for the translation was not to do a translation but to produce a version of the original that would make sense romanian. in the end i found this one of the most entertaining aspects of the whole project. aside from layout, syntax and the like there were fundamental questions that you just don’t have to ask (or can avoid) in english. what, for instance, is the gender of the narrator? which leads to a laying out of a different set of poetic cards on the table.

anyway, there’ll be a link on the sidebar in due course once i figure out how to do a paypal thingy. in the meantime i’ll be taking distances out for its first airing at the resonate arts house in alloa on friday night. which, being tomorrow means i should be off working on that. there will be other events in due course so i’ll post them on here.

in the meantime here’s a video of me and roxana mucking about with sound poetry what seems an age ago (we must do more of that!). i still have that childish sense of wonder and potential with technology and the internet and think that distances is very much a product of that. if all it does is encourage others to do something similar (or better, very different!) i’ll be very happy.

a lazarus

and finally a lazarus is out on the kindle – just click on the image at the right. maybe a wee bit later than planned but the reasons for that will come out in due course.

aside from some minor formatting problems i’m very happy with it. it may be that a hard copy version will be forthcoming but that depends on time and money plus the swiss lounge thing was about trying new forms. plus i was taken with the idea that it would be possible to buy a poetry collection for a cup of coffee. as for the kindle thing, outside of holidays and bike touring i’m still not altogether taken with it, but it’s a whole lot easier to publish to it than it is to do conventionally.

and i think that was an issue with this. i’m delighted that qarrtsiluni picked it up and getting i am furies into starry rhymes came just at the right time (and not forgetting the title poem’s appearance in the poetry bus) but, if i’m honest, i can’t think of anyone in the uk who would have touched it. which (and i’d be happy to be proved wrong), for me seems a shame. slp, at the face of it, appears to want to address this so it’ll be interesting to see how that project works out. but again, a wee bit like music, there’s never been a better time to bypass the conventional and adopt a do-it-yourself attitude, forge new relationships and create interesting new stuff.

i should point out for those who have read stone and sea that it is nothing at all like that so don’t be expecting something similar. what is it? i kind of like the description i put up on amazon. the notion was to take poems and use only their words to creat something else, definitely not a cut up, but something else, that made its own grammar and rhythm. i hope it looks easy because it most assuredly was not! by the time i got to the end i was most definitely the end. having to put my head repeatedly in that space disrupted my thinking, so much so i’ve hardly written poetry since and have been soothing my aching brain cells with prose. that said, as an exercise into getting into the bones of the language of a poem, it’s totally worthwhile.

so that’s the how and why of it. i would get it and try it. read it out loud, trip over the language, watch it come alive. i hope you enjoy.

oh aye, i’m ipad/iphone-less so haven’t seen what it looks like on those platforms. if anyone has those can you let me know? ta

a lazarus on qarrtsiluni

i’m happy to say that and we at bed and purest is available for listening to at qarrtsiluni. as ever, dave, beth et al maintain their usual consistent high standards and all the chapbook contest people are well worth a listen. i should point out also that the worship issue is now underway and that too will be something i’d recommend.

the audio file features two readings of the poem, one a straight rendition and the other is me fiddling about with garageband (any hot tips or garage bands for idiots type guide recommendations will be gratefully received!). while this one is a bit haphazard – i forgot what i was doing between recording and that version and, of course, didn’t save it – this sort of audio doodling was great fun and something i hope to do more of in the future.

qarrtsiluni plan to do a booklet of the chapbook finalists so i’ll post up details when i get them. i’ve been pretty impressed with their previous output so again this will be something i’d recommend esp if you’ve a space in your purchasing pile.

as for a lazarus, after the qarrtsiluni thing comes out (and allowing for a couple of pressing deadlines for this month) the vague plan is to put the whole thing out as a pamphlet on the swiss lounge imprint. that has been in hiatus for the last wee while but i’ve kind of shifted around a few priorities and i’m hoping to get it going again for the end of the year. that website is going to remain down for the time being but i’ll update here or there when the time comes.

a lazarus

i was rather delighted to be informed that my collection ‘ a lazarus’ had been shortlisted for the qarrtsiluni chapbook prize. thanks then to qarrtsiluni and all associated with them. it’s fair to say that, in the shape of two of greek poems, they’ve published work i don’t think would find much of a voice here and i think a lazarus continues this with a vengeance. if you’ve not visited their site i would highly recommend it and the sites around it esp dave bonta’s video poetry site moving poems which is an ideal place to while away the afternoon.

i should also thank peadar at tfe for getting the notion of the collection together by publishing the title poem and claire askew who published i am furies at just the time i was needing it. all of which might sound a bit like so much blah blah blah but it just goes to show you’re never really on your own even when it seems that way.

i like rewriting poems. i find it a good way to get into the language, copying it out, longhand or typing, it doesn’t matter (tho i prefer longhand). so what then if i took the words in poems and only those words and fashioned it into something else. so far so oulipo(esque!). the most obvious method would just be to do a cut up. which is fine for one poem but what if you’re going to do a bunch of them? in which case you have to do something like unwiring the grammatical side of your brain and then hook it back up again in the wrong order so that the resulting work has some sort of internal sense. and everybody has to be dead…

by the time i was done, and to be honest a chapbook length thing was about as long as i could manage, my brain was thoroughly fried. so much so i had to take some time off, write nothing at all but, at the end of it i had a thing that i’d seen through, that i was happy with. i guess what i’m saying is it’s worth it, to purse these notions, to do the thing for no other reason than because you want to, to see what it’ll look like when you’re done.

a lovely conversation

so, after a few weeks of falling out of love with writing or maybe, just maybe, having a rest, the snow finally melts, i get out on the bike and ,after a bit of domestic persuasion i get myself out to the writers group. it’s grand to catch up with everyone after the last couple of months and there’s a fair amount of irreverence which is something i like about the group. but as we’re bantering we get involved in a lovely conversation about rhyming. me, obviously, i’m not the biggest fan, of end rhymes certainly. i’m not putting forward any sort of ideological objection just that i was never into it in the same way i always preferred non-representational art to representational. to me rhyming seems just too formal, too un-necessary.

the others, tho, disagreed. rhyming they said, opened up doors to them, lead them to words and forms they might not previously have considered. this was new information for me and a perspective i’d never really thought about. we had some gentle leg-pulling about my punctuation, or lack of and i mentioned my frustration with reactions to lack of capitalisation and punctuation generally. it appears not everyone is a s concerned about the look of the poem on the page as i am!

so i picked a bunch of poems afterwards and decided to transcribe them in a manner that, to me, seems a bit more formal. there’s capital letters, commas, full stops, the whole nine yards! to me it feels like that thing you do when you bite a filling down on some tin foil. t also finds it a bit weird. it’s as if, she says, you’re taking away the encouragement for the reader to re and reread and making it much more instructive. i can’t disagree. i do, however, remember a quote recently, attributed to ted hughes i think, that the poem was a house and it was up to the reader to live in it. maybe what i’m doing is putting in some comfy chairs for the visitors.

so, as an experiment i’m going to send these oddly formed poems out and about and see what the reaction is. or not. currently i’m going to have these in my head as submission versions. everything else (until i change my mind!) will be staying in the form that’s comfortable for me. but you never know, maybe adding a comma here, an upper case there, maybe i’ll find myself somewhere different…

is it

really more than a month since i posted here last? what can have been happening?

other than being marooned in some strange winterscape that seems to have dodged most of the rest of scotland and, of course, the festive season, not precious much. it turns out i’ve been painting for much of that time and writing for almost none of it. a hint – if you want to finish a painting (let alone a series of them) quickly, avoid any notions of pointillism or variants thereof.

as for the writing, maybe a wee rest was in order. competitions and submissions really haven’t been tweaking my twinky recently for a whole variety of reasons but not least because of a recent rejection which, altho responded to very promptly, also inadvertently revealed that the person doing the responding very obviously hadn’t read the submission. now it’s not that i mind rejection but i do resent putting time and effort into something that isn’t even summarily read. i thought it was kind of funny. t did not!

but sort of a reminder that of late i’ve felt that i’m drifting away from what it is i want to do, away from even the idea of what it is i want to do in favour some round of submitting, writing for submission, wondering how something will sound at a performance etc etc etc and on and on. sitting in the house letting my imagination do what it wants is so much simpler!

so, a wee writing hiatus. and why not? it’s not like i’m out of love with writing, just that right now paiting seems more…attractive!

good news

what with general quietness on the writerly front and what not i’ve been a bit sparing, not to say miserly, on the competition front this year. true, i’m supposed to be working on a short story collection and a play amongst other things, but the collection is kind of suffering at the hands of cycling and general laziness and the play, well is best described as at the ‘conceptual’ stage. and that’s before i even think about painting….

anyway, aside from an unhealthy dose of self recrimination, i was delighted to hear this week that i was one of the finalists in this year’s aesthetica poetry competition. i have mixed feelings about competitions much of the time but it’s amazing how those feelings can disappear, esp at the prospect of seeing your work on some nice, shiny paper.

writers, shallow? who would think such a thing!?

notebooks

i’m not one of these people who like to write on computers, never have been, never will be. true, a final draft is easy to do on a computer but in terms of getting the writing down a computer, for me, lacks a certain something that an old school methodology has in spades.

typewriters? have a smell, the keys have an action, an action that changes over time. and who would deny the cadence and rhythm of the clatter fo the keys? of course i don;t have a typewriter now, a working one at least, but i do have an old royal that i polish on a weekly basis just to catch some of that old magic.

me, i’m a notebook kind of guy, have forced myself into a position where i’ve mostly always got some sort of notebook and a pen to hand just about anywhere i go. i got so sick and tired of thinking – yes, i must remember that – and subsequently coming up against some sort of imaginative blank space. i don’t mind the notebook itself, it can be ringbound, hard cover, any size up to a5. i don’t much like a gloss paper and if it has to be lined i prefer narrow feint and i can’t used squared paper but i’m not weird about it! i tend to take my larger notebooks to galleries because i like to sketch. all the rest are pocketsized or smaller. pens are something else. i’m funny about pens.

but, and there’s always a but, there is no backup for a notebook. recently i had to buy an emergency notebook in the gallery of modern art in edinburgh and ended up with this pantone thing with blue paper and white lines. i wasn’t up for it but it was all they had so i channeled my inner yeats and got on with it. and i ’ve kind of gotten into it. however i’ve also lost it (or hoping that it’s only misplaced). i can remember one of the poems in it but nothing else. along with that i had the contact details of someone who asked me to do some writing for on disability (*if that’s you and you’re reading this i have emailed to what i thought was your address but i can’t remember your phone number).

in short, it’s gone. i tend to keep my more well stocked notebooks around the house but in this case…oh well. the key is transcription and that ever so handy computer device. as long as you’ve transcribed it, you can keep it safe. that’s what i’m telling myself now anyway!

in the post

so in the post today i get my copy of stone going home again. i need to sit down and read it but first impressions are good. the cover is rather lovely in the flesh. i’m really into liz myhill’s design and it’s got the nice matt finish i like. these things being the things i like i have to say i’m into the paper as well, maybe just a couple fo grams light for me but nice to the finger.

and nice to see so many familiar names among those i’ve yet to meet. more poetry than prose tho, which they comment in the foreword.

first impression – nicely done to all involved. i’m looking forward to a blether at the opening on wednesday.

and what’s this? i get paid!

doing the napowrimo thing

i think this is the third year i’ve done napowrimo and already i’m thinking why am i doing this!? a night shift existence is definitely not conducive to writing poetry!

all the same it’s a worthwhile experience. coming out of winter can sometimes see me feeling a bit sluggish and napowrimo just doesn’t allow for that! i feel less inclined this year to be writing multiple poems of a day but it’s early yet so who knows. the deal is thirty poems in thirty days and i’ve never written less than that so we’ll see. and no matter what the quality, a prolonged burst of effort can provide a grand platform for the remainder of the year.

what to write about is something people seem to have a problem with. there are prompt sites aplenty around the internet and it can be good to join in with one of them for the month. sometimes it’s easier in a community when you realise that your problems are not your alone or better, you’re not the only one to have an off day! plus, that main advantage is, there’s a topic to write to each day which saves a lot of the mulling. i’m fortunate that i don’t have a particular problem with this (except maybe when i’m just awake!) but it can certainly ease the pain. the only problem i have come across with it is i’ve found i really don’t like to be dictated to as to subject matter. at which point it’s time to get over myself!

at the end, i’m always glad i gave it a go and i’d recommend it to anyone, even if they’re joining late. it doesn’t matter if you don’t finish, the point is just to be doing some writing, and that in itself should be the achievement. for the more prose minded there’s always nanowrimo later in the year or, as i think i’ll maybe try nest year, there’s always the option of flash fiction for a month. now that would be a challenge!