How not to get your poetry published

The wonderful Helena Nelson has cropped up in this blog before, over her editorship of Sphinx and a recent book launch shared between her and our writer (and her publisher, for she is a poet too) John Lucas. Last year Helena published How Not to Get Your Poetry Published, a nicely produced pamphlet available for a fiver from http://www.happenstancepress.com/, or from bookshops via 978-1-905939-32-9. That's an ISBN, an International Standard Book Number, not, as she says in the pamphlet, an International Standard Serial Number, and not, as she says elsewhere in the pamphlet, an ISBN number ie an ISB Number number. But ignore these trivial errors, this pamphlet should be bought by every aspiring poet. If every aspiring poet read this pamphlet - as well as reading poetry - they would save themselves, and publishers, much time. I might argue with Helena over a later chapter where she, while not advocating self-publishing, gives some handy hints on that, but I would not argue with her when she says "publishing poetry makes me poorer". Publishing poetry makes most publishers poorer, and, even if it doesn't, it takes up a lot of time - Helena usefully describes what publishers actually do. Even more usefully she simply, chattily, and by giving examples, leads any poet aspiring to be published, through the maze. She also suggests that the poet might ask themselves why they feel they really need to write, to be published, rather than simply "become a quality reader". She ends by quoting the four lines from Lawrence Binyon "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:/Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn./ At the going down of the sun and in the morning/ We will remember them." - probably the only lines of his that we know, and most people would not know who wrote them, but the lines remind us that "[poets] end up trying to market .... ourselves... when the most important use of our time is ... to develop our skills with language and to write as well (and as simply) as we can."
ps - the image above is from the cover of the pamphlet under review, see http://www.savagechickens.com/ for more, and for terms of use

Notes from the frozen north # 1

God, Edinburgh is cold*. But the Scottish Poetry Library, Helena Nelson and a warm and generous audience was a great setting for the last of John Lucas' launch readings for Next Year Will Be Better. Mindful that the subtitle of his book is A memoir of England in the 1950s, he read from the only Scottish section of the book. This comprised a well observed note about visiting Dumfrieshire in the 1950s when he and an English friend were about the only people who stood for the National Anthem (then common practice in England) to find that some people shouted at them to sit down while others pelted the screen with orange peel and the like. A moment of discovery that not all Britons were royalists.
As well as launching John's book, we were launching a book published by him at Shoestring, a collection by Helena Nelson (publisher at Happenstance), Plot and Counterplot. The two readers worked very well together. I was pleased to see other Scottish publishers in the audience, as well as someone from STANZA, the St Andrews poetry festival - but then Helena has a big following in Scotland. It was nice to share some of that, and to bring her some of John Lucas' Scottish fan club.
*It got colder, wandering around later trying to find where First (the inappropriately named bus group) had moved the bus stop for travelling on to Hawick, then colder still in an unheated rattler of a bus for two and a quarter hours under blue lighting like that used in dodgy pub toilets to discourage junkies shooting up. The news from Hawick? The local football team has lost every match it has played this season, the Hawick rugby club is bottom of its league, the local Council is trying to get volunteers to cut the grass in local parks and there's a murder on the front page of the local paper. For this I paid First £6.30 to get there and £6.30 more to get to Carlisle the next day...

The penultimate Sphinx

My fave lit mag has just arrived, Sphinx, edited by the Scottish poet and publisher Helena Nelson. This is Sphinx 11, and after 12 the mag will go completely on line, as part of the http://www.happenstance.com/ site. The mag's review already appear there. I presume that Sphinx loses more money in a print form than being put on-line for free access. But it is a nice print form, handy A5 with coloured endpapers, in keeping with its stated aim of promoting chapbooks. This edition though covers a range of small presses - primarily through interviews with the editors of Shearsman, Red Squirrel, Oystercatcher, tall-lighthouse, The Poetry Business, Gray Hen and a feature with an ex-worker from the letterpress printer Barbarian Books.

Essential reading for other nosy small press editors of course, but those who write for small presses, or wish to, should read this edition particularly. £3.50 well spent. You can buy all the back issues on the Happenstance site, though the current one is not on their shop yet so you may have to resort to good old fashioned cheques.

I would email Helena Nelson to plead with her to keep the mag in a print format, other than I did that when the decision to go on-line was first announced. She did not weaken.