May 2009
Laureate to Laureate and other matters
Marvellous that the changeover from Laureate to Laureate happens at this time of year, so soon after Shakespeare’s birthday, cherry (‘Loveliest of trees’ etc.,) blossom passing quickly to apple blossom, bluebells in the woods and the entire House of Commons, apparently, cheekily trousering all they can get.
Congratulations to Carol Ann Duffy, the expected choice, but no less brilliant for that. Good that the nation has recovered from it’s misogyny.
Two quotations to cut out and keep from her press release in the Guardian (02/05/ 09). The first was her saying that she was
‘... priveleged to be part of a generation of poets in Britain who serve the vocation of poetry... who... regard poetry as the place in language where everything that can be praised is praised, and where what needs to be called into question is so.’
and the second,
‘The poets I’ve known and worked with over 25 years or so... all share the certainty that poetry, the music of being human, matters deeply to a huge and growing number of people in this country...’
She gave a great interview on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4, emphasizing that her acceptance was on behalf of all women poets. Though it is always odd that poets on radio can’t be allowed to have conversations without being obliged to read a poem. The only sorrow of the day was the news of the death of U A Fanthorpe.
The Rialto’s editor was looking forward to a visit to Deal, a very likeable little town in Kent, in April. June English had invited him to take part in the Split The Lark Poetry Festival. The event was to have been Meet the Editors. A number of editors are invited and participants send a selection of their poems to be read by the editor of their choice beforehand.
On the day there’s a general forum where editors talk about their magazines
and answer questions from the audience, and then a session in which poets
sit down with their chosen editor to discuss their own work. June had to
cancel the event because of many messages from poets regretting that they
couldn’t afford the modest fee. A sign of the times. Anyway, as pre-publicity,
editors were asked to write about themselves and their work. Here’s The
Rialto’s response.
HOW DO I GET MY POEMS PUBLISHED IN THE RIALTO?
‘A writer has to spin his work out of himself and the effect upon the character is often disastrous. It inflates the ego.’ Elizabeth Goudge, A City Of Bells.
I wish I could tell you. A poem on any subject, in any style, might succeed. When we started the magazine we wanted it to be open, ‘deliberately eclectic’ was a phrase we used - ‘eclectic’ was a popular word a few years back - and we also wanted it to become part of what John called ‘the republic of poetry,’ a wider state that was not content to promote an orthodoxy of style or coterie of friends. We wanted poems that ‘succeed in their own terms.’ From time to time I get letters, provocative, telling me about ‘the typical Rialto poem,’ but I don’t believe there is such an animal. If there was it would be easy for me to tell you how to get into the magazine.
However after nearly twenty five years I’ve noticed that there are some poetry areas that I’ve become wary of. Maybe if I list them it will help? And there will always be exceptions - look back through the magazine and you’ll find them. So, the following are poems that probably won’t get published in The Rialto.
1. Poems about pets, their births, deaths, loyalty, kittenishness etc. Horses aren’t pets and they interest me.
2. Poems about paintings. I think this may be a Creative Writing Exercise in somebody’s book. They often turn up - they describe the work of art and say how interesting it is and what it reminds the poet of. I don’t know why, but they don’t work for me - maybe because the poets borrow a great artist and then stick their own name to the work. WH Auden has a poem with a Breughel painting in it and Lorraine Mariner has a poem with Bonnard’s work in it, but these are a different matter.
3. Postcard poems - what I did and where I went on my holiday. Travel is supposed to broaden the mind, but these poems show little evidence of this. They often slide into
4. Boasting poems. These are often by males, and the boasting postcard poem goes on and on, something like
It was dark in Brogdgibn Street as I, drunk,
lumbered down to Splatny Square,
somewhere there, last year, I’d had a
one night stand. The girl was beautiful:
I forget her name. The last tram swishes past.......
The Heroic Boast is of course entirely another matter, but it’s not often attempted.
5. Beware the Eternal Verities. Those poems that set out to Explain The
Meaning Of Life. There is a useful Creative Writing Maxim which says ‘show
don’t tell’. I’m very happy to know life’s meaning, but I’d rather you
showed me how you discovered it than bashed me over the head with it.
In General.
Please remember that the experience you are putting into a poem, though special to you, may not be unique. If you’ve seen a broken windmill or been for a walk in a dark wood others will have been there too. Your poem will need to hold an editor’s attention because of the energy it puts into describing the windmill experience. This will involve you writing the poem, and probably re- writing it (and maybe even throwing it away, all but a phrase or a notion - keep a notebook full of brilliant flashes of inspiration to use up in other poems). In the process your windmill has to become, in the space in which the reader reads, the only broken windmill in the world.
Please pay lots of attention to the shape of your poem (strict form, when it was/is practised does mean that the poet has to pay attention to shape). And please pay lots of attention to the words you use. For example, there is a beekeeper in the garden of the windmill. You might think it good to have the beekeeper looking like an astronaut in his whites and helmet. If you edit a poetry magazine you’ll know that astronaut beekeepers turn up quite frequently - though, interestingly, there haven’t been many beekeepers on the moon. Don’t try too hard. But do think about whether an image, an adjective, a whatever, might have been used by another poet before: this is one of the reasons people like me and Peter Sansom are always going on about the importance of reading, particularly poetry magazines - it helps you refine your vocabulary, it helps you to want to write something special and different.
For ‘windmill’ in the above two paragraphs you can, obviously, substitute
love, heartbreak, death, any of the experiences poets typically write about.
Why not write a poem about something that’s never been written about?
Check out the Editor’s Choice pages
on the Rialto web site for further clues.
Further help with the How to Get Published question is at hand in the
latest from Helena Nelson’s Happenstance Press, How (Not) To Get Your Poetry
Published ISBN 978 1 905939 32 9, £5.00 a pamphlet with 52 very useful
pages. Contact Helena at www.happenstancepress.com
Alternatively you could study Helena’s own skilful and funny prize winning
poems Starlight on Water is available from The Rialto price £7.95 or online
from Inpress
April 2009
April - Mr Eliot’s, ‘cruellest month.’
The new issue of The Rialto, No 66 has been posted out to subscribers, and sent to our distributors, Central Books - so if you look forward to finding a copy in your local branch of Borders it should be there soon (so much easier to make sure of your copy and SUBSCRIBE!)
The long delay between issues was partly because time crept up on us while we were compiling an application for further Lottery Funding, and partly because, once the application was in, the editor went into a paralysis of fear while waiting for the result.
And the result is........... a funding agreement for a further three years - marvellous news in these difficult times. It’s conditional on us producing a marketing plan and, importantly, making it happen. We have to increase sales.
We have a meeting with Lucy Sheerman, Literature Officer at Arts Council of England, East in late April to initiate work on this plan. Lucy has been a stalwart advocate for The Rialto and we thank her for her continuing support and help.If you have thgoughts on how to increase the sales of poetry please write to us.
A moment of slight melancholy. Dean Parkin, who has assisted at The Rialto for several years, putting funding applications together, organising readings and events, fielding e-mails, writing stuff for the Rumours pages, making supportive and encouraging noises to the editor, etc., etc., is leaving the magazine to spend more time with his career.
Dean’s recently had Arts Council funding to develop himself as a performance artist/poet (in conjunction with the New Writing Partnership). The first fruits of this mentoring will be on show at the Norwich Arts Centre, 8 p.m., on Friday May 8th. He’ll also be at the Wells-next-the-Sea festival on May 10th., at 11a.m. If you live in East Anglia watch out for him over the coming year working with the London Sinfonietta in schools and colleges.
Dean is a sociable poet with wonderful networking skills, affable, charming and great fun. He’s been a terrific asset to The Rialto and will be missed. The editor will now have to drop his legendary grumpy shyness and get out more - get a life even.
It’s Forward Prize entry time again. Obviously we’ll be entering Emily Wills’ lovely second collection, Developing the Negative for the main prize. And we need to organise our entries for the Best Individual Poem prize. If you have a favourite poem, from issues 65 or 66, that you consider should be entered, please write and let us know. Usual address, and mark the envelope Forward Suggestions - we need to have these by the end of the month.
Postal charges and your poems. The Post Office has just clunked up huge increases - it’s going to cost us a further 14p per copy to post the magazine to you. Please take care, when submitting poems to be considered, that you’ve got the right postage on the envelope, and on the return envelope - there are still folks out there that haven’t heard about The Large Letter. Regretfully the editor turns back any submissions that lack the correct postage - primarily because the Post Office puts such a massive surcharge on them.
The editor is currently reading the poems that came in in late October, and early November.
The Troubadour
February 2009
(‘2 a singer or poet.’ Oxford English Reference
Dictionary) (not to be confused with Trubloff:
The Mouse Who Wanted To Play The Balalaika).
Utterly the opposite of Wendy Cope’s famous ‘A Reading’ where ‘Everybody in the room is bored’, the Rialto event at London’s Troubadour in February was a triumph - an event worthy of celebratory champagne as one audience member told venue captain Anne Marie Fyffe.
Who was there? Up from the west country came Sue Boyle, Richard Lambert and Emily Wills (Richard and Emily, when they met in Bath before Christmas, had, unbeknown to each other, both been chosen as prize-winners in the recent Troubadour competition). Joining them in the first half of the reading was London’s Rosie Shepperd - see her new poem in The Rialto No.66.
In the second half, in the tradition of Rialto ‘firsts,’ Lydia Macpherson, who lives in Suffolk but is currently studying at Royal Holloway, gave her first public reading. Then Lorraine Mariner, whose Rialto Bridge pamphlet Bye for Now is, just, still available - get it before she becomes famous when her Picador first collection comes out - read work both old and new. Lorraine has become a startlingly accomplished performer - you could see audience members hugging themselves with glee. She was followed by the magnificent Gillian Allnutt who had come down from Durham on the bus to read a selection of those brief meditations of hers that seem to reverberate for so long afterwards. Then the event rolled up to a celebratory finale with poems from London lad Neil Rollinson.
The ‘leave them wanting more’ strategy, devised by Anne Marie and insisted on by event orgasniser Dean Parkin, worked to perfection. Even magazine editor Michael Mackmin, usually so stern and difficult to please, looked as if he was enjoying the poetry.
The Troubadour pub, where quite a good omelette and a glass of wine can be had, is at 263 Old Brompton Road, London, SW5, and poetry events happen in the cellar fortnightly on a Monday evening - details at www.coffeehousepoetry.org
The Bath Experience:
December 2008
And so to Bath (Queries: Did Samuel Pepys actually have a bath in his house? When did the bath become a standard item of household furniture? Famous poems about baths and bathing?) for the launch of Emily Wills second collection Developing the Negative and Richard Lambert’s Bridge pamphlet The Magnolia.
It probably wasn’t the best weekend to visit the World Heritage site, cold wind and a thick drizzle gave the place a difficult drabness. There were also vast crowds milling about, caused, we were told, by this being the weekend of the Annual Craft Market, a shanty town of wooden huts selling candles which draws tourists from ‘all over’.
Rialto were the guests of the Bath Poetry Cafe, a fledgling group set up by Sue Boyle and friends (Sue wrote the scintillating ‘A Leisure Centre Is Also A Centre of Learning’, first published in The Rialto and now in the 2008 Forward Book of Poetry. There was a celebratory dinner on the Saturday, hosted by Sue. Ann and I got lost on the way, Bath being an easy city to mislay oneself in; all the buildings looking much the same and being arranged in dizzying circles and crescents.
On the Sunday evening Dean joined us and the Bath Poetry Cafe took over the Mission Theatre in Corn Street (opposite the murky multi-storey car park). The Mission Theatre is, we gather, one of those unsung, unfunded local initiatives that help keep The Arts alive: the, now forgotten, Norwich Experimental Theatre was another such venture, from whose head The Rialto sprung, fully armed, twenty five years ago.
Great reading, charming appreciative audience, pretty much a full house despite the weather. Dean counted them and was well pleased. Surprise of the night was Richard who turned out to be tall and young and slim and able to read with a fine authority.
We liked the West Country. The inhabitants are friendly, indeed ‘Bath
is’, as one young woman told us when we were trying to find a table for
lunch, ‘a hospitality city.’ We did as much as we could to contribute to
the local economy by shopping hard on Sunday afternoon. Oh, and there’s
a great Tapas Bar in Bradford on Avon.
Thursday 27th November 2008
A famous three to Liverpool
Dean Parkin, Emily Wills and Michael Mackmin, a famous three from The Rialto, journeyed to Liverpool (November 20) to talk with, and read to, Alicia Stubbersfield’s cool creative writing students at the John Moore’s Uni. ( Fab city, currently of Euro culture: I loved, among much else, the Tracey Emin bird on a stick and the green laser beam linking the two cathedrals, also the ghost girl in the churchyard and the gang of not - so - young lads having a party around some stone(d) luggage on Hope Street. M. M.)
Next week we’re off to Bath for the official launch of Emily Wills’ second collection Developing The Negative (ISBN 9780 9551273 3 5): “Touched with magic” says Anthony Thwaite, “Will give great pleasure”, says U A Fanthorpe. And also to celebrate Bristol based poet Richard Lambert’s Rialto pamphlet The Magnolia (ISBN 9780 9545 1273 2 8) - “The true poet’s gift” says John Mole - which we published earlier this year.
Emily’s book is £8.50, Richard is £5.50. The reprint of John Siddique’s first collection The Prize, £8.50 (ISBN 9780 9527444 8 1), is also now available. The first edition quickly sold out: Jackie Kay says it’s “ a bold brave book with a big open heart.”
You can get these books by sending us a cheque, made out to The Rialto - don’t forget to include your address - or by buying online via Inpress, just click the link elsewhere on this site. Book Trade orders via Central Books, please.
The Rialto number 66, out as soon as we have enough poems, is starting to look interesting. There are poems accepted so far from Alison Brackenbury, Anna Crowe, Philip Gross, Judith Kazantzis, Lorraine Mariner, Les Murray, D.A. Prince and Elizabeth Smither. Hurry if you want a chance to get in!
P. S. If you are a poet waiting to hear about your work which is stuck in the queue please note that the editor is currently (late November) reading work that arrived in June.
October 2008
Rialto Books Update
John Siddique's book The Prize is currently being reprinted, the new version features a colour cover and will be available in November.
Our next publication will be Emily Wills’ second collection entitled 'Developing the Negative', is due out in the next week or so. More details of the book and a launch to follow shortly.
We really enjoyed our last book launch (we don’t get out much) for Joanna Guthrie’s Billacks Bones in late 2007. A hundred-strong crowd filled the King of Hearts in Norwich – the event started with a reading by George Szirtes and then Joanna took to the floor reading poems from her book. There was even time to partake in the obligatory red wine.
New pamphlet – The Magnolia by Richard Lambert
Published in April, Richard Lambert’s The Magnolia is the second in our series of Bridge Pamphlets. ‘Stately quietness’, attractive and intelligent’, ‘compassionate vision’ and ‘startling spare poems’ are how poets Tim Liardet, John Mole and Greta Stoddart have described Richard’s work.
To find out more click here
The Rialto 64
Highlights include Jane Draycott’s fine translation of ‘Pearl’ (complete
with an accompanying piece by Jane on the work), concrete poems by Stephen
Knight and Alex Shearer, prose poems by Virgil Renfroe and Carrie Etter,
and a spread of short poems by Steve Griffiths, Sebastian Barker, David
Wheatley and Bill Shepherd.
In our Poets by Themselves series, Joanna Guthrie writes about
growing up poeticised and reveals the unusual influence of The Muppet
Show on her writing career.
There’s also the winning entries from our Young Poets Competition (we get letters saying people prefer the poems by young poets). Read a selection of these here.
And there are those people who tell us they only buy the magazine because of the artwork on the cover. Well, this issue should shift a load to them. The strange thing about Mark Hearld’s seasonal cover image is that it’s called ‘The First Snows of Winter’ but actually seems quite spring-like to us. But then it did snow in April…