the Baroque voice

Francis Barraud: "here's one I created earlier"

Well. This is just to alert any of you who may have been yearning to hear the Baroque voice, or a slightly stylised version of it, that your chance has arrived! I can barely listen to it, to be honest, my lame transatlantic accent;* but it might please you. These things can happen.

You can hear me reading four poems, on a website called Poetcasting - a fantastic resource which was set up last year by a very enterprising student and poet called Alex Pryce.

All the featured poems will appear in Me and the Dead (Salt, July 2008), although "The Source" will have a new and much better title.

* Being recorded has pretty much the same effect on me as having my picture taken. There's also a picture on it.

selling poetry like it's something people want

Great news for Salt Publishing - who, as regular readers know, is going to publish my first poetry collection, Me and the Dead, this summer. They have just won the Neilsen Innovation of the Year award in the Independent Publishing Awards. According to Director Chris Hamilton-Emery, they are "not quite sober yet."

According to the Independent Publishers' Guild, Salt has won this award "for finding new ways to increase sales of its poetry and short stories despite tough market conditions, through online marketing, partnerships and brand development. 'Salt is bucking the trend in poetry by growing its sales'," says the IPG. "'Its innovation in lots of small ways adds up to a major achievement'."

The awards were set up by the IPG in association with The Bookseller and London Book Fair.

With its sales on the increase, improved distribution and a new US Sales and Marketing Director, Salt is showing the industry that poetry can sell. You just have to believe people want it.

Hurrah! May their innovation continue and their revenues increase.

one woman's reading: books of the Baroque year both future and past

What a difference a year and a day makes!

I've just discovered this among my files, as it were, and it bears so little resemblance to anything I could possibly write this weekend that I'm publishing it as a curio.

I (or someone kind of like me) wrote:

Four days into 2007, and long after all those newspapers did their "books of the year" sections, we're looking into the abyss of a new Reading Year. Baroque Mansions is piled high with things to read in 2007 (& I need my eyes to hold out this time; one of them is aching even now, but I think it's just an ache).

I have plans, I have commissions, and I even have a few little old hankerings. Sometimes I miss the simple pleasure of reading a novel, for no other reason than that it looked fun; of course there is still impulse-reading, and I do waste ("wa-aste?!?!?") an inordinate amount of time reading internet-things, but it isn't the same as when I used to read for... the story... and the plucky little characters...

Then there's the day job. Lots of items of professional interest are piled up in two different places around Baroque Mansions, alongside the poetry piles, the essay and criticism piles (Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, anyone?), and the odd little forlorn novel pile. Oh and I bought a proof copy of Larkin's letters the other day. I've put it on top of Lowell's letters. They're both in pink dustwrappers.

Plus, I have decided it is time to learn more about typography, properly. My happiness may depend on it. That's another pile.

It's becoming clearer all the time that I will never read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls - a book I just, one day in the second-hand shop, thought looked very interesting. And a friend had liked it. But that ain't enough to cut it any more.

Several of the "book blogs" seem to list books people have "read," as if they pick up a book, read it till it's finished, and then read another book in the same fashion, for no other reason than that they "like" them. They read, or hear, about it, and if they decide they might like it, they read it. Then they read another one; and they talk about them in terms of whether they thought they were "good" or not.

I mention all this only because it sounds so completely different from how, what, and why I read that it might as well be ice skating or hill walking. Don't they dip into a hundred books, on the grounds that they feel they "should know what's about"? Don't they read books they dislike? Do they really finish everything? When can you be said to be "reading" something - is it when you take the same book every morning on the tube? Is it like going steady? (Uh oh. I take a different book every day on the tube, depending on my mood and what I was dreaming about. Plus there are usually a couple in my bag, forgotten, from previous days.) Don't they get sidetracked by trains of thought? Do they not read any criticism or non-fiction? Is it always just for entertainment - novel after novel - and never for elucidation, research, education or critical analysis? (Having said which, I do wish I read more fiction.)

(I say they; it should probably be you. I know I'm the one who's out of kilter, not you. And this is why I can never go into a bookshop on a date, or whatever, because they think it's fun to browse, and my cover would be instantly blown. I say would be - but it has happened. They don't like it.)

Ah, well. Here's the list, what I can remember. Of course there was lots more that I read standing up in Border's or Waterstone's. But, like eating with the fridge door open, that probably doesn't count.

Ashes for Breakfast, by the German poet Durs Grünbein
Atomised, Michel Houellebecq
two novels by Mary Wesley
all of Wendy Cope's collections
Auden: essays, poems, "Letter to Lord Byron"
Table Talk of WH Auden, by Alan Ansen (who died a couple of months ago)
Swithering, by Robin Robertson
District and Circle, bits of, Seamus Heaney
Rapture, Carol Ann Duffy
The Optimist, Joshua Mehigan
Samuel Johnson, by Walter Jackson Bate - bits of
"Rambler" essays, a couple of, Johnson
Belle de Jour, blog book (far less sensational than promised; am I so unshockable?)
Charles Lamb and Elia, ed. JP Morpugo, ancient Penguin
Boudicca & Co, Jane Holland (Salt Publishing)
Faber Book of Sonnets and Penguin Book of Sonnets, in tandem, over the summer
Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag (Queen of Supposition and Sweeping Extrapolation) (I know, she died this year too)
Selected Poems, Geoffrey Hill, in beauteous new Penguin
Selected Poems, Greg Delanty, for an interview that never happened
title essay plus a couple, The Geography of the Imagination, Guy Davenport
Object Lessons, Eavan Boland
Harbour Lights, Derek Mahon
Almanacs, by Jen Hadfield
Gethsemene Day, Dorothy Molloy
Life Studies, Lowell
The Wounded Surgeon (Confession & Transformation in Six American poets), Adam Kirsch
Western Wind: an Intro to Poetry, David Mason and John Frederick Nims
Ulysses, James Joyce (bits of; much better than the audiobook, sweet as that was)
"The Dead", James Joyce
great chunks of Less Than One by Joseph Brodsky (I just don't really do that "I read this book from start to finish" thing)
various essays by Ian Hamilton
Immigrant Blues, Goran Simic
The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry (more arch than a gothic cathedral, but technically sound enough)
I spent a most of a week reading Martin Amis' "Horrorism" article from the Guardian (horrorism is bloody right)
Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk (bits of)
The Forsyte Saga (started, twice, for reasons stated above)
Bleak House (ditto)
short stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Autumn Journal, MacNeice; about four times
Louis MacNeice: a Study, by Edna Longley
Moon Wheels, Ruth Fainlight
Selected Poems, Ruth Fainlight

Well, that's what I can remember as standing out. To a certain extent it's arbitrary: there was some Wallace Stevens, some Coleridge, some Keats, I think there was some Anne Sexton in the summer. Plus there have been reams of articles, interviews, poems etc, downloaded from the web. Plus endless magazines...

My book of the year would probably be Charles Lamb.

the moving finger writes and the moving picture... moves

So... the year wanes and we are left with not much to do besides reflect on the tunnel we're in - the one that runs from Dec 25th to Jan 1st - how we got into it in the first place and what the world might look like when we get out again. Will it look any different at all? Aside from the fact that I will be the size of a house?

Of course, I must be talking about the inner world. The outer world is making itself all too much felt, with Pakistan, the international economy and my lower back all on the brink of falling apart. Here in my little patch of London we will start 2008 with two local teenagers murdered - an unhappy new baseline for our otherwise-quite-peace-n-love neighbourhood. Largely thanks to the efforts of Martin Amis & his friends the intellectual debate on religious fundamentalism has become like a comic book, just when we need rational discourse most badly. I owe British Gas £98 and I'm not even with them any more. The weather is getting stranger; we're told we can't stop global warming now, no matter what we do, and by the way nobody's doing very much. Recycling a few tin cans? Sending gigantic trucks round to get the cans to recycle? I mean, okay, here's a little story for you.

By the big bins at the end of my block there is a mountain of discarded "bulk rubbish" - old chairs, mattresses, kitchen units. The council has apparently told our caretaker several times that they would come and pick the stuff up, but it's been a couple of months and it just looks like shit. And, you know, Hackney, rats... But one day a couple of weeks ago I was on my balcony talking on the phone and I happened to see a truck drive up, pull over next to the house across the road which had a small, neat pile of furniture items in its front garden, and pile them in. It took five seconds. Too late, of course, too late, I noticed that the furniture items were rather cute, especially a little commode stand or similar, with its little drawer liners still in and everything. But I couldn't call out, too far away, too slow. Then they drove away, leaving Mount Everest of Rubbish just yards further along. At the same time, the ex-Mr B has a sofa mouldering in his front garden, because the council have told him he's already exceeded his quota of three, or is it four, items for the year. I mean, he had lots of work done, of course he ditched some old stuff. I told him he could have one my my four call-outs, as I haven't called them out at all, but apparently it doesn't work like that.

But the thing is, these people are driving these trucks around, basing their work on "targets" and "quotas" and wasting fuel and money, and you just get the idea that nobody gives a shit. Having worked in a local authority, I can tell you: they don't. They don't even have the imagination to give a shit. What kind of environmental target involves driving trucks around and not even picking up the rubbish??

The famous Clissold Leisure Centre is re-opening, half a decade later and only about a zillion times over budget. I'll be excited in a couple of years if the roof hasn't caved in. And do they still have mixed-sex showers by the pool?

I don't know, I really don't. If you think about the stupidity of people you could just despair. So let's not think about it. In any case, we are Baroque hereabouts and thankfully not really all that intrested in the mundane elements of How Things Work. I do admire and even envy people who are really intrested in all that stuff, but I am just not one of them. And this is why I can never construct a plotline. (See, it is a serious shortcoming.)

So what will 2008 look like inside? What the hell was 2007 all about? Here in Baroque Mansions it was about, among other things, sickness and death. Sickness, death and movies. Three deaths, three spells in hospital, two operations, four months off work, two trips to the States. It was all about How Things Work. I lay on the couch a lot. I lost the pace that had been my hallmark for the past decade. (Thinking about it, it was probably the pace that made me fall over in Asda, Isle of Dogs, that time, and the time I fell down the stairs while carrying laundry and shouting at my kids over my shoulder, and down the other stairs in four-inch heels trying to leave a party last Christmas, and slip on the pea pod in Somerfields, and break my foot running for a 277 bus while wearing kitten heels, over cobbles... and spill countless cups of coffee running for other buses.) Will I get it back? (Tune in next year...) Does being slow make you old? (I do need to get it back; I have a lot to do and I'm backed up already. In fact, I seem to have done my back in, doing the Christmas shopping.)

2007 was the year in which Mlle B told me I dress older than I used to ("but I mean you still look younger than the other mums! Don't get all excited! Mummy!! What did I say??"), which of course I guess I knew.* You just don't want other people to notice it. Especially when you've lost your pace.

In many ways it was the Year of the Movie. Lying on the couch and losing your concentration means that although a lot of things may not get done, like very important letters to rights departments, you do get to watch a lot of movies. I watched things I had never seen before, filled embarrassing gaps (Taxi Driver - oh my GOD. It is so amazing), revisited old faves and caught up with new things. And there's still so much I've never seen! But I'm back at work now, and have to do the writing I wasn't doing before, so hmm... I also have to buckle down and do the admin or my book will never come out this spring. Crap crap crap. However I am already at work on the next one... the next two, maybe even. Or three, so says my taskmaster. And that's not counting the apocryphal novel.

And look at the time! It's 2 o'clock. Get dressed, Kate.

(Nb. This didn't work. However, am about to go out for a drink in a secret location with a mysterious Stoke Newington blogger of my acquaintance... it's a bit dark out now for the dark glasses, so I'm afraid we'll be rather recognisable. More later, if the Syndicate doesn't get me first.)

* There's a pair of platform sandals with rope trim around the edges, they are the only thing that goes with a certain skirt of mine, but last time I wore them I felt a little funny. Is it bad? Can I still wear them?

back to earth, hopefully not with a thump

Getting real here. Tomorrow I have to go get on a plane in Newark, which means I have to lug my stuff from Woodstock to NYC, and from NYC to Newark, and then persuade the people at the check-in desk to let me check my bags in. What this means is that I have to do the packing, and I have to do it right.

Gone are the days, you know - as long as it fits in a bag it's all right - no, even hair products and body oil, all the most impractical things you can think of, now have to go in the hold, even though it's not pressurised, which means they're likely to burst open in transit, which means that today I need (in this town which lacks a supermarket) to get loads of ziplock bags. And last week at Heathrow they were trying to tell me my carry-on bag had to weigh less than six kilos! The bag itself weights four kilos. I was pretty much going to have to carry on an empty bag and check my laptop in, which I refused pointblank to do. But, because of the security, you do have to be able to get your laptop out of the bag easily - and then back in again - you know, what do they think we're like? We can't all be nomads.

Plus, there are the new sheets. They're pretty big even once you get them out of the packaging - and one of them has already been washed from where a muddy cat went and slept on it, but did it shrink? No. And the obligatory American Sweets. And just the couple of books and a Tony Hancock DVD nobody can play over here, wrong region apparently. And then there are the three framed pictures which an indefatigable aunt and uncle are even now trying to pack up in such a way that I can check them in - rather than, say, sending them to myself at vast expense and then having to pay import duty on them, can you imagine - which of course also means "in such a way that I can lug them through Port Authority." God I hate that place. And I still haven't worked out a good system for managing two suitcases, the carry-on bag and the coffee.

Then there's the kids, and then there's the cousins, and then there's Baby Bro and his wife. And one evening! Well, everyone's had a cut of me, I guess. And there are phone calls to make tonight.

I have to say, it will be lovely to be home. There are people to see there too, including of course the Baroquelings... I feel as if I've been gone a month.

Meanwhile there's the four calling birds poem, the manuscript and attendant other issues like for example permissions for quoted material, which I have not as yet addressed at all - and now it's the run-up to Christmas - and, ahem, Hecht. Oh and three books waiting for me at home to be reviewed. Oh, and work! Yes. Not only that but I have a toothache. I might go take a Nurofen.

... even in Trieste...

Joyce is reading Giles Goodland's collection, Capital (Salt). Photograph by Simon Barraclough and Elisa Bormida.

the bad news, the good news, and another poem

National Poetry Day continues...

Now that we've had a chance to digest the Forward results and look around us: this result does mean that Luke Kennard, famously the youngest-ever (and possibly the tallest-ever) poet to be shortlisted for the main award (and published by my own soon-to-be publisher Salt) didn't win the prize. However, never fear! From a start like this I think it seems more than likely that he could be winning the Forward for his third time by the time he's 55 (Sean O'Brien's age). His work is so different, so very rooted in his generation, it may be the award-awarding world has to catch up a bit.

Last night, rummaging around the internet, I found this news on a Salt blog, Salt Confidential: "Salt has announced that its half year sales have increased 82% compared to the same period last year. The poetry and short story publisher has seen annual sales increase by 104%.

...“'We’re delighted with the results,' says Chris Hamilton-Emery. 'We have a strong line up in this year's Forward Prizes for Poetry, Charles Yu has just been selected as one of the US’s finest fiction writers under 35 by the National Book Foundation, and we’ve a strong line up in the Premier’s awards in Australia. It’s been an exceptional few months, really, though we're quite exhausted!'

“...'We're probably the fastest-growing poetry press in the UK just now and certainly have the largest publishing programme,” says Hamilton-Emery. “We’ve continued to push up market, and the commissioning is leading the way, quality is the driving force, but nothing sells itself and we’ve learnt a great deal from Will Atkinson at Faber. Collaboration matters, and respect for, and working closely with, the bookseller can transform a "boutique" literary publisher like us. We've had wonderful support from literary editors in the broadsheets, too. Clearly, we're finding some of the answers, but we're always learning as a business.'”

Meanwhile, a poem by Luke Kennard, from his shortlisted book:

Plethoric Air (an extract)

We all laughed at the decomposing clown,
But later shame sunk upon us
And we got smashed on the balcony.

I had lost my left shoe in the blood.
The doyen and her ten attaches
Scattered blossom on the divans.

We were charmed by a famous puppy,
A dozen gold pins in her forehead;
A tendency to speak ill of the dead.

‘The dead are so stupid,’ she said.
An attache took me by the temples and ordered,
‘Look: that advertisement on the crevasse;

Notice the inverted commas around “crazy adventures”
Grow bigger than the words themselves,
Framing the very hills and the valleys.

another national poetry day dawns...

...under a blanket of snow from Sean O'Brien, who has just won the Forward Prize for the third time - and a third tome - an unprecedented hat trick which places him firmly, in the words of the judges, as "one of the leading poets of his generation."

I have to confess that the winning collection, The Drowned Book, arrived in the post two days before I went to the USA, and is sitting pristine in a pile of the 2,837 books I brought back with me. Drowned Book, indeed. Though that seems to have done it no harm.

The poem extract quoted in The Guardian has already settled in my mind like a snowfall, alongside August Kleinzahler's wonderful "Snow in North Jersey:"

Blizzard

From The Drowned Book (Picador), by Sean O'Brien (extract)

The snow will bring the world indoors, the fall
That saves the Gulf stream and the Greenland shelf.
White abolitionist of maps and calendars,
Its Lenten rigour pillowed like a sin, it means
To be the only season, falling always on itself ...
It calls us home again, beneath a drift
In which the figure and the ground collapse -
No more redundancy, no more perhaps.

and Look!

The Forward Prize for best first collection, which also had a Salt poet on the shortlist, has gone to Daljit Nagra for his Faber collection, Look We have Coming to Dover! I have to say I did love this book and I think it is a well-deserved win, against stiff competition.

Daljit himself has said, in an interview in the Guardian, that he hopes he can be known as a British poet, not "just" an Asian one - this collection is all about Asianness, and when the poet performs the work he often "minstrelises" (it (his word), doing accents etc. I think his writing is strong enough that he should let his other influences (which include Browning, Hardy, even Shakespeare) come out in his second collection.

This is, above all, a happy book - very rare in poetry. It's fresh and fun and about, ultimately, the joy of life. Read some poems here.

hangover towers

Well, I'm hungover for a good reason: we have launched Isobel Dixon's fine new poetry collection, A Fold in the Map (Salt), and we have floated it out to voyage on a river of free South African wine. The people at Foyles, which hosted the party, were absolutely delightful - until probably just after 9pm, when the several-floored shop was suddenly and repeatedly plunged into darkness, and the merry horde of literary revelers was unceremoniously ushered to street level and dumped on the pavement! (Cue fond reminiscences of my own young days, working at Penguin and having to coax drunken writers out after parties so as to tidy the shop up for work the next morning.)

The room was abuzz with poets, and literary agents, and novelists, and interestingly there was quite the little blog presence. (Of course novelists write blogs!) Various other blogs were discussed, too ("Who is Madame Arcati?" we cried). Bonding was bonded and friendships, old and new, were unbounded, speeches were made. Isobel made several pairs of eyes well and redden with a reminder that her "poetic family" was born in Michael Donaghy's famous workshop, which of course made everyone think how very happy and proud Michael would have been to be there last night. (Mental note: don't do this at Baroque launch! But it was lovely, of course, and for just a moment he was there.) She read only two poems from the book, one about her mother and one about her father: both I'd never heard before, and they were tantalising. How often are you left at a poetry reading wanting more?

Isobel's poetry is quiet and economical, but very warm with it. (She beat me in a competition three years ago, Oxfam Poems for a Better Future, where she came first and I came third: hers was short, clean and direct; mine was written in the voice of Henry James. Hmm...) Her poems are often like this, and come at some clear truth often from a surprise angle. The book is largely about her childhood in South Africa and her family, with pictures of her father on the jacket and a section about his illness and death and life in the family since then. It's very moving, and yet life-affirming (sorry for the word), power-packed stuff. Worth having a look.

Anyway, in our little gang we are now waiting for Simon Barraclough's first collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour, out from Salt next spring; after that it'll be my turn. For now, I might just have a little lie-down. And I've got something to read.