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LEICESTER POETRY SOCIETY
THE STANZA
No. 37 Summer 2008
poems — news — reviews
Editorial
Dear Members,
We are already half-way through 2008 and almost at the end of another LPS year. Practicalities press upon us. From September our venue moves from LAEC to Friends Meeting House, Queens Rd., Leicester. We hope, but cannot be certain, that all will run smoothly while the change-over takes place. What is certain is that we could not have remained at LAEC where, we have recently been informed, “extensive maintenance work is being carried out”. This would have made it impossible as a venue on Fridays after December. Fortunately, your LPS Committee had been foresighted enough to look elsewhere in time. We shall continue to review changing situations.
Despite current hard times for Arts organisations, and particularly very small ones like ours, we can congratulate ourselves on a high standard of programme this year. We have not been insular, nor parochial. We have reached out.
Our programme for 2008-2009 will continue in this ambitious vein. We have an impressive list of readers: Michael Haslam (to whose work the TLS [no less] dedicated a long article on 08/02/08), Marianne Boruch from the USA, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, and in 2009 Wendy Cope, who can actually write about much more than drinking cocoa.
To keep our own creative processes lubricated, workshops will continue on Fridays as usual but at Friends not at LAEC. It will be interesting to discover if a different setting produces different vibes.
The last Event in the LPS calendar this year is Summer Poetry Picnic on 21st June. This is an experiment. Be relaxed. Meet at 1.00 pm in front of Belgrave Hall. Bring a picnic and anything else a foresighted poet needs. There will be greensward, sculpture, vegetation, possibly sun.
Please play an active role to keep your Society vibrant!
Caroline Cook, Editor Contributors
Reviews
Deadline
for the next copy of The Stanza (No. 38) is Friday, 26th September (AGM & Read-around). Send interesting material — news, views etc. and/or poems in any genre.
Like white noise, snow pictures they slip and gleam between channels: crackling blips of intermittent sound, static electricity coming in on a frequency no one can tune.
As children we waved our scarves to make them move in the sky and laughed at the colours: ‘Hush now for the lights, behave’ the old ones said.
‘Listen, they’re whispering messages all the way from that other place — see the shining road they take. The dead live in a space bigger than your mind.’
© Siobhan Logan Published in The Journal 2008
A Note from Siobhan: “I thought you might be interested in hearing how the gig at the Science Museum in London went in March. The gig was a bit hectic but very good experience, and there was an enthusiastic audience. It was sold out — so plenty of interest in the Northern Lights. We were in the Dana Centre, a café-bar with not so good acoustics. The audience was split into three, sending us off into different corners of the room. I did a 20 minute set with each section. Rather a lot of background noise to contend with, but the Powerpoint looked great with the poems, and just to be appearing at THE Science Museum was amazing.”
7th March 2008
All the poems mentioned in this review, plus many other excellent ones, are published in The Forward book of poetry 2008. These Forward collections, which appear annually, are a must for those interested in contemporary poetry in English. John Lucas, eminent critic, poet and publisher of Shoestring Press, steered a good-sized number through the six poems considered by judges Glyn Maxwell, Sarah Crown, Jean Binta Breeze, Colin Greenwood and Michael Symmons Roberts to be the best single poems published in the Forward Book of Poems 2008. He was, I thought, noticeably impartial in his views, somewhat sceptical, as I think we all are, as to the possibility of there being a “best poem” in any year. David Harsent’s THE HUT IN QUESTION which refers back to Edward Thomas’ poem “Rain” left us generally tepid — well-written, certainly, but not offering the new view we felt a “best poem” should give. Lorraine Mariner’s THURSDAY, a stream of consciousness relating a personal experience of living through the London bombings of July 2005, was generally thought to be more original and interesting in style. Its one single sentence construction captures the immediacy and impact of the event. Carole Satyamurti’s THE DAY I KNEW I WOULDN’T LIVE FOR EVER was despatched quite briefly. Once again it was generally felt that this had been said before, possibly better. I thought this judgement a little harsh. I think John Lucas appreciated Myra Schneider’s GOULASH more than I did. It is certainly a sensual offering, full of warmth and colour, but it was too rich a dish for me. Time allowed only scant perusal of Jean Sprackland’s BUFO CALAMITO. This was a pity as the poem shows originality in theme and language. It is a power-packed little piece. I think it would be correct to say that we all (including John Lucas) judged DUNT by Alice Oswald to be the best of the six. Serious in theme, heartfelt in spirit, original and bold in its imaginings, DUNT demonstrated a striving to go beyond the personal to a higher and deeper level of writing. Later, we were not surprised to learn that DUNT had in fact been judged to be the “best single poem” of its year. We felt honoured that John Lucas was present to guide us so subtly through the poems. I wonder if he might be willing to repeat this in 2009? I would also like to thank Huw Watkins for his part in enabling this event.
Caroline Cook
Can my hand write not knowing who the next word is going to be or who its mother is or know if she is crying for it to come back after its late meander wandering wantonly into my verse so far into the evening past the ebony pool with all its fast fading reflections singing tenderly to one another in ever finer silk tones as the great conductor goes slowly retiring in the west behind the blank hills that dominate jaggedly beyond the lateral road where blackness as of deep water consumes the breath of God until there is again something upon the deep. — some word waiting to be rekindled; waiting to catch the dropped stitch by which worlds are born and the way home lost.
David Brazier
No, it's nothing to do with heights. It's a low-down sort of sickness.
Hear that noise in your labyrinths? That's the monster waking, stirring.
Try this set of exercises — they were developed by NASA.
You can take these small white tablets up to three times every day.
And try not to get stressed out if you feel yourself falling over.
You could always act the drunk. That people will better understand. Mark Mawson
11th April 2008
Another very successful Members’ Reading took place in April and this time each of the readers provided us with copies of their poems. This was much appreciated by the audience and especially the reviewer who, like some others perhaps, finds it hard to take in a poem at one reading.
Jean Harbour was the first to read and I find her poetry refreshingly emotionally open, whether writing about her own children and grand-children or an unknown child, as in ‘A Hospital Visit’ (tribute to an unknown child)
‘A seam of sky seems to press upon your head, neatly bandaged in a floral scarf’
suggests the child’s inevitable discomfort or worse. The strength of the poem lies in the comparison of the grandchild
‘our chatty four year-old, who skips and hops avid to find the sweetie shop’
with the unknown child in the wheelchair whose face is
‘expressionless as a chalk cliff’ yet opens her eyes and smiles
‘in camaraderie at the small girl, who dances bizarrely on the lines’
Nothing to do with sentimentality, but an appreciation of how the world is; and how stark the reality that is sometimes brought to our notice quite unexpectedly. The poet suggests, however, as in ‘Come in No. 5 ...’ (a poem to a friend on the brink) we should not disregard hope, but
‘ .................... consider learning to cheat, at least allow for some miscalculation or examiner’s mistake, that would delay..’
Many of Jean’s poems are about people and the intricacies of their living and, perhaps like the church at Nonnington, are about both ‘dust and sunshine’.
Siobhan Logan not only read poems but talked about and described her experiences in Tromsø, Northern Norway, which she had visited while being sponsored by Leicester University Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group, of which I’m afraid I’m entirely ignorant. She illustrated with beautiful lengths of cloth which served to echo and accentuate ‘children waving scarves’ and the ‘ropes of colour moving in the sky’. The references to scientific fact and phenomena were an excuse for the introduction of myth and mystery which seemed to permeate the poems ‘the Trembling Roadway called Bifrost’ and
‘ ''Hush now for the lights, behave" the old ones said.’ and the warning
keep a knife with you always whisper, do not anger the lights
This, Siobhan told us, was a ‘taster’, as it was impossible to do justice to the theme in such a short space of time. On 28th June Siobhan will be giving a much longer interpretation, aided by members of Leicester Writers Club, called ‘Stories Drummed to Polar Skies’ at the Richard Attenborough Centre, when she will engage with what must be one of the most difficult themes to write about and illustrate.
Graham Norman was our third reader and his poems were illustrated with interesting black and white prints. I especially liked ‘The sun and I’ which reminded me of Donne’s ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun’, but in a more friendly way!
Graham’s gift seems to me to evoke strongly, various aspects of ‘nature’ and knitted into them human doings and feelings. There is much description, that comes from the keen eye, but description always seems to enlarge on itself and take us into new realms of seeing. ‘Six ways to see seals’ employs irony, self-mocking, humour and, at times, the surreal. There is all of this in these four lines, about the couple who ‘sat and pinked in the spring sun’ —
‘I could not see but said I could, Just for companionship. They were seal people, Smooth, plump, definitely mammal.’
One could never be able to take in a poem like this satisfactorily — simple in language but more complex in idea — without having it in front of you. And this is even more applicable to a poem like ‘Old Trees’ which is not simply a description of ‘tree-ness’ but more a metaphor for human existence. ‘Chain Letter’ is political (in the wider and narrower sense) but wholly considered, as
‘Yet the truth is, it’s all like that. No “if” or “but”, no variance. What caused the thing is what went on before.’ and, talking about the horror of bombs that fall ‘..... on their town and rips apart Their limbs, their hearts, mechanics’ sanitises ‘Though the best will make it art As Picasso did with Guernica, Goya With all war from then to ever.’
The poem finally comes back to the dispassionate bearer of news who will ‘............................... now take on The gentle clothing of the postman, His soft blue shirt, his cotton trousers ........’ in what has to be, in a coming to terms, an affordable resignation.
At the time of the reading I seemed to get a sense of Graham’s secularism but, having re-read the poems, don't know where it came from — perhaps from his talking about them. From a purely personal point of view I would have preferred it if he had not read out the numbers of the different stanzas. It seemed to break up the continuity and, as we had the poems in front of us, seemed unnecessary.
Altogether it was a very varied and most enjoyable evening; and a pleasure to hear every word!
Jill Cunningham and Huw Watkins
Graham, Siobhan and Jean
Sometimes arrives early, grabs a window table and the waiter’s eye. Orders Chardonnay,
but Perhaps isn’t sure she’s ready yet and wants more time with the menu
and Maybe is trying to remember what she enjoyed last time.
Possibly, crushing her cigarette among the bent stubs, Asks I wonder what’s happened to Now?
D.A. Prince Pub. Poetry Nottingham (60/4) February 2007 A Note from D.A. Prince: This is the title poem from my new collection published 1st May 2008 by Happenstance (www.happenstancepress.com). Marilyn Ricci has a pamphlet from the same publisher, due out in July. There will be a joint launch in Leicester in early September. Date to be advised.
4 am, how quiet it is, a slight stirring only in the bare branches of the trees.
Then, a lone cyclist riding up New Walk without lights, disappears towards the park. Can't help wondering about him.
Street lights are on, windows dark. Above the empty streets just one star visible, Sirius, brightest of them all, silver with a tinge of glacier blue, looking deadly cold.
Alice Beer
Foursquare as a box, also spherical, Each contained in each, a Vitruvian horse. And white all over, excepting dark eyes, Skin taut showing riverine veins.
The apple bulge of muscle, cored with bone Contains the organs, purple, pulsing. Teeth down to the damp grass, Now quiet, incurious, in the warm light next to me.
I take my clothes off, lay them under the hedge, And levitate fifteen hands to sit astride. We do not move. The grass gives up its green. Cool airs ripple the skin as we become one animal.
Graham Norman Vitruvian Man - Leonardo
Circa a European Year of Revolutions, of Kossuth and Cavour and Louis Napoleon's Eighteenth Brumaire, when Chartists massed, faintly tinted in life colours, in the first known crowd photograph and a grim economist fused a hissing manifesto, one man found everything to lose, one man preserved
by the Heanor and District Historical Society, one man who might have been co-patrilineal
to this one, scribbling here, across a left over note, a bone trace of age unstated, Joseph of my surname, asphyxiated circa 1848 at a firedamp lit hard seam at Loscoe pit.
David Bircumshaw, 2008
Review of the G.S. Fraser Lecture 9th May 2008. Richard Burns: An English Poet in the Balkans.
Anyone expecting a lecture at a lectern would have been surprised, and if that anyone is like me, heartened, by Richard Burns’ presentation and reading. He is not a man who likes to stand still and talk but performs with a restless enthusiasm and an animation of eye and body that engages his audience and brings them deep into his world. This is a big, serious, thoughtful and impassioned European world.
Richard lead us gently at first through amusing anecdote and self deprecating revelations to the point on his journey into the Balkans when on May 25th 1985 he was visiting the museum at Kragujevac in central Serbia with his seventeen year old daughter. The museum is a memorial to the massacre of around 2300 Serbs by the German army in 1945. The experience of a blue butterfly (psyche) landing on his outstretched hand was an epiphanal moment that led to his writing a sequence of the 49 poems that form the Blue Butterfly collection. The first of these poems describes when,
“a blue butterfly simply fell out of the sky and settled on the forefinger of my international bloody human hand.”
The second, “Nada: hope or nothing,” continues the theme, ending,
“a blue butterfly takes my hand and writes in invisible ink across its page of air Nada, Elphida, Nadezhda, Esperanza, Hoffnung.”
Now, we were surprised and delighted as the poem was read again in Serbian by Silvana Galic, one of a group of Leicester Serb families and friends who had come to the event at the invitation of Professor Burns and the Leicester Poetry Society. Few of us non-Serbs know the language, yet to hear the poem, having understood it in English, was to feel it in the rich warmth of the Serbian, a rare and moving experience. The evening continued with more humorous anecdotes of life with the British Council in Serbia and an entry into the world of Balkan myth and tradition explored in the collection, “In a Time of Drought.” Dodola, the Balkan rain maiden became our companion and the poetry became a duet between Richard and Silvana, in both English and Serbian, with the added delights of Silvana’s singing and Richard’s terpsichorean vigour as he moved around the hall.
Richard Burns classifies himself as a European poet, one who deals with serious social, political and cultural themes. By the end of the night we may have felt a bit parochial, a bit too insular and English, but also moved, excited, maybe even regenerated, by what we heard and saw. The Serbian families seemed delighted, and their openness and friendship enhance the evening and we hope their connection with the Leicester Poetry Society will continue.
This was a poetry evening of levity and gravity, pleasure and pain, recognition and learning and it set a benchmark for the G S Fraser Lecture in the years to come.
Graham Norman
The past is packed, the door ajar. Time yawns and fidgets, eyes his coat and, like a guest who’ll soon be gone, significantly clears his throat.
So little left before we part – I search myself for something more than pleasantries to ease the heart of this hurt child of eighty-four.
But pleasantries might serve our turn instead of letting speech congeal, if either one of us could find fit formulae for what we feel.
Genetic substance, copied style conspire, constrict. What we two say through thickets of inhibitings and interdicts must find its way –
in hot unhealing grief that crowds through the resistant throat – or terse flat sentences we fumble for like tokens from a clip-lipped purse.
But if in this transaction both exchange the intentions in what’s said, then such base coinage may suffice to furnish one day’s salt and bread.
Brian Fewster Pub. in Poetry Nottingham (62/1) March 2008
In time to come, when I am seventeen, And longing for my first trip into space, I won’t remember then this happy scene, The look of pride upon my mother’s face. This stranger, in whose bony arms I lie Now wets my head, and on my forehead draws A watery cross, whilst I forget to cry, And carries on intoning without pause. Godparents, aunts and uncles, neighbours too, Whose lifetimes will be history for me, All gather round in judgement as they coo, That I will be their judge they cannot see. But that is yet to come, take one last peep, This child of Christ is almost …fast…asleep.
Mike Brewer
Pub. in Poetry Now, East Midlands 1994
The vandals have taken all the trees
The vandals have taken all the trees everyone of them gone from Gallowtree Gate. Who the Goth got rid of the madding evenings of sparrows, the shirring starlings screaming round the clocktower, the life, the growth of trees, the lime and yellow thinning, sparse with orange in the seasons standing and bending outside the café balconies...
The massives, those three, raised above the street, their boles crammed with hardy flowers on red pentagons, cinqfoil walls with lounging capstones hugging benches, and sheltering or shedding wet on idlers, coughers. jesters and the sturdy kiosks back-to-back, tobacconist and Kodak sellers facing the living street, the air, the weather. A hundred years could not repair the state.
They hoist two Christmas trees off some plantation and the quick Mercury declares that they bring life to the city centre. Livings were made by men with spikes for a few years laying them on ledges against the settling of pigeons. The dovecot of the town, the Odeon rock-face, now as monument, I'd plan an avenue flanked by city gardens.
On the High Street buses are banned. They're killing trade. Take lorries, buses, people and deliveries away, and you've lost the bustling town. Rubik-apartments pop up from rubble plots, blank tor a time. Less and less I want to walk in town. Why not a breather's yard, some trees, a path? The Baptist Linden trees are gone to pebbles. Buses slalom and chicane in narrow channels. The Post Office has gone from a level-access site to firetrap, underground. The school has pretended to be afraid, and quit, and the grcat dappled plane outside the City Rooms has been cut down.
Lydia Finlay
Thoughts inspired by the English Poet in the Balkans.
In his 2008 G. S. Fraser Lecture, Professor Richard Burns said that he was bored with contemporary English Poetry; English poets do not address themselves sufficiently to serious social and cultural issues. They are too inward-looking, too anecdotal in their style. He is probably right – but may also be unfair. There should be room for the examination of the self and of social minutiae, even navel-gazing, in poetry alongside the sonorous, the didactic and the polemical. No, what is wrong with so much poetry today is that it is not memorable. Poetry should affect one’s mind like the shock of battle. Phrases and lines should reverberate in one’s head like the crash of shells for days afterwards; images haunt like post traumatic war syndrome, rearing up in one’s mind at the most inappropriate moments. Nor should this be just personal to the individual but will happen to most people who read that poetry. A really great poem will become part of a society’s collective consciousness – although you may want to debate whether or not such a thing can exist!
Lest you think that I am suggesting that only verse screamed out above the noise of battle will be heard, remember also that the gentle intelligence can sing a memorable tune. Richard Burns himself gave us one such poem, “The death of children,”
“It is the death of children most offends nature and justice. No use asking why. What justice is, nobody comprehends.”
Who, when they have read or heard them would ever forget those three lines? Or even if forgotten, would not reacquaintance bring them back with the same pain and power? This is the poetry we should be seeking out to read to ourselves, declaim to our audiences, compose for ourselves, write for the wide world. It is the poetry of frisson, of the rising hairs on the back of the neck, of the belly-hot surge of understanding, of tears wetting cheeks, the knife thrust of embarrassment, recognition of shame, of the elation of being human, the sadness of being mortal. It is not the theme that matters; it is the clarity of voice and memorability of the words that count. Richard Burns is right because it is the human condition that is the garden of all great poetry; the personal condition is really only interesting when it illuminates our common world.
Graham Norman
Extract from When night covered Europe
Second Song of the Dead
You who pass this way in European day know who walked among these hills and valleys a man and a boy with nothing to say but half-remembered poems carrying a machine gun when night covered Europe
In a mountain village a woman gave them porridge and space by her fire cornmeal and milk crumbs rich as knowledge kindness to mend courage of a man and a boy carrying a machine gun when night covered Europe
From THE BLUE BUTTERFLY by Richard Burns Future Tense
It may be simple. He arrives tonight. And it can be perfect. You will have glimpsed it once or twice. (In Romance languages the endings can be learnt by heart.)
It may predict the present. He’s on his way. And can be expressed using will. He will come. Note that will may also denote a habitual state. She will sit waiting for hours/days. (In Russian it has no endings.)
Sometimes called progressive, I’m getting it right next time. it may also denote a natural propensity, The colour will fade. and its meaning can be achieved by going. They’re going to separate.
Shall is dying out, and nowadays appears almost exclusively in questions. Shall I ever feel this way again?
Note that it cannot be declined or avoided.
Caroline Cook Pub. in Poetry Nottingham (60/3)
LINES NORTH – Selected Poems by Pat Corina
Reading the lovingly edited and produced LINES NORTH by the late Pat Corina, I found myself recalling the words of the American poet Kenneth Koch who, in his poem ‘The Art of Poetry’, asks if poets live on in their work & concludes that if they do then it is a small & strange sort of life.
The poems in LINES NORTH echo a lifetime of detail and diversity. There are poems about Yorkshire, Africa, custard powder, Christ, fairy tales, owls, foxes, reading, writing, the shipping forecast, playing the cello ... the standard overstuffed attic of curiosities that make up the chaotic museum of memory. These are poems of daily detail that don’t shrink from the obvious — sometimes that’s a problem, of course, because they end up telling us things we already knew — but more often than not they come across as clear-eyed and unflinching examinations of common landscapes of human experience.
There are one or two poems based on or around old photographs which — you might say — is, by now, an all-too familiar subject for the page-long lyric. But, there’s something in Pat Corina’s approach — the honesty, I think, the clean & certain grasp of the language — that raises it above standard fare.
‘A perspective’, on the face of it a routine meditation on time and impermanence, opens an in an un-showy, scene- and theme-setting way
The photograph, in which we are both out of sight, shows a wide beach below the unseen point of view. Clouds are reflected in the sea, a distant line which will advance regardless after we have left.
before moving on to describe one of the protagonists scratching a name in the sand. Again, this runs dangerously close to cliché, but it is redeemed and elevated by the surprising language in the concluding stanzas:
Other atoms jingle in our tissue’s pockets, other molecules perform their patterned steps, and that wide ledge we stood on has been washed away to show the mammoth bones buried beneath our feet.
Our other selves are standing, still, invisible on insubstantial air above the sliding sea. I think our hands are touching. You are pointing out, below our feet, the huge striations of your name.
There’s something unexpected and compelling about the way that the atoms ‘jingle’ like coins in the ‘tissue’s pockets’. There’s the clever, sea-suggesting sibilance that swishes through the first two lines of the concluding stanza (selves, standing, still, invisible, insubstantial, sliding, sea) & the chiming long ‘a’s of ‘striations’ and ‘name’ that slow everything down & bring it to closure. Pat obviously understood the music of language & shows here she knew how to make it work to telling effect.
She does good punchlines, too. As we know, punchlines in poems are perilous things, and this is usually because they simply don’t punch their weight, so to speak. In ‘Things my mother taught me’ the reader runs through a fluent list of domestic and traditionally female rituals, ‘How to chop mint .../ How to shell peas ... / Topping and tailing. Creaming/ sugar and marg. Peeling, slicing./ Putting cutlery in its proper place./ How to stay silent. Smile ...’ before being stung by ‘... How to walk/ on knives.’
And then there are moments pure, lyrical intensity that confront and confirm the audacity of writing poetry in the teeth of the world’s careless brutalities:
Nothing is ever lost. And one day – it will be late in the year, leaves like black slugs leaching to earth – I shall light my words so that they scatter and lift, their dark instructions melting grey, rewound in monochrome like an upward drift of spring. (from ‘After Pythagoras’)
The life conferred through LINES NORTH may be little and strange, but it’s one worth having, I think. Karin Koller, Davina Prince and Brian Fewster (and whoever else was involved in the production of the book) have done a fine thing in bringing these poems to a wider readership.
© Clive Allen May 2008
Editors of poetry magazines, like their magazines, are a very mixed bag — and let’s be grateful for that. Unpaid, sometimes subsidising their magazine from their own funds, jack/jill of all trades from post-opening to critical judgement and the finer points of design, balancing a budget and the sensitive egos of poets while they keep one eye on subscriptions renewals and readers — would a totally sane person take this on? More likely to be remembered for their errors than their foresight, they may be poets themselves, hoarding tiny patches of time for their own work before the post arrives with the next batch of submissions. Don’t they deserve a little sympathy?
Some don’t. I’m not going to name names (though I’ll give name and magazine title for all the following examples to anyone who asks) but I avoid the editor who sat on work for two and a half years, ignored the email withdrawing it, and then published it after it had been accepted elsewhere. Ditto the one who refused to let me withdraw work she’d accepted, telephoned to say she was desperate to hold it on file — and there is has remained for the past three years. Or the editor who rejects by return post with a rejection slip that blames the sender for adding to her burdens. Or the editor who can’t spell my name or proof-read accurately (so my poem acquires a few hand-crafted typos). You will have similar tales, I’m sure.
We all have our favourite magazines. whether print or on-line — and my list would not be the same as yours. There are some magazines I read but wouldn’t submit to, for all sorts of reasons — probably you feel the same, but with an entirely different list. The Poetry Library on Level 5 of the Festival Hall is an excellent place for undisturbed and wide-ranging reading of print magazines; it’s open to everyone and a congenial place to decide whether you identify with a magazine. It’s the editor who decided the contents: do you want to join them? If not, then it’s not for you; that’s why we should be grateful for editors being various. And most editors are thoughtful and encouraging (or have I just been lucky?). There’s the editor who replies within two weeks, always with a hand-written note commenting on the poems; the one who suggests other likely magazines for poems he’s rejected; the one who sends a perceptive commentary on each poem; editors with a sense of humour (honestly!); the editor who explains when your poem didn’t quite make it through the last tussle with a co-editor. And the editors you’ve actually met, at readings or festivals or launches; they not only look human, they are human. I’m very attached to an editor who describes his magazine in a verse mission-statement as ‘the bold Ann Summers of the poetry world’, and promises to cater for those with a taste for ‘something rhyming, in pentameters.’
Some magazines look at all submissions anonymously (I know of two) to avoid any suggestion of cliquey-ness. Some take poems only for the next issue; others will hold over for future issues. Yes, of course they are curious — nearly as curious as the poets who send in their poems.
D. A. Prince April 2008
Un Homme De France
Il aime la danse mais il n’aime pas l’impertinence de l’âge moderne. Où est l’humilité? Où est la civilité? Et, où sont les toilettes publiques, s’il vous plait?
I wonder if this poem would have been accepted by the Editor of Poetry Review (Spring 2008) if it did not bear the name John Hegley?
Caroline Cook, Editor
NEWS
Future Events 2008
21st June 1.00 pm to 4.00 pm Summer Poetry Picnic (for details see Editorial)
The following events are at Friends Meeting House, Queens Rd. and begin at 7.30 pm:
26th September AGM . Please attend! There will follow a Read-around. Write or bring a poem about Smells!
17th October Michael Haslam
7th November Marianne Boruch
12th December Siobhan Logan “Northern Lights”
Workshops
Workshops at Friends Meeting House (270 5003) will begin at 7 p.m., and will be held on most Fridays. Please bring several copies of poems to be workshopped. You can come to Workshops just to contribute; you don’t have to bring a poem. Or you can bring a poem by someone else.
Autumn Workshop dates are likely to be:
October 3rd 10th 24th 31st November 14th 21th 28th December 5th
Full Membership £26 annually. Concessionary Membership £20.
Please send your cheque to: Colin Cook, LPS Treasurer, 338 London Road, Stoneygate, Leicester LE2 2PJ
Farewell, small bookshop Swallowed by the Amazon Unsustainable.
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