News

July 30th, 1-2pm
…Lyrical Lunchtime with Jean Binta Breeze.
New Walk Museum, Gallery 6/ FREE 

The Lyric Lounge’s official patron, Jean Binta Breeze will perform new work and acclaimed classics. The first female dub poet in the world, Jean has performed on nearly every continent and is the author of 7 books. Her new collection, ‘Cutting a Lime’ is forthcoming from Bloodaxe, Spring 2011. Open Mic slots availble. Arrive a little early and sign up with the compere.

July 31st, 1-2pm.
‘Lyrical Lunchtime’ with Kenny Wilson
New Walk Museum, Gallery 6/ FREE

Local Legend, Kenny Wilson comes to Lyric Lounge Leicester – with a head full of lyrics and a fist full of notes. Imagine Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, all rollled into one and living in Leicester. Expect free styling, risk taking and a operetic homage to the landmarks of the city. Open Mic slots available. Arrive a little early and sign up with the compere.

August 1st, 1-2pm.
‘Lyrical Lunchtime’ with Staple Magazine
New Walk Museum, Gallery 6/ FREE

Lyric Lounge Leicester has teamed up with Nottingham based Staple – a magazine of poetry, prose and pictures, to bring you five talented artists. Sink into the lyrical lands of Aly Stoneman & Milk, Pam Thompson and Sureshot (aka Michael Brome) – performing with Mike Sole. See contemporary poetry at its finest. Be serenaded by New Walk Museum’s beautiful Grand Piano. Open mic slots are available. Arrive a little early and sign up with the compere.

LYRICAL LUNCHTIMES ARE COMPLETELY FREE!

For more information about our ‘Lyrical Lunchtime’ acts, and the rest of the Lyric Lounge programme – including appearances from Fatima al Matar (soon to feature in Staple’s forthcoming ‘24′ anthology), Mark Gwynne Jones, John Hegley and many more – go to the Lyric Lounge Leicester official website.

One of the highlights of Staple 72: The Music Issue has now been judged by Ruth Padel, Hugo Williams, Alex Clark, Dreadlockalien and Fiona Shaw – the panel behind the shortlists for the Forward Poetry Prizes 2011 - to be among the highlights of the year. Chris Jones’s ‘Sentences’ is a powerful short sequence drawing on his work in prisons, combining clear-eyed perspectives on the problems that bring men to the landings, and make it hard for them to completely escape, with an extraordinary formal elegance and control. If you’d like to read ’Sentences’ before the Forward anthology appears on National Poetry Day (October 6th) – then you can order a copy of issue 72 direct from the Staple online shop.

The full shortlist for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem award is as follows:

Julia Copus: An Easy Passage

Chris Jones: Sentences

Lydia Fulleylove: Night Drive

Ian Pindar: Mrs Beltinska in the Bath

Lee Sands: The Reach.

Kate Bingham: On Highgate Hill

About Chris Jones 

On September 7th, Staple and Leicester’s leading spoken word night will collaborate in presenting the work of four poets (five, if we include one of the night’s regular comperes, Lydia Towsey, which we certainly should) devised to be performed alongside films created by Word’s resident film-maker, Keith Allott, the man behind the varied backdrops that colour and add texture to much of the work performed on the open mic and main slots at the Y Theatre. 

Taking submissions, often in the forms of poetry screenplays (Pam Thompson’s ‘Backstory’) or treatments (like Ghost Poet’s description of a dream-like imaginary film, relating an encounter between a man and a boy’s ghost in a confined room), it will be fascinating to see where the process of these poets working with Keith Allott to build an expanded version, incorporating film, will lead.

Just as Thompson and Ghost Poet take divergent routes into the idea of a poem that might become a film, so the other two writers involved (Maria Taylor and Jayne Stanton) do likewise, Taylor offering ’The Carnival of Souls’, a poem steeped in the history and some hazily recollected memories of 1950s and 60s American horror films and b-movies, where our unnamed but undoubtedly glamorous heroine is chased, escapes, finds herself  in a room with curtains that “swirl, like/unworn bridal veils” as “the water calls” and (by the by) finds herself a cult concern among her fans.  

Taylor’s spooked atmosphere operates through details and textures, while Jayne Stanton’s ‘The Cab Door Closes’ takes an opposite path, sketching in a single fleeting moment that might imply a larger story – a woman, actress or model, perhaps, who “takes her seat/in time to watch a private showing/in the rear view mirror” where a small ‘cameo’ is noted, as a man stands (whether he is threatening or desirable is not clear) and the woman removes her gaze, parting company with the scene she has observed, going on ”for her next casting”. Perhaps Stanton’s film will explain, or simply deepen the mystery.

Each piece of writing will be extended and filled out by the addition of images and sound, and the finished pieces will be performed at Leicester’s Phoenix Square on September 7th, at a special one-off event, from around 8pm (though arrive earlier if you’d like to perform on the open mic – slots book up quickly here!). We hope to add footage to the website in due course: since the technology now exists to look at fresh ways of approaching publication, in time we hope to add more work designed for audio-visual as well as plain print presentation.

In the meantime, the extracts in Staple 73: The Film Issue might offer a small taste of what is to come, and we hope some of our readers will come along to Phoenix on the 7th September to share in the unveiling of these unclassifiable works by five poets, all regulars at the Word! nights, and all likely to surprise and entertain, just like cinema itself.

Prior to the evening performances, Pam Thompson will also be leading a film-themed workshop in one of the Phoenix resource rooms: contact Word! for further details and bookings.

(*…that have nothing to do with whether it’s actually good enough for publication)

I’ve been doing a few talks and workshops recently on ways into publication for writers, and one of the Frequently Asked Questions is why work is turned down.

Obviously, there are the usual reasons to do with quality of submissions, suitability for a particular magazine (the eternal mistake of not reading a magazine even once before submitting work to it shows few signs of taking early retirement), the vexing business of work that is wonderful until the last line fails to clinch the deal (or that stumbles its opening, before lifting off part-way in) and so on. There are the standard ‘include an SAE large enough to fit your work into’ (a surprising number of people forward their six poems or two short stories in envelopes that would struggle to house a postcard, making replying to certain submissions an exercise in advanced origami as much as editorial choice) and ‘do not send handwritten pages elaborately decorated with Celtic knot-work and pictures of dragons’. Then there are those who forward 75 pages of text, accompanied by a six-page CV and covering note typed and signed on the author’s behalf by a secretary (there’s a certain type of American ploughing alphabetically through the Poets’ Market directory who seems especially guilty of this). And of course, there are those who feel that real poetry means material that Robert Southey would have considered a bit outmoded back in the 1820s…all this we know.

But what about the perfectly good, professionally presented and perfectly publishable work that we, nonetheless, have to keep on returning? That’s where the following points come into play.

1: Whether it’s due to the increased availability of mentoring, writers’ workshops and courses, or the growth of MAs and undergraduate creative writing options, or the availability of more poetry and feedback online, or the activities of Book Doctors, library services and festivals in bringing good work to aspiring authors’ attention, it has to be noted that the average standard of submissions to publishers at all levels has been gradually creeping up. On the one hand, this is excellent news: the vast majority of the submissions to Staple are – as a minimum – competent, well-crafted, and often well on the way to being very fine writing. This also means, however, that we have to return far more perfectly good poems than might have been the case in the past, simply because we can only include so much in any given issue. Editing was no doubt easier when the general standard was lower, and a smaller number of good poems chose themselves: these days, more editorial choices are made between different kinds of good poem than between good and bad poems.

2: Certain subjects are eternally attractive to writers, and we receive many examples of these in any typical influx of submissions. This means that we are choosing among many versions of what are often essentially quite similar types of poem and short story when putting together any particular issue of Staple. For authors of short fiction, relationship break-up stories, stories where former friends meet and find they no longer have much in common, stories that centre on secrets coming to light, stories involving car accidents, stories about estranged children returning home after parents’ deaths, or to visit dying parents, stories about writers, and stories about people in their twenties just out of university, finding their ways in the world, have to be especially good to make it into our pages. For poets, observations on nature, reflections on children leaving home, feelings of spirituality triggered by views of the sea, recollections of childhood events, anecdotal poems about events witnessed in ordinary streets, poems that use standard workshop forms like the sonnet and villanelle, or take their cues from postcards and paintings, or poems about travel and foreign landscapes and cities; these too need to be especially powerful examples of their kind to rise above the general glut of material pursuing similar subjects and approaches. We have published examples of most of these types of story and poem since late 2007, when I first took over reading the submissions from my predecessor Ann Atkinson, but once we have even a small number of these in an issue, even the best examples will need to be returned.

3: Generally speaking, we try to maintain an overall balance between poetry and prose in our issues. Some lean a little more one way or another, but we hope to give roughly equal space to both. This can mean, for example, that certain issues may be more open to prose or poetry, depending on the balance of suitable submissions we’ve received. In the case of our forthcoming winter issue, on translation, for example, we have so far received more excellent and suitable poetry than prose: this means that anyone sending in good versions of short fiction cast into English from other languages currently has a higher than usual chance of winning a place in that issue’s contents. There is still room for more poems, too, and for essays and stories on themes more loosely related to the main thread of the issue’s theme, but there’s a bit more room for prose at this point in the evolution of that particular issue.

4: The themes we work to at Staple are not intended to exclude work that doesn’t deal with them directly, but as the idea is for each issue to have its own identity and some of the underlying coherence of a good anthology, the editor’s eye is always reading with a view to the connections and contrasts between the various things already due to be featured in a given issue. This can often mean a poem or story is accepted because it offers a link to another piece in the folder, or brings a distinct fresh angle to the subject we’re trying to build an issue around. Obviously, this is not something writers sending in work can really know ahead of making their submissions, and to a large extent editing each issue is akin to holding a jigsaw in the head, and trying to match the distinct shapes of the pieces as they arrive in the post to the gaps in the picture. Where poems or stories are returned simply because they won’t fit this picture, we do try to give that reason and invite future submissions, though pressures of time might mean we’re not as consistent in doing this as we’d like to be. It is, however, another reason why some perfectly good pieces, that might otherwise have been included, might be returned.

5: The final point turns the tables slightly, and notes that some of the work I’ve been most pleased to include in Staple  has come from meeting people at events – not all of them our own events. Any halfway decent editor will be out attending readings, events, exhibitions and other places where writers and artists gather to support their colleagues, as well as giving talks, getting involved in those events, and generally on the lookout for two things: opportunities to dish out heaps of subscription flyers and promote the magazine to potential readers, and writers who might not be submitting their work to us who we may want to publish in future.  When we put on Staple events, we also talk about our upcoming themes, and many a good piece has emerged from someone coming up after such an event with an idea, or from someone performing in an open mic spot at a reading being asked to send the poem they’d read in for consideration. It follows that being out at events, attending readings, festivals and workshops, is one of the ways by which editors find new work. Consider regular attendance at these things to be as much part of the submission process as putting A4 sheets into stamped envelopes with SAEs enclosed, and the chances are you’ll be remembered when your submissions arrive in the editor’s post later.

So there we are. Four reasons why perfectly good writing might not always make it into a magazine, and one suggestion as to how those scales might be tilted, just a little, in your favour despite them.

Lowdham Book Festival

The eleventh Lowdham Book Festival concluded its regular last Saturday of free events this weekend, with everything from Brian McCormack & Deirdre O’Byrne presenting Beckett at the local WI, Christy Fearn on Byron’s rock-star status, Stuart Jennings on Newark’s experience of the English Civil War and Tony Waltham on Nottingham’s labyrinthine sandstone caves. That’s not to mention Nottingham Writers’ Studio presenting a Word of Mouth showcase, curated by the novelist Nicola Monaghan, a second launch for the Into The River anthology introduced by Cathy Grindrod, and Maria Allen reading from her Tindal Street novel After The Earthquake (which coincidentally, received a glowing Guardian write up that same morning). Altogether, then, a packed day showcasing the infinite variety of independent publishing both inside and outside the region – in fact, a day rather too packed, in that I only managed to attend a fraction of what was on offer.

In the face of increasing narrowing of stock at bookshops, festivals like Lowdham (or next month’s Southwell Poetry Festival and I Am An American Poet… festival, both running concurrently in Nottinghamshire in July) are becoming increasingly important as ways for writers and publishers to meet their readers directly, and it’s hoped that all of them do well, and draw the audiences they deserve. With six rising stars from the American scene – Kerri French, Eireann Lorsung, Shana Youngdahl, James Cilhar, Laressa Dickey and Zachary Carlsen in the UK to present workshops, talks and readings - alongside Southwell’s more familiar British roster of Michael Rosen, Don Paterson, John Siddique, Jo Shapcott, Jenny Joseph, Siobhan Logan and Andrew Motion, there will be plenty of opportunities to catch up with both some well known and undeservedly overlooked  new writing.

As belts are tightened on funding (this year’s Lowdham managed without previous years’ arts council grants) the support of writers, publishers, retailers and readers will become increasingly crucial to the survival of these events – so we should all make sure we get along to as many of them as possible.

Like many of those involved in the Save Our Presses campaign, Staple Magazine relies on ad hoc and opportunistic strategies for getting itself onto the radar of potential readers and subscribers: events, as discussed in a post earlier this month, act as one such catalyst. Then there’s word of mouth, supportive efforts from existing readers and subscribers, flyer swaps with other organisations’ mailing lists, leaflet drops at venues, online activity and all the other methods, usual and unusual, of trying to maximise the numbers of people whose consciousness the magazine’s existence might cross at some point, while directing any interest roused towards our online shop or mailing address.

The two things we don’t seem able to break through to as ways of selling the magazine are conventional media coverage and getting copies into shops,  the former because there are so few outlets for reviews and notices of poetry generally, let alone journals, beyond the pages of magazines (perhaps ironically) like our own, and the latter because retailers seem broadly united in feeling that these things just don’t sell. There’s obviously something of a Catch 22 here, since the unappetisingly limited range available in most bookshops means that there’s rarely anything of interest to even a poetry and short fiction obsessive like myself, and the lack of books and magazines to browse pushes ever more readers’ purchases online, thus closing the circle of assumption that ‘these things won’t sell’ within physical shops.

In many ways, it’s a classic self-fulfilling prophecy, though there are signs that retailers may be finally coming to realise this, as their range narrows to bestsellers and proven formulas, sales continue to fall, and the few success stories are outlets like Donlon Books in London, or The Bookcase in Lowdham, whose stocking policies aim to take their readers by surprise, with a range of books that their customers might not have thought to search for on Amazon: whether Mark Pilkington’s wonderfully eclectic Strange Attractor, the beautifully designed pages of poetry and illustration in Popshot or  a whole range of one-off chapbooks, hand-made books and newsheets, these are the things that the browsing experience is tailor-made to fit.

Yet few industries can be built on as many sick notes as mainstream marketing, a profession whose only purpose is to sell things, but which habitually insists that only things that suit its methods will sell.  It’s akin to a doctor who knows nothing about human anatomy or symptoms, but does have a bottle of aspirin, so considers only conditions that can be treated with a dose of aspirin curable. Yet rather than being struck off, these quack doctors have been given ever greater influence in mainstream publishing and retail, simply to ensure that only the relatively few types of book marketeers feel comfortable about selling are presented to readers.

It’s an unduly harsh observation, to be sure, and there are some wonderfully dedicated and inventive marketing people out there: but the grain of truth is there, too, and I suspect that until we return to a more diverse ecosystem of retail, coverage and distribution, the breadth and depth of the market will continue to shrink. Perhaps the current development of electronic systems of distribution will help, in presenting readers with a far broader spectrum of published material than the present restricted range available to all but the most dedicated, just as Spotify and other services have opened up vast regions of musical activity to many previously resigned to choosing among the contents of their local HMV and mainstream radio playlists.

The emergence of the downloadable book or magazine brings its own problems, of course, not least the difficulty of payment and resources in a context where refreshed enthusiasm for new discoveries and growth of readerships comes at the expense of any certain way of bringing in enough to cover authors’, editors’ and other costs. It will be ironic if the biggest potential growth in readerships since the introduction of mass literacy also results in a situation where the ability of anyone to actually produce anything without patronage ends up returning us to a kind of pre-Modern age where only the wealthy, institutions and the odd sensational, random bestseller are able to make ends meet.

But that’s a negative view: beneath the radar of the least imaginitive mainstream marketing are a host of options, from the previously mentioned likes of Hatch, to the way that small, highly nimble outfits like Annexinema and 7 Inch Cinema have built devoted non-mainstream audiences for events that showcase quirky, surreal and challenging short films even as the multiplexes grow ever more dominant on out-of-town sites, or, in music, labels like Trunk Records, Finders Keepers and Ghost Box create limited issue releases that sell out almost instantaneously to enthusiasts for the sounds they create.

Perhaps publishers – especially those of us whose print runs are already small enough to count as limited editions without being labelled as such – can learn from efforts like these, and while we might not be making fortunes, we might eventually manage a living while keeping the range of available work a good deal wider and more appealing than that amenable to the marketing teams’ off the shelf bottles of aspirin.

I found myself in London again on the 17 June, visiting the Barbican‘s major new exhibition on the theme of Surrealism and architecture, The Surreal House, in which domestic and public spaces, ordinary interiors and furnishings are variously unsettled. Once again, looking at the products of this singularly lyrical movement, I was struck by how closely the best visual art so often adopts its strategies from poetry, myth and storytelling – whether Louise Bourgeois’ slyly phallic staircase No Exit, Edward Hopper’s 1923 House By The Railroad, a model for the modern Gothic home, used endlessly since as a cypher for an unsettling domestic space by everyone from Alfred Hitchcock and Steven King to The Addams Family, or the films of Jan Svankmajer, Andrei Tarkovsky and Buster Keaton. An exhibition like this feels more like an immersion in a library than a purely optical kind of viewing, full of ideas, suggestions and strangely shaped stories.

That the same day also happened to be the launch date for Pascale Petit’s latest Seren Books collection, What The Water Gave Me, was probably fortuitous, then, since the book expands Petit’s 2005 Smith/Doorstop pamphlet of poems in the voice of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo to a full collection, and reinforces that same feeling that Surrealism’s lyric strain is entirely at one with the practice of poetry – hardly surprising, given the primacy of poetry within the movement, and the extraordinary – though often little-known to poetry readers – body of poems created by writers affiliated with it: even today, the movement remains active, with magazines like Phosphor in Leeds and the Chicago Surrealist group’s Franklin and Penelope Rosemont editing anthologies like Surrealist Women and Black, Brown & Beige that continue to extend the movement’s history and influence beyond the limits often placed on both by art-historical and academic orthodoxies that would pretend it ended with World War Two or Andre Breton’s death in 1966.

In fact, not only are active poets like Jayne Cortez operating as self-declared Surrealists, many others are drawing on Surrealist influences without formally declaring themselves as such, and while Petit’s book is not itself grounded in the politics or theories of the movement, beyond sharing a certain sensibility, in giving voice to another figure whose affiliations were independent, but whose practice was very much in sympathy with the temperament and aims of the wider movement, her imagery of hearts dangling from meathooks in the chest, or lovemaking as an explosive, emotional and literal car-crash, inevitably has its own connections to the original ideas underlying Andre Breton‘s guiding concepts of ‘convulsive beauty’ and ‘mad love’ as the basis for a ‘revolution of the mind’.

Perhaps it’s a long way from the Paris of that first manifesto in 1924 to a packed room in the Horse Hospital behind the Russell Square tube, on June 17 2010, where Petit gave a short reading of poems from the book accompanied by slides of the Kahlo works that inspired the poems. But it’s no distance at all from lines like “I am down under the stems/my face on fire” (from Sun and Life), “Every love-cry//is a silk tendril/quivering in my silent house” (from Diego On My Mind) or “The moon watches…hungry as an ulcer” (from Without Hope) and the kind of material produced by Benjamin Peret, Paul Eluard and Breton himself during the 1920s and 30s. That this Surrealist influence continues wherever poetry is found making its subversive impact – yesterday, at both the Barbican and at Petit’s wonderful (and hearteningly packed-out) Seren reading – becomes ever clearer as the years go on.

An enigmatic header tonight, with a somewhat retro nod to Barthes, for a post prompted by a recent request from the excellent Brittle Star magazine to keep a ‘reader’s diary’ during the month of May 2010, for publication in a forthcoming issue. It’s been fascinating to read previous diaries in the series by Anna Robinson and Fawzia Muradali Kane, and my own log of a selection of books read during those 30 days – some rather less notable in literary terms than others – will appear in issue 26 later this summer.

Writing it, after having at least half-scrupulously kept track on my own reading for a month, was an interesting process, and revealed certain truths about my approach to books in general that may or may not be typical. The first observation was that the full list I consulted on May 31 needed drastic editing, simply to create a manageable sample that could be discussed in around 1500 words. This was done by cutting books bought but only skimmed, odd chapters, single stories and poems…then trimmed again by excluding everything read for work purposes.

I won’t go into the detail of the diary (you’ll have to buy a copy of Brittle Star for that, and buying a copy or subscribing is highly recommended regardless) but something struck me quite forcefully about that vast chunk of reading defined as being for work rather than personal pleasure: I realised that since my work involves a constant stream of reading – submissions, review copies, or new books – it’s simply impossible to separate my personal reading of new writing from the context of editing Staple.

With every new voice a potential future contributor, feature or review (or at the very least a benchmark of where we might fit into the current literary landscape: does this spate of books by new authors suggest we’re converging with or diverging from the key currents of poetry in our time, or just bobbing along as we’ve always done, only occasionally troubling the mainstream with awareness of our existence?) even those books I’ve gone out and paid my own money for precisely because I wanted to read them (and there are many of those) seem to be drawn into the gravitational field of editing the magazine.

So it’s not to say that new writing isn’t still read with great personal pleasure, only that it’s now rarely the ‘pure’ pleasure of reading for its own sake, a pleasure that now seems restricted to the old books I find secondhand. Perhaps the fact that three volumes on The Meat Trade, published by The Gresham Publishing Company in 1935, picked up for a pound at last Saturday’s local market, might have been purchased with an eye to using the descriptions of cattle breeds, abattoir technology and 1930s butchers’ shops for some as yet unknown literary purpose is less significant than the fact that they are of no use whatsoever to the magazine.

Likewise, there’s no doubt that a handful of elegant late sixties volumes by DM Thomas, Edward Kissam and Robert Kelly are all a pleasure to read for their own sakes, with no significance for the future direction or content of the magazine. Except, I realise, I’m already examining the bindings and admiring the typography, paper and design of these old Cape Goliard titles, and wondering how we might learn from it. And these largely forgotten poets, perhaps we might look at them one of these days? A short feature on neglected and little-known figures, that could work quite well…

So there goes the purity of the pleasure, again. But my Grandma always said ‘be careful what you wish for in case it comes true’, and having made a living from the thing I love, the price must be that - for the moment, at least - doing the thing I love sometimes feels like being at work.

It’s Harold MacMillan who is credited (possibly apocryphally) with the above formula as an explanation to a journalist about why governments get blown off course, but it could just as well be taken as a description of a small publisher’s main preoccupation – after publishing itself. Going through all the editing, proofreading and design, and receiving the finished magazines from the printer, is only the first small fraction of it: the real business gets properly underway after that - trying to remove as many of the copies from your own premises in as short a time as possible. And that means organising events.

Having rolled back into Nottingham on the late train from St Pancras at around 1.40am this morning after our latest session, at the Lumen United Reform Church in Camden, I did a few calculations on the walk home from the station: we sold a reasonable quantity of magazines, at a special offer price, netting enough to cover the train tickets down and a bit more besides,  but in order to achieve this I’d taken a day out of work and our three readers had each given up a good chunk of their own time. Economically, if we’d paid even a token sum (instead of relied on goodwill) there would have been no financial sense in doing the event.

But as I’m sure most of those involved in putting on similar things knows all too well, that’s the wrong way of looking at it. The real benefit to Staple lies not in the amount of cash in the tin at the night’s end, but in the opportunity to present work by our contributors to an audience that might not have heard it, to meet potential subscribers, spread the word about what we do, and hear poets from the venue’s regular audience on the open mic – these, after all, are people whose work we might one day want to publish.

Last night, it was especially nice to meet at least one poet we had already published, Barbara Cumbers, whose contribution to Staple 71: The Art Issue was a wonderful sestina based on Richard Dadd’s The Fairy-Feller’s Master Stroke taken from a batch received in the post. So the important thing about these events, it seems to me, is not any short term profit they might earn (though in the rare cases when there is some, it’s a definite bonus) but instead the part they play in building a relationship between our magazine, and its existing and potential readers and contributors.

Many who didn’t buy a copy last night may, in the weeks and months that follow, decide to give us a try, while those who did take home a copy or a fond memory of hearing, say, Sophie Mayer‘s performance of her poem in tribute to the late Louise Bourgeois, Fawzia Kane‘s reading of an atmospheric piece about Istanbul courtesans, or Jacqueline Gabbitas‘s poem in the voice of quirkily personified grass cursing the crows that peck at lawns, might be expected to bring friends next time, or lend their copy out, or simply tell others how much they enjoyed the evening…

It’s the kind of unquantifiable word of mouth that most small publishers rely on, lacking as we do the budgets for advertising, bookshop promotions and proper distribution, so even factoring in the occasional short term losses, it’s hoped that in the longer term these events will play a critical part in keeping magazines like Staple visible and viable. But besides such practical reasons as these, the live reading as a medium in its own right has its own rewards as a way of experiencing the good writing we publish in a new way.

Last night, finding ourselves facing a stained glass window, with a large wooden crucifix high on one white wall, we listened to Sophie Mayer intoning a very vivid invocation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s (in)famous photograph of an impish Louise Bourgeois toting her phallic sculpture Filette like a handbag. That’s certainly something you wouldn’t get anywhere else, the kind of moment that might make even Ken Russell do a double-take, and it will now swim into my mind every time I read that particular page in Mayer’s excellent Shearsman collection, Her Various Scalpels.

In other words, the business of events can be hard going at times, but it’s well worth the effort: long may our contributors continue to read and audiences turn out to hear them. We’d be nothing more than a large pile of blank notebooks without either, so it makes sense we should want to get out and meet them, one at a time if necessary.

Nottingham Writers’ Studio

I was over at Nottingham Writers’ Studio on Thursday evening to listen to Susi O’Neill deliver the latest in a series of talks on subjects related to writing and publishing: as both the director of Digital Consultant and practising musician under the name Miss Hypnotique, O’Neill charted a wonderfully brisk and clear-eyed run through the various ways in which writers, publishers and performers can use social media to reach new audiences and develop new work, many familiar, but many more introducing a whole range of newfangled sites and tools I’d never heard of.

I came away from the session convinced that the digital revolution is certainly more exciting and full of possibilities than I’d given it credit for, but also just a little bit inclined to think I’d like at least a temporary return to manual typewriters, tipp-ex and three week deadlines, because all these exciting opportunities turning up at once looks pretty exhausting, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day to capitalise on them all effectively. There are so many tricks these days that  it seems like we’ll always be missing one.

That small caveat aside, the real point of mentioning this latest session was to draw attention to Nottingham Writers’ Studio itself, which I suppose we might define as a defiantly old-media entity that uses a lot of new-media tools to achieve its aims. It’s basically about real people meeting in a real room overlooking St Mary’s Church in Nottingham’s Lace Market, with a part time administrator (currently the performance poet Alyson Stoneman) and a nine-strong board responsible for running a programme of events for the organisation’s 80 or so (at the last count) members.

It’s an organisation founded and run entirely by writers, initially the brainchild of novelist Jon McGregor. Since he first gathered a few associates together and got things moving in 2006, the membership has rapidly expanded. It’s not all about traditional literature and creative writing, either: any given session at the studio will bring together poets and novelists with storytellers, copywriters, journalists, screenwriters and academic historians, with all genres covered, from children’s, crime and comics to teenage, romance and fantasy. It’s a fair bet that if your professional life involves putting pen to paper with any degree of seriousness, and you live in or near Nottingham, you’ll feel at home, be entitled to join, and want to have a say in the future direction of the organisation.

Having been involved with the studio myself since around 2007, it’s been wonderful to see it evolve: from a few conversations among a small group of Nottingham writers (key figures then included Michael Eaton, Nicola Monaghan and David Belbin) to a floor of offices and meeting space above a Balti House; and from there to the current wide-ranging membership, much smarter location on Stoney Street, and dedicated series of events each month.

It’s had a huge impact on the city’s writing culture, offering opportunities to meet others working in the same or completely different fields, and begun to generate a critical mass of activity.

At least one new publisher has emerged from the mix in Ian Collinson’s Weathervane Press, while the numbers of formal and informal collaborations, brokered opportunities and new friendships are now beyond counting: the studio offers a point of contact for organisations looking for writers to work on particular projects, and is in many ways something of a unusual presence in the UK, similar to other spaces and networks in many respects, but is distinctive in being entirely led, managed and populated by working writers.

It’s a co-operative model that has proved its worth in Nottingham, and if anyone knows of similar groups elsewhere it would be good to find out about them, in order to ensure appropriate links can be forged.

It also shows that the real world of random meetings in pubs, cinemas and cafes can still be at least as good a place to create links and get new networks running as the virtual sphere: the latter oils the wheels and makes it all much easier than it might once have been, but the Nottingham Writers’ Studio proves there’s no online substitute for a proper session involving 25 people with shared interests in a welcoming room that contains large quantities of wine, beer, biscuits and crisps.

For information on membership and upcoming events, check the NWS website or contact Aly at the 49 Stoney Street address.

The first post in Staple Magazine’s month of blogging on incwriters – starting on June 1st, and ending on June 31 – got the introductions and promotions out of the way, before looking at that small word, ‘we’, so often used to describe the magazine’s operations.

Yet despite that ‘we’ being less the royal version than a perfectly valid reflection of our existence within a wider network of advisers and supporters, contributors and readers,  Staple itself amounts not to the dedicated team in an office that team-spirited ‘we’ implies, but of myself in an attic room at my own house – and even then, only for two days’ work on the magazine each week, between other freelance assignments, reports, journalism, web copy and all the dozens of things that writers and editors do to earn a crust instead of actually writing and editing.

This makes the recent announcement of big cuts to arts spending over the next few years a source of both optimism and pessimism. On the one hand, it needs to be acknowledged that small publishers are among the most efficient organisations that funding ever reaches: even the biggest, like Salt, Bloodaxe and Enitharmon, rarely add up to more than a handful of salaries and office/warehouse space, while at the smaller end, Staple does everything – paying for time, replying to submissions, posting out orders, doing accounts, organising events – on a total grant equivalent to a middling salary at any other organisation.

In terms of value for money, then, I think most small publishers can fairly claim to offer it in spades: but that very fact has, in previous funding rounds, tended to count against us. Because most small publishing ventures run on enthusiasm and would – in theory – continue without funding suggests (to a certain mindset) that our funds might be cut without impacting too much on overall levels of activity. So when it comes to making the judgements, the old prioritising of large over small scale tends to come into play.

In recent years, the Arts Council had begun to rethink this previously enforced amateurism, and insisted that grant applications cover adequate payments for writers and editors. The professionalism implied in this is important: and those without access to salaried positions, able to subsidise time for what necessarily becomes a kind of hobby (whether that covers writing or running a publishing venture) may be at risk over the next few years – a fact that could threaten the small publishing ecosystem.

Hopefully at least one of the aims of Save Our Presses is to bring together our collective weight in order to counter the unavoidable fact that, individually, we don’t have the means to fight our corners when grants are threatened with the attendant publicity that a major institution – a big festival, agency or even a provincial theatre – can generate in its defence.

Over the next month’s blogging on Incwriters, I hope to draw attention to some of the many results of recent decisions in literature funding – a climate that has enabled many publishers without direct funding to thrive alongside those of us in receipt of the occasional GFA cheque. I hope this hasn’t been too gloomy a starting point, though: my real point is to suggest that we small publishers already have a strong case to make for ourselves as the climate changes: the trick will be to ensure we make it effectively.

Put bluntly, then, a full-strength orchestra might make more noise than a one man band: but with enough one-man bands gathered in one place (under a heading like, oh, I don’t know, Save Our Presses, perhaps?) we can make sure we’ll be able match any orchestra decibel for decibel.

The Red Ceilings

Staple’s reviews editor, C.J. Allen, drew my attention to the appearance of his latest pamphlet – the rather wonderful Lemonade – as the latest in a growing series of beautifully designed, very high quality downloadable e-chapbooks created by New Mills based The Red Ceilings. There are many rewards to be had from browsing that particular pamphlet, and even more to add, should you enjoy it, in the library here, and this is an enterprise that looks like it will be well worth returning to as its catalogue develops. Is this the future of the small poetry press? It certainly looks and feels like a model that will become a significant part of the mix, even if the printed chapbook has its own powerful appeal, and will no doubt continue alongside any fresh developments of this kind. My only niggle was that the design at The Red Ceilings is so good I found myself initially frustrated that I couldn’t lay my hands immediately on paper copies. Then again, a decent printer, some good quality A4 paper and a stapler would quickly resolve that…leaving the choice of print or digital entirely in the reader’s control. Whichever you prefer, then, The Red Ceilings is worth a look.

On Tuesday night, between 7pm and midnight, the sixth Hatch programme, Hatch: Across, cranked into gear on Nottingham’s St James’s Street, taking in a range of performers from the relatively well-known likes of Leicester’s Metro-Boulot Dodo and Bristol’s Action Hero to local artists and students just trying things out, taking risks, and coming up with ideas as oddly compelling as Ruth Scott’s  three hour tightrope walk in an Australian-themed bar, Adam Goodge’s  philosophical snooker sessions, and an attempt by Ollie Smith to describe the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel in instant text messages to Kathryn Cooper, who then tried to draw it during a live online link up between Nottingham and Barcelona.

Although billed as a performance event, the Hatch nights are the brainchild of two writers – Nathaniel J. Miller and Michael Pinchbeck - who came up with the idea as a way of bringing together a whole community of people to collaborate, experiment and generally catalyse new work in and around their home city. Of the six events staged in the two years since, only a couple have received any significant funding, and the Hatch model demonstrates what a collaborative approach can achieve in terms of bringing artists and appreciative audiences together.

Hatch has the feel of a free street party or unique never-to-be-repeated event, each one based on a new theme and quite unlike the last: in that – and its open door policy to participants and observers alike – lies the secret of its success. Individual pieces you might see along the way can be wonderful, heroically misguided or simply the beginnings of something that will develop further, but whatever the mix of parts, it’s the whole package of Hatch that gives these sessions their buzz, and brings audiences back (with their friends) time and again.

Perhaps it’s a format that would be hard to translate directly to writing and publishing, but it’s worth noting that many Hatch events are essentially text-based, with staged fake powerpoint lectures, one-on-one performances in which someone might whisper their script into your ear under a duvet, and absurdist puppet shows all part of the mix. Perhaps more poets and short story writers should be devising similarly inventive ways of presenting material and taking a greater part than is currently evident in events like Hatch, and others like it elsewhere in the UK.

Some, of course, are already doing exactly this: David Gaffney‘s fiction has been presented in many different ways, as has the work of Ken Hollings, while even the mainstream has Iain Sinclair‘s activities in psychogeographic walking, film-making and theatrical presentation. Perhaps the running so far has been made more by such inventive but niche publishing enterprises as Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor  or Phoebe Blatton and Susan Finlay’s wonderfully low-budget Coelacanth Press  than the typical poetry and fiction presses, though it’s hugely encouraging to see Popshot Magazine and others like it developing the 60s heritage of magazines like Ambit.

Performance poetry has long been noted for its inventive ways of framing work outside the usual confines of the traditional bookshop and author reading, but examples of this approach in page-based work also seem to be on the rise. If anyone reading knows of interesting approaches to add to the (very partial) list above, please post them, as I’d love to hear more.

I’d go so far as to wonder if the future of writing rests on nurturing this kind of activity alongside our traditional outlets, and just as the galleries, theatres, art cinemas and festival circuits ultimately benefit from the fresh interest generated by the activities of nights like Hatch, similar things in literature probably wouldn’t do our magazine and book sales any harm either. 

Staple settles into residence at the Incwriters blog for June: kicking off with a bit of brazen self-promotion, and a consideration of the possible impact of cuts in arts funding on small publishers over the next few years.

Do we need to build an orchestra from many one-man bands to make our collective case?

http://www.incwriters.co.uk

Staple Magazine presents three very fine poets, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Sophie Mayer and Fawzia Kane, at LUMEN (88 Tavistock Place, London WC1), on Tuesday June 8th, from 7pm, £5/£4.

Open spots are available (sign up on arrival) and all proceeds go to the Cold Weather Shelter. Hope to see you there!

A regional event

INDEPENDENT PRESS DAY

Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Street, Leicester

10.30am – 4.30pm, Saturday 20th March.

Staple 72: Music Issue launch from 12 – 12.40pm, with Aly Stoneman & Jonathan Taylor.

Stalls from dozens of independent publishers.

Workshops, readings and book launches.

Independent presses from across the region (and some from around the country) will be on site, together with many regional writers whose work is publishedby large and small independent publishers. Join us for an hour or two or the whole day.

Open to all and free of charge.

Information

The Book Fair and all readings take place in the Clephan Building, Oxford
Street (entrance on Bonners Lane), Leicester LE1 5XY

Public transport and car parking information on www.dmu.ac.uk/Images/DMU1227-campus%20map_tcm6-734.pdf Clephan Building is five minutes from Leicester city centre and ten minutes from the train station. On site parking only for stall holders and speakers, sorry.

As a supplement to the article on spoken word recordings in the latest issue, we’ve created a playlist of some of the material discussed and hope it adds an additional dimension to the piece itself and will encourage readers to seek out the full recordings, all of which are very worthwhile: the playlist is in mp3 format, and runs as follows:

1: TS Eliot: The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock (Caedmon, 1955)

2: Edith Sitwell: Popular Song (Facade 1923, recording made by Argo, 1972)

3: Edith Sitwell: From A Far Countree (Facade 1923, recording made by Argo, 1972)

4: Dylan Thomas: Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait (Caedmon, 1955)

5: Louise Bennett: Jamaican Alphabet (Folkways, 1957)

6: Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite: from Rights of Passage - The Journeys (Argo, 1968)

7: Herbert Read: from Echoes of My Life – Exile’s Lament (Argo, 1968)

8: Joan Baez/Henry Treece: The Magic Wood (Vanguard, 1968)

9: The Open Window/William Blake: Priests of the Raven of Dawn (Vanguard, 1969)

10: BBC Drama Workshop/David Cain/Ronald Duncan: July (BBC, 1969)

11: BBC Drama Workshop/David Cain/Ronald Duncan: October (BBC, 1969)

12: The Liverpool Scene/Adrian Henri: Winter Poem (RCA, 1970)

13: Barrow Poets/Edwin Morgan: The Loch Ness Monster’s Song (Argo, 1972)

14: Barrow Poets/Miroslav Holub: How To Paint A Perfect Christmas (Argo, 1972)

15: Sir John Betjeman: Late Flowering Lust (Charisma, 1974)

16: Sir John Betjeman: The Licorice Fields at Pontefract (Charisma, 1974)

17: Peter Porter: The Sadness of the Creatures (Argo, 1975)

18: Peter Redgrove: From The Reflections Of Mr Glass (Argo, 1975)

19: Dave Dallwitz Jazz Band/Ern Malley: Stagnant Fragment (Swaggie, 1975)

20: Dave Dallwitz Jazz Band/Ern Malley: Patterns for Slatterns (Swaggie, 1975)

21: RS Thomas: Welsh Landscape (Oriel, 1976)

22: RS Thomas: In A Country Church (Oriel, 1976)

23: Cyril Rajendra: The Animal and Insects Act (Alliance, 1982)

24: Linton Kwesi Johnson: Di Great Insohrekshan (Alliance, 1982)

25: EA Markham: Don’t Talk To Me About Bread (Alliance, 1982)

26: Marie Osmond/Hugo Ball: Karawane (Rough Trade, 1993)

It’s around 70/80 minutes in total and the whole thing can be streamed or downloaded on this link.

Welcome to Staple’s new abode, and hope to see you here again soon!

The story of spoken word as a recorded medium really begins at the birth of the technology itself, with Thomas Edison reputed to have tested his earliest prototype phonograph cylinders in 1877 with his own recital of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, and the technology was sufficiently advanced by 1890 for Alfred Tennyson to make wax cylinder recordings of around ten poems, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ among them. In the years that followed 78rpm discs featuring Biblical readings and passages from Shakespeare were plentiful, and many examples of interest exist in the richly populated hinterland between music and poetry, the twisted ballads and song-poems of the ‘Old Weird America’ gathered on Harry Smith’s epochal Anthology of American Folk Music and the Red Bird ‘Poetry and Jazz’ sessions of Tony Kinsey and Christopher Logue among them.

Despite the riches available even before the full advent of the 12” LP record, however, it seems to be the 1950s that saw spoken word recordings really take off, and the births of such idiosyncratic labels as Caedmon in America and Argo in the UK were particularly significant in creating a commercial market for what were otherwise seen as largely educational and archival artefacts. In the selection created for Staple 72, we’ve gathered a mere 17 recordings to represent a cross-section through the many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of possible inclusions, but they hopefully touch on key strands in the development of spoken word as a distinct literary medium, and offer an introductory gesture towards that larger story…and where better to begin than with one of the last century’s greatest poems, read by its author?

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock (Caedmon, 1955) 

The serious-minded Modernism of T.S. Eliot, and the poet’s drily ironic delivery of his own lines on records like this one, are often lazily condemned (in some circles, at least) as the antithesis of the spoken word scene’s more democratic energies. But any reader or listener who can’t see this 1955 reading of his early masterpiece The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock bringing down the house in a live setting with the same riotous force as the poem manages on paper is allowing Eliot’s forbidding reputation to get between the actual words and a more instinctive response to their effect.

The truth is that however dry Eliot’s reading seems, there’s real humour in the play between his high-serious tones and the absurdist doggerel of such iconic couplets as “I grow old, I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo”.

This LP – released as part of the Caedmon Literary Series in 1955 – opens our selection of recordings made between the 1950s and 1970s, all precursors of today’s spoken word scene, and many by poets more closely associated with the page than the stage. It’s partly a draft version of a feature we’re compiling on the Prehistory of Spoken Word for Staple 72: The Music Issue, but also, I hope, an attempt to bridge the gap perceived to exist between the realms of written and performed poetry in the UK. We very deliberately open proceedings with this recording of a man who is in many ways held up as the totemic ‘difficult page poet’ by both his supporters and detractors in the belief that Prufrock – first published in 1917 – unsettles that view at a very fundamental level.

It’s not just my view that Eliot bridges the divide between page and stage approaches, either: the poet’s love of music hall is well known (he even wrote an essay on Marie Lloyd) but perhaps more revealing is that during an interview I did with Linton Kwesi Johnson for The Big Issue in the North in March 2001, the renowned dub-poet mentioned in passing that he had himself recorded a reggae version of Eliot’s poem, to make exactly this point. At the time of writing, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Prufrock remains unreleased, but it would be wonderful, and no doubt transformative, if Eliot’s estate were to one day relent and allow Johnson’s so far unheard dub take on Prufrock to take its place beside Eliot’s own reading.

Perhaps this Youtube mash-up of Eliot and Portishead makes the point well enough, and for other performative takes on Eliot’s lines, these two film-collage and animated responses to Eliot’s text also seem worth a look.

All our contributors and subscribers should receive their copies of the latest issue shortly – one more sack to get to the Post Office and it’s all done (until next time)…

If you don’t subscribe, of course, now would be the perfect time to do it…

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If you’re wondering where old blogposts have gone, we’ve relocated Staple  from its old website: the archive of blogposts can be accessed here