On Newsnight Review

Well, I almost was: the covers for The Ambulance Box, The Opposite of Cabbage and Ian Gregson's How We Met filled the screen momentarily as a clip from Salt's Just One Book video was played. Priceless advertising! Chris got a few seconds on the campaign, on which you can read the latest here.

You can watch the programme here for the next seven days. It was great to have an edition of Newsnight Review dedicated to poetry. Simon Armitage spoke a lot of sense, to my mind, but most of the panel came over well. The hip-hop artist, whose name escapes me, also impressed me. A pity we didn't hear or see any of his Shakespeare work.

I have to say, hooray for the licence fee! We wouldn't have had a poetry season without it, would we?

Salt Latest

The Just One Book campaign has hit the Guardian books blog here! And that's not all folks: Chris Hamilton-Emery will be on Newsnight Review this Friday. The campaign is working -- 800 orders in the first four days, bringing in £17,000, which is six weeks' cash for Salt -- but Chris, Jen and their stalwart helpers are far from out of the woods yet, so let's keep it up.

Not bought your one book yet? Here's a quick list of Salt poetry titles I've particularly enjoyed over the past few months:

• The Opposite of Cabbage - Rob A Mackenzie
  
• Next to Nothing - Chris Agee
• A Fold in the Map - Isobel Dixon
  
• A Brief History of Time - Shaindel Beers
• Me and the Dead - Katy Evans-Bush
  

And here are several more still waiting to be read:

• Camper Van Blues - Jane Holland
• Goose Music - Andy Brown and John Burnside
• Dear Alice - Tom Pow
  
• Glaciation - Will Stone
• Arrondissements - Douglas Oliver

The Portal

Chris and Jen are marvels. Cash crisis or no, they have just launched Salt Contemporary Writers, the new Salt author portal, a typically stylish web resource with a page for every one of their authors. Here's mine. It seems that they never cease to innovate and push forward. That's one of the reasons why we -- all readers and writers of poetry and fiction, not just the folk on their list -- need Salt to survive.

Another Review!

Another review! It seems to be my collection's weekend for reviews, especially ones with a HappenStance connection: Matt Merritt has just posted a wonderfully thoughtful, warm and generous appreciation of The Ambulance Box (the first link above). I'm indebted to him.

Matt and I will be reading with Rob A Mackenzie and James W Wood at Word Power Bookshop in Edinburgh on Saturday 20th June 2009 12.00 noon - 1.00pm. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Increase Your Poetry Emissions!

The good news is that Salt's "Just One Book" campaign is beginning to make a difference. It has even been picked up by the Bookseller, but Chris and Jen are far from out of the woods yet and we need to keep it up. I intend to make a few suggestions for your one book over the coming days/weeks but, meanwhile, here's that spoof advert. (I would embed it, but it overlaps the sidebar if I do. The Ambulance Box appears at about 0:16.)

Reviews

The previous two posts collide in Helena Nelson's generous review ofThe Ambulance Box and Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage over on the HappenStance blog. It's my first blog review! (Although I've already gained a five-star Amazon customer review!) There are also reviews in the pipline or promised from Matt Merritt, Tony Williams and James W Wood for ONE Magazine.

Well Done Nell!

Huge congratulations to Helena Nelson on HappenStance press being shortlisted for the publisher's award in the inaugural Michael Marks pamphlet awards. It's much deserved, as Nell has done a huge amount to boost the publishing careers of numerous poets and the world of poetry chapbooks in the UK, not only through her own quality productions but through the magazine Sphinx, the only publication dedicated to reviewing poetry pamphlets. Here's hoping she goes on to take the prize. But whatever the outcome, it just makes me even more proud to be associated with HappenStance.

Just One Book

Everyone has been hit in some way by the downturn, with the arts suffering a predictable squeeze as Government and business belts tighten all over the place. According to Jane Holland, the UK has lost or is going to lose several poetry presses. It's a dire time for poetry -- indeed, for literature in general -- in these islands.

Salt, publisher of my collection and very many fine books, is facing a financial crisis. Chris and Jen have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect the press. Their three-year funding ends this year: £4,000 is due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but they can't apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months have left Salt with a budget deficit of over £55,000.

It's proving to be a very big hole and they're having to take some drastic measures to save our business. Earlier today, it seemed that all the books scheduled for publication this year would have to been shelved, but Chris and Jen, in their seemingly infinite determination and ingenuity, have found a way to rescue this front list. It still involves considerable scaling back.

Salt is far from out of the woods, if that's not a mixed metaphor. But we can all help it to survive. Chris tells us how below ...

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now.

We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop
or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store (UK and International or USA) and help us keep going.

2. Share this note on your Facebook and MySpace profile.

Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone,
Chris Hamilton-Emery

Next Gigs

Next week, I'll be returning to the Golden Hour with The Ambulance Box. I can't help but be flattered by what Ryan Van Winkle has put on the poster:

Click on the pic to see the details. It looks like a really good night. Hope to see some of you there.

The next gig after that is the Sotto Voce quiet slam at VoXboX on The Meadow Bar in Edinburgh, Thurs 7th May 2009 7.30pm.

The Shrill Sound of Poetry Sales Descending into Sound Bites

Sales of poetry books are down

screamed the BBC news website on Wednesday last week, before exhorting us all:

but one way to reinvigorate this traditional art form could be to make it functional

and going on to suggest that we could re-engage the public with the art of poetry by turning the instructions on how to wire a plug into poetry. Give me a break. Not that I'm against using anything as the material for a poem, but I just can't help groan at this kind of stuff. I mean, poetry does have functions, for goodness sake.

Apparently,

In recent years, there has been a sharp fall in sales - from £12m spent in 2005 to £8.6m in 2008, according to Book Marketing Ltd.

How peculiar, then, that Jill Pattle, who runs The Linlithgow Bookshop, should be telling me on the platform at Waverley station today that their poetry sales have "risen exponentially" and she is now revamping the poetry shelf to make more space for poetry books. The last time I looked, the space that the shop devotes to poetry would probably, as a proportion of the shelving, equate to something like three whole floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in any of the Edinburgh Waterstones stores. That's an extremely rough estimate, but you get the picture; when was the last time those Waterstones stores had one such shelf full of poetry? Jill's poetry section is also at the front of the shop.

Likewise, when I was in Eyemouth last week, I was delighted to see that the wonderful wee bookshop Crossing the Bar had a small poetry shelf, with an unusual selection of books, including a beautiful Michael Longley book, Out of the Cold, illustrated by his daughter that I came that close to buying.

Is there a lesson here? What would happen to poetry book sales if, instead of hiding the poetry sections away at the back of the basement and shaving stock from it like a döner kebab, the big shops were to put it out front, with offers, staff recommendations and displays? Will we ever find out?

StAnza: Unlike the Duck

StAnza seems so long ago now that it’s almost hardly worth reporting any more on it, but there are a couple of things don’t want to slide into the dim and distant without comment.

First and foremost of those is Roddy Lumsden’s reading. I’ve known Roddy since I was a student, since before he published his first collection. That book — Yeah Yeah Yeah — was launched upstairs in The Waverley, a quirky wee pub a stone’s throw from the eponymous railway station. At StAnza, Roddy was launching Third Wish Wasted, his fifth collection, accompanied by the munching of some truly tasty pies.*

I’ve no hestitation in declaring Roddy’s reading the best I saw on the festival. The poetry was so good: a gleaming, distinctive sound; an enviable imaginative and formal range; wit, intelligence and fun. Nothing wasted. You can hear an excerpt from his performance on the relevant StAnza podcast. Neil Astley was also there with the Bloodaxe video camera, and you can see the result roughly halfway down this page on their site. Even better, you can read the book. Unlike the duck, it does not disappoint.

Speaking of Bloodaxe and films, I should also mention the extra showing of the taster for In Person. It was put on for those who missed tickets for the much more than sold out Duffy and Agbabi event. That reading wasn’t on my list anyway, and I think very few of the small audience for the film were refugees from it. However, I’m mightily glad to have had the opportunity to see the film, partly because I missed all the other ones on this year’s festival but mainly because it was well worth watching in its own right. I haven’t yet bought the In Person anthology, but it looks to be excellent value.

The main reason I didn’t get to any of the films was probably the fact that Rob A Mackenzie and I had a stall at the poets’ market, touting our and Alexander Hutchison’s Salt collections. That was also the reason I didn’t really get round the other stalls, but I thoroughly enjoyed chatting to James and Marianne of Kettilonia Press, who were beside us, as well as to the folk who came along to the stall. It was also good to meet Rachel Fox, albeit extremely briefly. If you have access to Facebook, you’ll find a shot of me at the stall among Robert Alan Jamieson’s photos.

StAnza was so much more than the sum of all these different parts and the many other meetings and encounters I haven’t mentioned. As Susan Mansfield says in her Scotsman write-up,

someone compared the festival to T in the Park. And while poetry is not quite the new rock'n'roll, year on year StAnza feels more like a festival.

*I now realise the Scotch pie can be a thing of beauty, not simply a dull companion to a bag of chips.

5PX2

Despite holidaying in Eyemouth, on Thursday last week, I joined most of the other contributors* (inlcuding one of the translators) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to launch 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. The evening was slightly chaotic but enormous fun. A good-sized audience, too, for a Thursday in holiday time with competition from the Science Festival.

Everybody’s work was performed in the original and translation. I don’t speak Italian, but hearing the contributors from Italy — Dome Bulfaro, Tiziana Cera Rosco, Tiziano Fratus, Federico Italiano and Eliana Deborah Langiu — enriched my appreciation of the translations considerably. At the last minute, I was asked to read the English translations for Dome Bulfaro, which was fun. It felt a bit like playing by ear, as I tried to follow his pauses as much as possible. Of my own five in the book (which are all new), I read “The White Dot” and “Breathing is the Place to Start”. For me, the highlights of the other performances were Matthew Fitt and his translator alternating the pages of “Kate O’Shanter’s Tale” between Scots and Italian; Tiziana Cera Rosco’s reading, which electrified her poems; and Tiziano Fratus’s translation of my “Breathing is the Place to Start”, which sounded truly beautiful.

These things are always about meeting people as much as about the poems. Some good friendships were made and others strengthened — I hadn't sat down with Matthew Fitt for a long time, for instance. The Italians were great craic; I only wish we could have spent more time together, but thanks are due to the Institute for the meal that enabled us to spend the time together that we did.

With all the conversation we’re having around here about younger Scottish poets, it was particularly refreshing to connect with a bunch poets under 40 from outside the Scottish and British bubbles. For some reason, the sheer volume of good will and admiration that exists abroad for Scotland and Scottish writing always takes me by surprise. Perhaps there’s more of the Scottish cringe left in me than I thought. Let's hope the evening helped to kill that vestige off.

*Unfortunately, Claire Askew couldn’t make it.

Holy Saturday Poem

This weekend's* Saturday poem in The Scotsman was the title poem from The Ambulance Box**. Great publicity for the collection! I'd heard several weeks ago that it was happening and knew the date but it only occurred to me in the middle of the week that it would be the Holy Saturday poem. An appropriate date, given the piece is about, as the paper neatly puts it,

"THE inextricable link between our suffering, our sense of celebration and our hopes for healing".

Many thanks to the good folk of the Scottish Poetry Library for choosing it.

*I'd have posted this yesterday but couldn't get on to Blogger for technical reasons.

**Please note that the layout isn't quite right in the paper, because the indentation hasn't come out at all. You'll just have to read it in the book for the full effect on the page.

StAnza: Flight and Finesse

My first event on the Saturday at StAnza was Bill Manhire's masterclass: a one-off workshop with six writers selected from among a batch of submissions plus an audience. I was in the audience, not having submitted anything.

Manhire was warm and engaging while still being quite thorough. As he pointed out, there was no time to build up the trust that would be established in a long-running workshop group. Perhaps he'd be a tougher critic in that setting, but I get the sense he wouldn't have the bluntness of some well-known poets. Whether you think that's good or bad depends on what you look for in a critic of your poetry, I guess, but it suited the set-up.

We were all give copies of the poems, chosen by Manhire mid air over Singapo. The poet would read their piece, then Manhire would ask them about it and comment on it himself before opening the discussion to comments, suggestions and questions from the audience and the other selected participants. The atmosphere was friendly, the selection varied and the discussion intelligent.

For me, the best poem of the session was Matthew Hotham's "Forms of Flight". It was the most interesting formally and possessed a distinctive beauty. It had mystery, imagination and a quiet but insistent power. It simply said to me that Matthew had real talent, underpinned by skill and intelligence. Several people in the room obviously just didn't quite get what he was up to, and made suggestions that would have robbed the poem of mystery and richness. That's what you might expect of such an event, I suppose; I couldn't help but defend his piece.

After the masterclass, Rob Mackenzie, Ross Wilson and I had a brief chat with Matthew and Cynthia Chin, who also had a poem in the masterclass. They'd come over from the States specially for StAnza. So we're not just talking talent and skill here, but ocean-crossing commitment! Later, at the poets' market, Matthew bought The Ambulance Box and The Opposite of Cabbage and gave Rob and me each a copy of his chapbook, Early Art, published by Turtle Ink Press in 2006.

Having had a quick read through Early Art, I'm really looking forward to going back and savouring it. Everything I saw in "Forms of Flight" seems to be there in the pamphlet, though perhaps not quite as developed, given that it was published three years ago. Still, the talent is obvious. It's exciting to find a good writer at an early stage in his career, and I'm looking forward even more to seeing where Matthew takes his poetry in the future.

The Lithgae Launch

Summertime (officially), and the temperature's freezing. That's Scotland's wind chill for you. Otherwise, it's a glorious morning; a fitting follow-up to a good night at the Black Bitch, with Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage playing in the background. I lost count, but I think there were close to 30 people there. It was mostly Linlithgow folk, but James W Wood came through from Edinburgh, Alastair Findlay came over the hills from Bathgate and my good friends Alex and Jacqueline escaped the Netherlands just as the Tartan Army was invading. I read two sets, as follows:

• Pedestrian
• Improvisation for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time
• The Meisure o a Nation
• Cardiac
• Hairst Day
• Wandelvakanties Dicht bij Huis
• The Invention of Zero
• The Ambulance Box

Then:

• Still
• Waukrife
• In Praise of Dust
• Lullaby
• Notes to Self

I sold 20 copies and chatted to various folk until 11ish -- midnightish BST -- then we headed home with a couple of boxes of chips.

Home and Away

Tomorrow night, I'm on home turf to launch The Ambulance Box in Linlithgow's Black Bitch Inn*. I'm expecting a smaller crowd than at the SPL, but looking forward to it just as much. The event kicks off at 8 pm. There's a bar and I'll be reading two 15-minute sets, though I've yet to decide what. Anyone is welcome.

On Thursday 9 April, I'll be at the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to celebrate the publication of 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. Details of the event are at the first link in this paragraph.

*The black bitch is the emblem of Linlithgow -- it's one of those faithful hound stories -- and, indeed, natives of the town, regardless of sex, are known as "black bitches". That's right: Scotland's current First Minister is a black bitch.

StAnza: Absence, Presence and Accuracy

An oddity of this year's StAnza is that one of the most defining events for me was something I wasn't at. I refer, of course, to the poetry breakfast on the Friday, on the topic "Where are all the Scottish poets under 40?" I was dying to hear about it and asked one or two people on the Friday -- Colin Donati and Claire Askew, to be precise -- what had been said and what they'd thought of it.

However, it was Bill Manhire who really turned it into to the defining event. Towards the end of his masterclass on the Saturday morning, he referred to having been at an event "where people were saying there were no Scottish poets under 40". Ahem, 'scuse me. This is a Scottish poet under 40*.

After the masterclass, Rob A Mackenzie, Ross Wilson and I asked Manhire about his comment. He said that everyone on the panel for the breakfast seemed to be in agreement that there were no Scottish poets under 40. I was, as you can imagine, pretty exercised by this. However, I was also sure the poetry breakfast discussion was more nuanced than his memory of it. It was about the dearth but not absence of Scottish poets in my generation. In fact, the panel included a Scottish poet under 40: Christie Williamson (although Christie, being a Shetlander, would hesitate to define himself as Scottish). And I already knew from my conversations the previous night that Cheryl Follon and I had been mentioned in the discussion.

But if what came over to Bill Manhire was that we don't exist at all, what did others hear? You can hear a bit of the discussion for yourself on the Friday podcast, but all it does for me is leave me itching to hear the whole thing, which will be possible at some point in the coming weeks. I don't want to rehash the recent discussion on Rob's blog, but if anyone has anything to add to that, comment here by all means.

I'm particularly interested in where we go from here, and am glad to see that Colin Will is taking that tack on his blog. Maybe we need to start by making a greater effort to celebrate and encourage the poets we do have in my generation and below, whatever stage they're at, and Colin W's suggestion of a pamphlet series akin to the tall-lighthouse Pilot one is good in that respect.

I reckon we also need urgently to bolster and co-ordinate the opportunities for learning (and, therefore, teaching) poetry writing outside the university creative writing MScs. These courses are, of course, good in themselves, but they seem to have had the unintended consequence of narrowing opportunities beyond the academy. They simply aren't affordable to everybody, for one thing. Informal networks can be great, but have they shrunk too? It's great for individual writers to start independent workshops, but perhaps we can do more for one another by working together. Maybe we need to see whether a Scottish Poetry School or a Scottish curriculum for the Poetry School is possible.

Much as it might satisfy the dour and dreich side of our national character, let's not have our visitors going back to their countries telling everyone that Scottish poetry is doomed by a lack of young(er) blood**.

I'll post separately about the masterclass and other events from the Saturday at StAnza.

*The grey hair, folks, has been gradually colonising my scalp since I was 12.
**Happily, our friends in Turin obviously don't think that.

StAnza: Repetition, Surrealism and Hestiation

St Andrews was bathed in glorious sunshine this weekend past for StAnza, even if there was a bit of a chill to the wind. It certainly brought to mind Alastair Reid's "Scotland", famously burnt by the man himself two years ago. Reid was there in spirit, as you can hear in the podcast exerpt of Jay Parini's lecture (recommended). However, this year, Rabbie was doing the burning, what with it being the year of homecoming. Now that inevitably brings to mind Bill Herbert's "Rabbie, Rabbie Burning Bright". But I digress.

Anyway, I had a fantastic time at StAnza, despite the stressful lead-up on Friday trying to get my books to arrive at a time and place convenient for Saturday's poets' market. Somebody at the distributors -- not at Salt, I stress -- had cocked up, and the books I'd ordered in ample time had spent the whole week sitting in a warehouse in Eaglesham, I believe. Frantic Facebooking and phoning eventually sorted it out. Suffice to say that my box of The Ambulance Box made it to the Byre Theatre on Saturday morning after a Herculean effort of persuasion and, I imagine, plenty choice words from Tom and Jen at Salt. A huge thank you to them both.

As if that wasn't enough, when I got home from work I had no wallet. I was pushed for time as it was, but I had to phone up and cancel my cards and report it missing to the police. (I discover now that was in my desk at work. Numptie!) Still, without being a danger to myself or other drivers, I managed to check in to my B&B on the extreme southern edge of St Andrews and make it to the Byre with only moments to spare before Eleanor Livingstone walked onstage to introduce Bill Manhire and Simon Armitage.

I'd never heard Manhire before and the last time I'd heard Armitage was way back when I was a student. I particularly liked Manhire's "Hotel Emergencies" and "The Oral Tradition", which seemed to me to go places the other poems he read didn't touch. With Armitage, nothing stood out quite so strongly. The narrative poems he read sounded quite prosy, but I'd like to see how they read on the page. The more formal pieces came over better for me, though his use of repetition in some of them got too much. Sally Evans lampooned it quite sharply in the open mike. Armitage certainly overdid it, and I say that in full consciousness of how often I use repetition as a structural device.

There was quite a crowd in the Byre bar for the open mike, which followed the Manhire/Armitage event. As is often the case at these things, the bulk of the writing was comic verse, but there was plenty more serious stuff too. The standout readers for me were Allan Gillis, Rob A Mackenzie (whose choice of "Scotlands" was perfect on a number of levels), Kevin Cadwallader (whose line about the surrealist coppers I loved, though every time I saw him the rest of the weekend I forgot to tell him) and Judith Taylor. It was also good to hear Sorlil, who read much better than she seems to think, and Ross Wilson in particular. I read "Pedestrian", which went down well.

After the open mike, Rob, Ross and I headed pubward with Roddy Lumsden, Adam O'Riordan and a friend of Roddy's whose name, shamefully, continues to escape me. I fell into discussion with Adam and Ross about the SNP, devolution, independence, the West Lothian question and the lack of brilliant young left-wing politicians. That among other, more literary things, like. There were dark mutterings from StAnza student volunteers about a party of the fun kind, but the less said about that the better. Not that there is anything to say about it, because it didn't happen, due to misunderstandings, miscommunications and somebody deciding to stay in the student union. Just as well, really: it meant I could roll into bed by 2 am and be relatively compus mentus the next day.

Reprint

The Ambulance Box is being reprinted! The final copies of the initial print run were delivered to me on Saturday (that's another story I'll tell in a post about StAnza) and a reprint of the hardback will be available in the next few weeks. We had discussed reprinting in paperback, but apparently an order for the hardback edition came in from Waterstones, which was the clincher. The paperback edition will be printed only once the hardbacks are completely out of stock.

StAnza Plans

A brief note on my plans for StAnza this year. I'll not manage to get through until the Friday evening. That means I'll miss the poetry breakfast on the relative absence of young Scottish poets. I have a ticket for the Bill Manhire and Simon Armitage reading, but I'm not certain I'll make it through in time for that. I'm staying overnight, though, so I'm planning to go to the open mike and hoping to get a spot to read from The Ambulance Box.

On the Saturday morning, I'm going to the masterclass, just as an audience member. After that, it's the launch of Roddy Lumsden's new collection, Third Wish Wasted, celebrated with a pie and a pint. Rob Mackenzie, Alexander Hutchison and I have booked a table at the poets market, so we'll be splitting the afternoon's shifts between us in a yet-to-be determined manner. However, our books should be for sale.

My final event of StAnza will be the Jay Parini and Jenny Bornholdt reading. I don't know their work at all, but that's the beauty of a poetry festival, isn't it.