The deadline for submissions to South is at the end of the month. I sometimes wonder if I should send poems to other magazines like I used to in olden days but, quite honestly, there aren't enough of them. Poems, I mean. There are still plenty of magazines. Last night I went through my very business-like attache case of poems to see what I had to offer.Within the case are two files. One is for poems that are likely candidates for my next booklet, which we could call file A, and the other is for those that might not even make it as 'fillers'. Not that I'd ever admit to including any fillers, of course.
Two of the A set have already appeared in print. Two got relegated to file B on the latest reading, and that left me with five from which to pick three to sent to South. We will see about that. I feel I ought to maintain the vaguest of presences as an obscure figure on the outskirts of the literary world, like one of those low magnitude stars that doesn't even get joined up into the recognized shape of the constellation that it is in. In the meantime, two poems were relegated from file B to oblivion. And so although I generally have in mind a booklet of about 14 poems every four years, it is now three years since the last one and I have only seven likely candidates for the next. But when one has nothing to say it is best to say nothing and the frugality of 'less is more' is an approach I approve of.
Two things are required to produce a good poem. Something to write about and a way of writing about it, not necessarily in that order. It doesn't sound that difficult until you don't have either.
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I have been enjoying the first chapters of the biography of Chagall, above, with the sensitive young artist moving from the Jewish quarter of provincial Vitebsk to sophisticated, tough St.Petersburg. But I'm taking it slowly while reading other books alongside. Last winter my attempt on a biography of Walter Sickert began with the best of intentions but was eventually abandoned at about halfway, stalled in a quagmire of dense detail.
John Francome's Stone Cold was reasonably thrilling but heavy-handed in its stereotypical baddies and overcooked sex and violence. I'll read anything with a horse race in it from time to time but, as in my previous encounter with Francome as novelist, I wondered how much of it he wrote himself (possibly quite a bit of it) and thought of Dick Francis as being from an age when thrills were more cliff-hanging, page turning and less gratuitous.
Soon to arrive are Danny Baker's first volume of autobiography and Jane Yeh's new book of poems.
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Once the Yeh book has been considered, it will be nearly time to think about the annual website awards of Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection and the shortlists will be put up here a week or two before the winners are given the satisfaction of this minor honour along with no cash prize whatsoever.
In the meantime, it is possible to announce that Ian McEwen's Sweet Tooth was convincingly the best novel I read this year but that the best event I attended is a wide-open heat.
Out of the three superb Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concerts, the Beethoven 'Pastoral' Symphony might just have been the favourite but not by much; The Magnetic Fields in the Royal Festival Hall in April was inevitably great; The Brodsky Quartet in Portsmouth Cathedral in June has to be a candidate on account of the Golijov Tenebrae; that was quickly followed by the Poetry Parnassus reading back in RFH with Heaney, Soyinka et al; and two readings at Cheltenham deserve at least places on the shortlist.
I don't know. Let's give it to the Brodskys.
The best CD I bought this year was the Charpentier Lecons de Tenebres, exactly what I was looking for as 'something like' the best disc ever which was, of course, James Bowman and Michael Chance doing Francois Couperin's setting of the same thing. But that disc wasn't released this year. And so, the best CD of the year, and certainly the most played (certain bits of it) was the Music from the Eton Choirbook.
But the gala nights of the poetry shortlists and prize-giving are still to come. You will be required to be suitably attired and be within reach of an appropriate glass with which to toast the winners when you tune in for those.
The best CD I bought this year was the Charpentier Lecons de Tenebres, exactly what I was looking for as 'something like' the best disc ever which was, of course, James Bowman and Michael Chance doing Francois Couperin's setting of the same thing. But that disc wasn't released this year. And so, the best CD of the year, and certainly the most played (certain bits of it) was the Music from the Eton Choirbook.
But the gala nights of the poetry shortlists and prize-giving are still to come. You will be required to be suitably attired and be within reach of an appropriate glass with which to toast the winners when you tune in for those.
