Category: poetry research (Page 1 of 2)

Submit to What? The Fallacy of Poetry Submissions.

July 7, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Over the last six months I have wasted time on submitting to a list of poetry magazines. When I began my career (in brackets like above) there was no choice.

Pre internet the only viable visibility for a poet was through the list of poetry journals which I had to photocopy as a minion at the South Bank London Poetry Library. I was employed as a customer service operative whilst more canny and frankly dull people held the reins. Placing yourself there was a handy stepping stone for carreerists and I worked alongside many later ‘famous’ poets and such like. I never had a head for networking so left after a short time to move to Edinburgh.

At that time there was no other route into visibility unlike now. Also the main literary journals were well known and indeed about 10% of them are still extant and influential. The rest like many a online magazine now came and went .

I have a folder with all my paper based submissions from 1992-3 still and it makes interesting reading. The hit rate was approximately 10%. So 100 poems out may get 10 published. I had met and been known by influential poets then and that helped me place poems that for sure. My first poems were published in John Harvey’s Slowdancer because Maura Dooley liked them and suggested I send to John Harvey. Both poets I respected and a magazine I fitted in to. Having hit the jackpot with first submission I then slowly fell out of sight and favour and gave up on writing altogether by 2007 although actual output stopped long before circa 2000 as I went off in different directions.

Returning to poetry somewhat on retirement I decided to test the waters now and submit to all the free online journals around. This excluded The London Review of Books for instance. I do not pay to play so to speak.

My hit rate has been zero. Nothing at all. I not on anybody’s radar and do not fit into any of the currently fashionable cliques and niche publishing ventures out there. Most of these are frankly awful. Not just bad themed publications on whatever half-baked shit idea the editors had..waves, dolphins, trees and beetles..you get my drift but also the level of smug nepotism fermented by the social media groups is sickening.

A recent post by Irish writer Fred Jackson strayed into the ‘hung criminal blames the hangman’ syndrome when in fact the wider picture explains most of the way publishing works now. Poetry now is politically important as a viable conduit for dissent and raising issues be they trans rights, sexism, racism etc but this does not of itself guarantee good writing.

Occaisionally a good poet can combine both politics and verse but most of the time it is perMOANance not perFORMance…


i.e. Message outweighs form completely to the point where some prose poetry is nothing more than prose and bad prose at that but if says the right words it gets published. A Labour victory and the dream of increased arts funding (don’t bet on it folks as Starmer is a realist not a fantasist) will only increase the beggers at the gate.

So having put toe in water so to speak I can honestly say I do not care as I genuinely believe that this method of publishigng poetry is dead as a dodo.
A majority of the online journals were barely internet competant being the dream project of people with little knowledge of the interent and a free WIX account.
Even amongst professional journals the amount of design and presentational skills is low. There are exceptions like SALT which has a genuine designer at helm. Elsewhere it frankly embarrassing to see journals with art and poetry so bad you want to laugh out loud..you want elves you get elves you want dragons etc etc…

Based on this I have made an executive decision to waste no more time on submitting to editors I think weak or plain stupid…to magazines that cannot present my work better than I can and so it leaves one option and right now it the best course of action.

This blog and the associated substack have a far greater chance with time spent managing properly ( i.e. daily posting) than any magazine for raising my profile that is a fact not a illusion. I have made better contacts through substack than I ever would through normal social media (too overused and frankly a bucket of shit mostly) . Substack is the equivalent of meeting poets and writers in the poetry readings of old. You get to filter out the chaff and can walk away politely.

I now have two substacks.

One for general poetry criticism like this and one for a new Eco Poetry project so slightly different target audiences.

https://darkweather.substack.com

and this for reviews and criticism

https://shaunbelcherwrites.substack.com

This is my chosen route forward and I recommend it to others as for Poetry Magazines online or otherwise (mostly online as the cost of paper too high now)

Adios thanks for all the fish.

Coppard returns…

May 1, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Like a bad penny this story never dies and after I had this photograph taken yesterday I thought similar and did some more digging and found two new articles on ‘Flynn’ and for those less squeamish that comes from the saying ‘in like Flynn’ about Errol Flynn’s legendary bedding of women.

the full story in Coppard link above but here two new takes on the story..

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-marvellous-forgotten-stories-of-a-e-coppard

I came from nothing, and it may be I was never anything more than a contrivance for recording emotions I would fain have taken for my own, but could not– life passed me by

.
From AE Coppard’s semi-autobiographical My Hundredth Tale written c1930

Graham Thomas an English author living in Tokyo has written a very accurate short life of Flynn available here.

Recommended.

AE Coppard – An Oxfordshire Tale.

The Function of Criticism

February 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have spent the afternoon reading the beginning of Yvor Winters ‘The Function of Criticism’ which I acquired about 30 years ago.

I also read a couple of interesting articles online.

The first by the poet David Yezzi is interesting and makes a case for his continuing relevance. The second is a wider career over-view from the now defunct Contemporary Poetry Review.

I also mused upon the slow demise of the ‘Poet-Critic’ a sad reflection of the sorry state of contemporary poetry where popularity and social media profiles count for more than intellectual rigor. Even with Larkin, Heaney and Hughes there were solid publications of other writing. Can one imagine a serious book of Simon Armitage or Helen Mort criticism ..no because it too dangerous an occupation in the ‘blow-back’ noughties where any -expression of opinion is frowned upon. Books are reviewed but mostly to further mediocre careerist blogs but serious criticism that gone the way of decent classical music radio i.e. popularised out of existence.

So reading the opinionated Winters is refreshing. He was wrong as much as right but at least he expressed an opinion.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/1997/6/the-seriousness-of-yvor-winters

https://www.cprw.com/the-absolutist-the-poetry-and-criticism-of-yvor-winters

Talking of opinionated tody I also picked up this Further Requirements book by Larkin to add to Required Writing which again I had for over thirty years. I wonder how long before Larkin is ‘Decolonized’ from the local university stacks which considering his lifetime devotion to maintaining library collections is beyond sad.

Edwin Smith – Catching Light – Recordings

November 12, 2020 / / 0 Comments
https://soundcloud.com/horseshoe-tapes/sets/edwin-smith-catching-light

EDWIN SMITH POEMS

Back in October 2014 (now six years ago) I was on the first term of a Creative Writing M.A. at NTU.

I was also with uncanny timing commissioned (the first and so far the only time I been commissioned) by R.I.B.A. through Apple and Snakes to write in response to a lovely collection of Edwin Smith Photographs at R.I.B.A. that autumn.

I missed my course deadline but fulfilled the commission and promptly left a course that frankly I should not have been on at that time. The £500 fee almost covered my first term fees!

The RIBA website has mislaid the entire project basically so I publishing whole thing here instead.

Here is the work which is one of the best things I done so far and as I not as flavour of the month as certain other poets hasn’t been seen since unless you delve deep into my obscure back catalogue.

Apple and Snakes put up a blog post of the recordings we all made as well but they been deleted since as diversification took its toll..
also deleted from RIBA too….ticked the wrong box?

So here they are again..

The New World

May 7, 2019 / / 0 Comments
Back to basics….

Poetry and I have not been getting on….

In fact I have been ignoring poetry, shelving it, filing it and generally pushing it to the back of my mind for the past decade.To start with this was deliberate as the combination of employment in an art school (note word art there not a writing school) and the first consistent art studio close to home promised great things…

But the best laid plans..mice and men etc.

The art school post ended in 2015 and although I still rent a studio I have been fairly incosistent in using it and the great rebirth of my painting career and the fame and wealth that would surely follow never happened.

A fairly shambolic attempt to reinvigorate my writing in 2014 on a M.A. in Creative Writing ended in abject failure as the reality of my age and what a modern creative writing course consists of collided head on….

Above and beyond all of these forlorn attempts to concentrate on anything was the gradual deterioration of my wife’s condition from 2009 onwards. Nothing, not an M.A. in Fine Art or international conferences had half the effect of living with someone who gradually showed more and more signs of a serious mental illness and addiction.

I have pretty much lost the last decade to being part of her battle with family tragedy and illness and thankfully despite the recent divorce she is still alive so far. I take nothing for granted now and take each day as it comes.

In that kind of time-frame poetry was the last thing on my mind and with the exception of some hastily produced mini-pamphlets my poetic career has remained parked in the drive until now.

So here I am 60 years old..none the wiser and a lot poorer with no gainful employment looking at writing again as the most ridiculous and least renumerative path I could possibly choose.

Welcome to the New World…same as it ever was..same as it ever was…

What I am doing…

June 23, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I wrote this statement in 2010. Nothing has changed.

I am using this ‘credo’ as the basis of my new ‘great leap forward’ with the Thames art and technology idea..

 

Delineation of ‘Theory’: An artist’s personal statement

Throughout my ‘art-working’ life some things have remained stubbornly, one might even say obsessively’, constant. Be it in digital images as recently or in drawing or poetry and song I have remained constant in delineating a clearly ‘map-able’ terrain. This terrain extends about 5 to 20 miles in radius of my hometown of Didcot in Oxfordshire, England. Always the poor relation of the illustrious centre of learning that resides but a stones throw away.

There runs a hard core of intention throughout which draws on politics, ecological thinking and that obsessive returning to notions of ‘place’ and ‘landscape’. I regard my work as being a mapping of constant themes which recur sometimes years later. The River Thames is one theme and the Berkshire Downs another.

Local folk tales and oral literature mined from local libraries another. A recent song ‘Hanging Puppet’ drew on one such ‘tale. In fact one could describe it as artistic ‘Anglocana’ to differentiate it from Americana. I have written well over 2000 songs over the years. Mostly these are recorded in lo-fi versions and only really coming to life when in the hands of other more talented musicians (see the Moon Over the Downs CD 2003).

Poetry has appeared in various magazines and in the Scottish anthology The Ice Horses (1996). I currently have at least 4 unpublished complete books of poetry on the shelf. One could describe my work as multi-disciplinary with a strong streak of green politics colouring the waters beneath.

I have drawn on some clear influences in writing and art. Seamus Heaney’s concept of a personal ‘Hedge School’ going back to John Clare is one thread. My forebear’s personal involvement in Agricultural Unions is another (see Skeleton at the Plough poems). I also am influenced by a ‘working class’ sense of writing picked up form Carver and Gallagher and other dirty realists. In song almost any Americana act would suffice.

I am not American but I have strong American influences going back to Thoreau and Walden lake. To try and build an alternative ‘English’ approach I have increasingly been drawn back to the English Civil War when the notions of science and arts were more fluid and interchangeable. As an example I would cite Robert Plot’s Oxford a marvelous Natural History of Oxfordshire from 1677.

In it one finds specimens such as ‘Stones that look like Horses’. I draw heavily upon cultural geography theory post Williams and Berger and am heavily influenced by Patrick Keiller and David Matless.

It is this kind of merging of scientific natural history and folk-lore terminology that I now most interested in both in poetry and artwork.

Back on TRACK? : Oxford and Nottingham

June 7, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Back in 2010 I started off with the title Track for a multimedia M.A. that finally did not happen. However the seeds of some kind of project centred around the impact of the railway on the movement of people and ideas started then. This is now bearing fruit as a double project centred on my local history research in two cities close to my heart.

So now we have…

based around the recent Lost Nottingham poetry project and

Based around the concept of Backwaters and Branch Lines

Maybe two separate collections or two bound together in one ‘TRACK’ volume.

Here was the original version from 2010

https://shaunbelcher.com/rpt/?page_id=7

Lost Nottingham: Paper Boats on Private Road

May 24, 2018 / / 0 Comments

PAPER BOATS ON PRIVATE ROAD

A lone slim figure in Sunday best gets off the tram on Woodborough Road,

Hesitates then proceeds down Private Road until it dog-legs east at his destination

As he turns along the high brick wall he hears children’s laughter, a maid calling

He stands at the gate hidden by trees and calls, the maid comes to the gate

Later she recalls his patent leather shoes and his smart appearance that day

Frieda stands at the French Windows, behind the red curtains, eyes sparkling like a hawk

He is ushered into the sitting room, red velvet curtains caught in the breeze billowing

Initial stiffness is washed away in a heated conversation about Oedipus and women

D.H. Lawrence is being bewitched by this most ‘un-English’ and strong-willed of women,

Her exotic and erotic vibrancy entrances him, already struggling to escape this England

Her husband delayed by work she leads him past then in to her bedroom,

An English sparrow in the talons of a German hawk he is taken in hand, finds himself

Then they are both entwined in secrecy, taking tram and train to secret assignations

One day with her daughters they play on a local stream with paper boats

He flicks matches at them saying look it is the Spanish Armada come to sink England

Two paper boats catching fire in a Nottinghamshire backwater, then phoenix-like rising

From the crazed machinery of Edwardian England, the conservatism of suburbia

Sometimes of an evening Frieda would dash up Mapperley Plains just seeking freedom

In a cottage near Moor Green they continued their first loving act on Private Road

Under Pear-blossom, ‘a fountain of foam’, Frieda crawls naked over him, he writes a poem

To her and to freedom, to his sexual and intellectual fulfilment with a gushing woman

By May 3rd they were sat together on a night-boat to Ostend, that old England fading

A peaceful Anglo-German union as the two empires ramped up production of munitions and cruisers

The Suffragette movement beginning… the war to end all wars looming.

Paper boats burning…

 

« Older posts

© 2024 SHAUN BELCHER

Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑