And the ship slid into the dock and…

Hurrah!  The first 8 pamphlets are almost all designed and typeset and the launch has been booked for 31st May at the Ship and Mitre in Liverpool at 8.00pm (if anyone would like to come then please email the press and let me know so I know numbers – it’s free btw).  The launch should be brilliant and the Ship is a lovely pub.  The upstairs room where the readings will happen is a nice art deco gem of a place and if people like to have a beer while they listen to amazing poets read then the Ship probably has the best selection in Liverpool.  My own favourite is Augustiner Brau Lagerbier Hell!

Of the 8 poets, 6 are confirmed to read so it should be a sparkling night.  I think I’ll split it into 2 halves and the poets can read in the order that their pamphlets are ordered.  I should tell the poets this idea really but if I go with that order then it will be JT, Steve, Catherine, Luke then a break then Richard, Jess and Colette! That seems a good order.It’ll be a great night anyway to celebrate the launch of the press and the brilliant pamphlets.  Come one, come all.

Jess Green Interview

Where do you write?

I am an embarrassing cliché – at a desk in the garret of a Victorian semidetached.

 

Tell me about the last poem you wrote?

A bit of a sexy one that I still haven’t plucked up the courage to post on my blog because my parents are my biggest fans. It’s also about the house I live in which could be lovely (think high ceilings, a pantry, a freestanding bath with gold taps) but unfortunately is inhabited by four 20 somethings who are more interested in wine than furnishings.
Which poet got you into poetry?

Benjamin Zephaniah. Aged 7 my Dad bought me a copy of Funky Chickens and I thought he was an amazing poet because he didn’t write ‘properly’, I thought he was so naughty for using slang words in his poems. I wrote him a letter telling him how much I loved him and asked him if the poem about his cat being kicked to death was true. He replied saying that sadly it was and that he looked forward to one day reading poems by ‘Jessie Green’. I should send him some.
If you looked outside your window what would you see…answers in haiku only please.

Blonde boy in a dress
watching from a bedroom window
magpie looking back.
What poets have you discovered in the last year?

A brilliant spoken word poet called Kate Tempest, I always say to people, whatever you think about poetry, she will change your mind. I also discovered Brian Turner’s collection Here, Bullet. I’ve went through a phase of being really interested in the effect that modern day warfare has on poetry compared to what it did to poets such as Wilfred Owen. I’ve also been reading a lot of Keats recently because I realised I mention him in a poem and actually have read very little of his work.
Can you suggest a collection or pamphlet that people should read?

I am definitely not highbrow enough to answer this question. It’s got to be Zephaniah, Funky Chickens; with such cracking titles as ‘Give Peas a Chance’ – genius.
I use ‘the’ far too much in my poetry. What word do you use too much?

I realised yesterday I mention Sambuca far too much in my poetry. I don’t even like Sambuca, it makes me heave. A guy that I used to work with would come in most mornings bleary eyed and stinking for aniseed so I often make reference to it when talking about that job. I relate it to the drunk slimes you get pressing up against you in the queue for the bar on a Saturday night which is why it’s mentioned in Midnight Soliloquies.
How does your style come across in your work? In the performance? Or the layout? Or the language? Or…?

I think my style comes across in my performance. I see myself as a spoken word poet and spend a lot of time working on my performance and delivery. My poems are quite fast paced in my head when I’m writing them, I think a lot about rhythm and the way words sound. I do take some criticism for the speed at which I deliver my poems and have been told in the past that I’m not a ‘proper poet’ because my poems aren’t drowning in metaphor.

 

What themes run through your poems?

I usually write when I’m frustrated or angry, or just need to write something down to stop my head hurting. Because of this, my work is often fiercely political (I do worry that if we finally manage to defeat this government full of knobs I’ll run out of inspiration).   I’ve just finished a job that I really hated towards the end so I’ve written a quite a few whingey ‘my boss is an idiot’ poems in the past few months.

I love living in big cities and am very influenced by city life. Having said that, I’m having to make the decision of where I want to live and work next and don’t know if I can make the leap to the terrifying capital.

 

Which poetry magazines do you read?

Mslexia, Ambit, Spilt Milk, The Rialto, Magma. I’ve had to cut back on my subscriptions recently though so I love a good online magazine – I’ve just discovered Litro (http://www.litro.co.uk/) and have been published a couple of times on a brilliant online blog called Poetry24 (http://poetry-24.blogspot.com/).
Tell us about your pamphlet?

It provisionally shares a name with one of my poems – I Won’t Share This City. It’s a mix of a frustrated kick in the face of the coalition, the bleeding heart of lost friends and lovers, a little bit sexy (but just enough so my Mum can still send copies round the family).

I’ve realised over the past few months I’m quite good at last lines so there’s a few punchers in there.

Poems such as Midnight Soliloquies, Deep Down In The Avenues and I Won’t Share This City rely heavily on place and probably took the most time to write and redraft. Like all writers, I am a hater of cliché, and try to find ways to make the reader see the place I want them to be in without describing it to them.

Finally, if your poetry was a drink what drink would it be?

A pint of Merlot.

Richard Watt Interview

Can you suggest collections or pamphlets that people should read?

John Glenday seems to be quite well known now, in a Competition Judge kind of way. His first pamphlet The Apple Ghost (1989) is one of my favourites and an absolute delight. From Occupied Territory set the bar just above Liz Lochhead, but both are still writing and the game’s wide open. Aonghas MacNeacail: My favourite Scottish writer of the moment, and his book Hymn to a Young Demon is brilliant.

Which poet got you into poetry?

I was a terrible, precocious infant and began to read poetry a long time before I could appreciate any of it. Not to belittle Georg Trakl and Dylan Thomas, but they were my kit. Very knotty, tortured stuff: what “tween” can resist? The first stuff I really took to heart was by George Herbert and the metaphysical group, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck. I didn’t think writing was something normal people engaged in, and then I encountered the “close reading” set at secondary school. Ted Hughes, Phil Larkin and (thank God) Norman MacCaig put a fire in me. I began to write at 16 but it was only on discovering Hart Crane that I started to mix a little high diction in with my poor, white boy roots.

What poets have you discovered in the last year?

Andy Jackson, Emily Berry, Teresa Cader and Johan de Wit are all new and exciting to me. You’ve got wit, guile and lunacy in there. Thomas McKean’s book A Conversation with Ruth Pitter recently turned me on to that grand dame. Tim Key’s become my favourite performance poet, although it’s really comedy.

Tell us about your pamphlet. How does your style come across in your work? 

It’s provisionally called The King’s Road after what should be the concluding sequence. I’m not so sure of the title now. I enjoy end sequences but they have to be powerful or the reader comes away unsatisfied. I’d like to think the reader will come away with a sense of wonder.
Beyond journalism and an interest in typography, I am a self-flagellating pedant and this must come across. Writing for an audience of one results in an obsession with failure. Allegories and puns fuel my poems. In my pamphlet you’ll find Arthurian myth, iconography, sea shanties and loneliness, Lovecraftian horror, science fiction, punk rock, stalking, video games, rampant libido, mental collapse, and a desire for fun above all.

Where do you write?

Mobile phone note-taking and dictation apps come in handy on a walk or drive, which is when I get most ideas. I type on a program called Dark Room once I get a few lines home, which reminds me of early home computers: green text on black and no distractions. There’s something very mysterious about green text. Stare into it too long and you’ll wake to a Garth Marenghi-style manuscript and an unsympathetic boiler.

Which poetry magazines do you read?

I’ve always kept up to date with Ambit in print (it’s easy), and Slate/Horizon Review and Spilt Milk online. The way things are going now, I trust a few people who are “in the scene” and tend to buy pamphlets via Facebook recommendation rather than subscribe to a magazine. That said, you have to be wary of agenda when you’re talking about poetry with poets. It’s like chatting on a civil aviation forum with Boeing247 and LockheedMartin1. I’ve never understood it.

If your poetry was a drink what drink would it be?

Three fingers of navy rum.

JT Welsch Interview

Where do you write?

There’s a lyric halfway through this pamphlet, ‘The Tiresias Letters’, which presents itself as reeled off some tragic evening in a little writing shed at the back of a garden. I wish it were true – it’s so far from the scattered notes and dozens of bus journey versions of that poem, for example. I do have a bare table at a window, with an old burgundy Royal and a box of paper, but I’m hardly ever resolved enough to work that way.

Tell me about the last poem you wrote?

I’ve been trying to do something with that ‘certain young man’ who shows up in the Gospel of Mark. When the soldiers arresting Jesus grab for him too, he runs off naked, also eluding everyone who’s spent the last two thousand years trying to identify him. I love the logic of these wild goose chases. One popular explanation is that it’s Mark himself, in a Hitchcockian cameo, although that seems a bit too artsy for the hardcore. Frank Kermode draws a brilliant parallel with the man in the mackintosh from Ulysses, another lapse of pure narrative fortuity. Anyway, these concerns with identity, authorial presence, ambiguity, and (possibly) sexuality connect to the longer manuscript I’m working on.

Which poet got you into poetry?

I’ll risk embarrassing myself and say Stephen Crane. I can see how cheesy he is now, but when we’d done his novel, The Red Badge of Courage, alongside some Dickinson or Frost, at school, his poems really shook me up. They seemed brutal but confused in themselves in a way I still admire. And his sense of form is hilarious for the time. Pound liked him for that; and another of my heroes, John Berryman, wrote a biography of Crane as he was starting out.

If you looked outside your window what would you see…answers in haiku only please.

Scholarly squirrels,
briefly lost, then loosed among
the ghosts of summer.

What poets have you discovered in the last year?

There have been some newish people like John McCullough, Amy De’ath, or Jack Underwood, who I was glad to find. Americans I hadn’t read before, like Jon Davis and Atsuro Riley. Or ones I knew of, but only first read carefully this past year, like Carl Phillips, Susan Wheeler, Maureen McLane.

Can you suggest a collection or pamphlet that people should read?

Something recent? John Beer’s ‘The Waste Land and Other Poems’. That’s fun stuff, and you’ll have fun asking your local bookshop to look up the title.

I use ‘the’ far too much in my poetry.  What word do you use too much?

I know I overuse ‘just’, or deictics like ‘this’ and ‘now’ (and, yes, ‘the’), probably in a lazy attempt to close down on some lost lyrical moment. But I recently put a bunch of poems through one of those Word Cloud things online, where it builds a visual representation of word frequencies – I was scandalised to see ‘like’ near the top. I don’t think of myself as the simile type.

How does your style come across in your work? In the performance? Or the layout? Or the language? Or…?

I’m not sure what comes across, but I obsess over layout. By a certain definition, I’m fairly conservative with form, I guess. It’s a control thing, but I need something to work against. So even if it passes for straight-laced (and secretly, I hope it does), I also hope the anxiety comes through. Sorry, I should have said the voice. It’s usually pretty apprehensive as well. Let’s call that a style.

What themes run through your poems?

Glancing over this pamphlet, I realise nearly every poem attaches itself to some name or figure. So, all that stuff about identity and history or cultural echoes I suggested before. Sexuality and gender are usually at stake. I know ‘confessionalism’ has become pejorative (once more), but the production of textual selves, structures of ‘knowledge’ vs. concealment, and all the associated power plays still seem to have much broader implications. Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ meets a queer ‘personal is political’.

Which poetry magazines do you read?

It varies. Boston Review, PN Review, Poetry (Chicago), The Wolf, 3AM, Jacket, AGNI, Chroma, Blackbox Manifold, The Manchester Review. I realise a few or maybe most of these are online. I end up reading quite a bit on screen, through blogs or various routes, links on Twitter, Facebook. The Page is also dependable for that.

Tell us about your pamphlet.

This is a sequence I’ve been coming back to for ages. I’m not sure what I thought I was protecting it against. The longer poems at either end are obviously crucial, with this ‘Orchid’ protagonist. In some sense, it’s probably her/him taking on those historical disguises throughout – Akhenaton, Raphael, Longinus, Jason, James Dean. But it is playful, I hope. I like the idea of them side by side in the chorus, all desperate for the solo. Maybe the orchestra is made up of their correlative objects then – all the pistillate shivs and frockcoats, imaginary mountains, old socks, stillborns and kidnappees, the Holy Prepuce. There are whiffs of narrative, but filtered through all this junk.

Finally, if your poetry was a drink what drink would it be?

I’ve been a strict teetotaller since before I knew the polite word for it, but I don’t think my poems operate like my usual props of water or orange juice. What about a fine imported root beer?

Catherine Woodward Interview

1. Where do you write?

I like to write somewhere quiet when I’m alone, I get too distracted otherwise. I’m rather boring I’m afraid.

2. Tell me about the last poem you wrote?

At the moment I’m working on a sister poem to a sonnet I wrote some months ago. It’s a univocalism (a poem with one vowel, although in this case it has one instance of the letter I) about Pacman. I’m having a lot of fun writing it but it’s slow going. I’ve also just finished a first draft of a parody of A kill from the Crow poems.

3. Which poet got you into poetry?

It may have been the combined work of Ted Hughes and T. S. Eliot, they’re the poets that come to mind when I think about sixth form college, when I first started reading then writing poetry. Since then lots of poets have inspired me along the way and got me even further into poetry, Caroline Bird, George Szirtes, Jack Underwood, Aisle 16. But it was more my friends and fellow poets who have got me into poetry in a big way and also spurred me on to try my hand at performance poetry; John Simpson Wedge, L. Eaves and Hassina Allen to name a few. There’s nothing quite as motivating as an active, passionate poetry community; without people to share poetry with I doubt I would love it as much as I do now.

4. If you looked outside your window what would you see…answers in haiku only please.

After The Flood hit,
The last sluice of Pend d’Oreilles.
Hairy backs of hills.

Cheating really, I’m currently on holiday in Idaho and I’m right on the Pend d’Oreilles River.

5. What poets have you discovered in the last year?

I discovered Ruth Larbey as I was reviewing a group of pamphlets early on in the year. I recently read and enjoyed Selima Hill’s Bunny. I’ve discovered a number of great poets at Norwich Poetry Club events; some that stand out include one half of a Mancunian comedy duo called Thick Richard and Salena Goddan, who was a delight. In fact, there I discovered many of the poets on Nasty Little Press, which really is a great small publisher. Also, I had the pleasure of being briefly acquainted with an American poet Brian Folan, who had something of The Beats and the avante-garde in him, he was certainly a fresh influence on me and some of my poetically-minded friends.

6. Can you suggest a collection or pamphlet that people should read?

I don’t think I can; no poet is right for everybody and I could never know what books someone would benefit from or enjoy without knowing them a little first. All I can really do is suggest collections or pamphlets I love or that might broaden someone’s horizon: Richard Price’s Rays I think is a good one, and it’s a good idea to keep your eyes peeled for poetry on the blogs Silkworms Ink or Etceterart.blogspot. Anything by Frank O Hara and Imagism by Peter Jones for an insight into the fascinating history of the movement.

7. I use ‘the’ far too much in my poetry. What word do you use too much?

Probably ‘and’.

8. How does your style come across in your work? In the performance? Or the layout? Or the language? Or…?

I don’t think I have a fully developed style yet. The pamphlet is a challenge because I’ve been adapting what semblance of style I have to other styles that I want pay homage to; the poems I’ve written for the pamphlet vary a lot, some are abstract, some narrative, some are formal and others free. I suppose this shows that at the moment my style isn’t rigid but there’s definitely some common elements between the poems which speak of an up and coming style. Stylistically I like to follow, in part, Ezra Pound’s dogma; I try to avoid ornamental language and use as few words as possible to say as much as I can, I think simile and metaphor should be integral to my poems and not additional or as afterthoughts. My poems often end up being quite ‘to the point’ as a result, in a plain sort of style but still as poetically complex as possible. This kind of language works for me very well, I try to write poetry that doesn’t alienate but doesn’t compromise itself either. That comes across in my performance of poems too; when I read I like to do a lot of crowd interaction to get people involved with poetry and to encourage them to invest themselves in it a little, rather than be passive observers. I think I struggle a little with address though, generally the poems I write are quite intimate, but the intimacy struggles with my fondness for big, bold public statements. The pamphlet, as I mentioned, is quite different, I’ll just have to see how it turns out. Free verse, for one thing, has been strange to me, I like to write in form because of how creative it is; form squeezes as much out of thought and experience as possible, free verse, to me, often feels only flabby and approximate. Anyway, that’s my perception of my style, a reader’s may be completely different, poets don’t often know much about their own poetry.

9. What themes run through your poems?

I’ve been producing increased levels of love poetry lately, which overtook previous themes of death and forgetting, those are broad themes but I don’t know about smaller themes. I’ve begun to work on projects as a way of guiding my writing to make myself more prolific. Lately my writing has been about exploring depth in seemingly shallow things with existential and vaguely philosophical themes branching out of that (my last project was an attempt to write a poem for each of the 150 original pokemon). I’m young and I’m still finding my voice, I don’t think I can pinpoint any truly consistent themes, not yet, it would take a critic to do that.

10. Which poetry magazines do you read?

Mostly ezines, Silkworms and Etc as I’ve already mentioned. Also Eyewear, The Glasgow Review, Hand+Star.

11. Tell us about your pamphlet?

My pamphlet will be called Snapshots of Rude: From Rude Tube and the Idiot Box. It’s inspired by Hughes’ unfinished Crow poems. I wanted to follow a similar format; the spiritual journey of a semi real protagonist mostly in free verse, only I want to succeed where Hughes failed and finish mine. The series is a work in progress and the pamphlet contains extracts from what will be a longer (hopefully finished) series. Rude Tube, a humanoid television, discovers an approximation of what it means to be human through various unintentional encounters with pop culture and the media. As he comes to know himself he learns all about the good and the bad aspects of being human, he’s put through trials and finds that the world around him is questioning his past, by the end he’s hit the lowest of the low and is ready to love. At least that’s the plan, I’m still writing it. The poems range from humorous to horrible and are sometimes humorous and horrible. Metaphor and reality are all one in an attempt to make realism irrelevant. It’s barely even poetry. Hopefully it’ll be as much fun to read as it is to write.

12. Finally, if your poetry was a drink what drink would it be?

A cup of tea. Dark or light, sometimes sweet, it comes in many varieties, it’s quintessentially English and it’s made with love.

Mission Statement

Holdfire Press has 4 points that are important to its aims.  Here they are:

1 – Holdfire Press will publish poetry by young poets.  It will attempt to identify, encourage, develop and promote a new generation of poets.  Our reach will be diverse in style and form but its core will be a dedication to unearth new talented poets and identify young poets who are publishing and reflect the ‘new generation’s’ vibrancy and urgency, enabling both the new and widely published young poets to reach a wider audience.

2 – Holdfire Press will encourage the connection between the page and performance (readings).  The press will look to put on readings and performances through book launches and regular poetry nights whilst also attempting to open the door for its poets to read at festivals and events across the UK.  This will give our unexperienced poets the chance to develop their reading skills whilst also helping our more experienced poets to have their poetry heard and read by a wider audience.

3 – Holdfire Press will publish pamphlets and books with an emphasis on design and quality.  The press will work with young artists and the product (the pamphlet) will be of the same quality as the poetry we publish.  The press believes in presenting our poets in the best way possible and establishing Holdfire as a quality publisher of poetry.

4 – Holdfire Press will grow as a press through its publications and readings, through sales and diversification, through promotion and awareness.  The press will move quickly towards full collections and look to have a continuing relationship with our poets (whether that be through publication or readings), establishing both the poet and the press as being at the forefront of poetry in the UK.

They Dominate Doughnuts!

I have been absent from blogging for a few days and I’m not sure why.  I did get a bit drunk on Wednesday, and Thursday…and then Friday I had a day of reading (mainly about Henry III) and trying to sort out the dialogue in my novel.  They might all be the reasons for blog silence.

I did have a really good chat with Simon  Thirsk from Bloodaxe on Wednesday and he helped me add a kind of clarity to my overall business plan. My next blog post will be a discussion, with myself, of my business plans, the goals for the press, what I want to achieve for the poets and I’ll also put up my Mission Statement – 5 points I’ve come up with, following Simon’s advice, acting as a kind of manifesto of Holdfire’s ethos.

But for today..what to talk about hmmm.  I’ve been contacting festivals trying to get an idea of whether they’d give the poets who are published by Holdfire a free slot with expenses.  No responses yet though.   I hope some festivals do get back to me as it’d be really good to be able to help poets get readings (and a good way to sell books).  As a poet myself I’m sometimes confused and disenchanted by how little readings I get offered or when I do ask for a reading, get a yes, I then don’t hear anything.  So maybe I’m trying to live my dreams through the success of other poets.  That sounds fine.

I’ve also been reading on Facebook all the discussions, yes I did mean discussions, about whatever the hell is happening at the Poetry Society.  Even though I know I should care that a poetry organisation is crumbling or destroying itself, that one group of poets care only about self-preservation whilst the other cares, maybe too much, about the advancements they’re making that lead to a  thinning out of their role through excessive diversification (maybe), well I just can’t seem to some up an ounce of care over the whole situation.  I just can’t be arsed really.  I think this is because I feel disconnected from whatever happens in poetry in London and disconnected from the people, the poets, who are connected to the Poetry Society (this is obviously something I’m trying to change – I’m trying to spread the Press, get poets from all over the country and also find connections in London, Scotland, Wales, everywhere….Holdfire isn’t a Liverpool Press, it has, and should have, a national reach).   I get a strong desire to be insular when I read the comments, to say to myself  ‘Well what benefit has ‘Insert Organisation’ done for Liverpool or for me personally as a poet in  Liverpool’  and selfishly, from both a civic and personal viewpoint, I think nothing.  I then make the giant leap of thinking that maybe all these organisations might not simply need refreshing but overtaking, being usurped, by newer and more nationally open organisations.  All Watched Over By Poets of Love and Joy – an interconnected and ungoverned poetic movement.  Hmmm.

I have hidden Socialist and Working Class beliefs.  Barely hidden.  or rather I don’t shout them.  I see poetry, the poetry of this decade, as very (I don’t want to say it, I don’t want to say it)…very…very..Middle Class.  But then I see a lack of action from my own city in pushing poetry, literature, culture.  Any attempts to push culture seems somehow half-hearted and half-baked.  But then I also think, with an element of a scowl as I sit in a dive of a pub on Scotland Road (I don’t drink there) that culture thrives elsewhere whilst it kind of sneaks through cracks in concrete here.  I am a jealous man.  I am jealous of London, of Edinburgh, of Norwich, of Manchester.  Of Crewe!   Don’t blame me for this chip on my shoulder, blame the streets of Huyton, the empty shops and factories, the boarded up terraces, the 1960′s Catholic churches…ah….I can’t keep it up.  I was attempting to portray myself as a Socialist-Paranoid-Northerner there but I’m not. I was trying to dig out a reason as to why I find myself lacking energetic interest in the Poetry Society argument.

Here’s the real reason.  I think I feel that whoever is in charge or in a position of poetic influence it doesn’t matter too much to a small press.  Especially when that press wants to present, publish, promote young poets.  Hard work matters, growth and development matter.  Let the rest come later.  The press is trying to float beneath the surface, at first, and find poets that will go on to become the new established, the new avant-garde, the new cherished, the new urgenct, the new challengers.  So really I think I’m too interested in my own machinations at the moment, my own goals and how to achieve those goals, to worry too much about the shaky world of poetry.  I’ll build my own house and it’ll have a vestibule and the back door will always be unlocked.  Hmmm, it’d have to be a house in the country for that to work.  Maybe there’ll be geese and chicken in the garden.  Poetic geese and chicken.  A poetic dog and a poetic magpie staring down from an oak tree. The poetic magpie will become Magpie Laureate one day but the poor Poetic Dog will end up at Crufts, running through tunnels and over fences, forgetting every word of poetry he ever barked…

I hope people realise that the seemingly disjointed feel of this blog is merely to soften things before I post my serious Mission Statement.  It has nothing to do with an inevitable slowing in happenings now the poets are on board, the applications posted, the artists contacted, the goals targeted etc etc.  September isn’t far away but there’s a lot to do before then.  I should cherish these past few days of quiet inboxes and the time it has given me to stay up late and sort everything out  just like I should cherish Jamie Carragher before he retires (he can’t half tackle he can’t).

A 5th Poet!

Catherine Woodward is both a small time performance poet based in Norwich and a postgraduate at the University of East Anglia. Her current work attempts to reveal the poetic nature of anything and everything, the product of a recently developed joy of living. Her poems are often humorous and horrible at the same time, her voice is a cross of the prophetic, surreal and the plain, geared to make her readers wonder at all that makes them human, even the bad stuff. ‘If I can’t find ten reasons to laugh or cry at a toothbrush, then I’m not writing properly.’ Her pamphlet is a collection of extracts from a longer work in progress about the spiritual growth of a humanoid television.

 

Artists!

Not that I’m an artist but here are some I like (imagining if I could use any artist for a cover).  My artistic knowledge is limited.  Occasionally I buy paint and a canvas.  I liked Desperate Romantics and kind of liked the Dr Who with with Van Gogh in, even though he appeared to be a Scot (I forgive that more than the weird sexual politics the show seems to be playing at the moment).  Anyway, here are some painters I like.  I know there aren’t any women but then that’s completely the fault of my ignorance.  In defence the two artist who have offered to work with the press (Bee and Lisa) are female and excellent artists. Once again, anyway….

Kandinsky

Goya

Twombly.  I’m sorry Noelle but I love…LOVE….Twombly.

El Greco

Pollock

Bacon

Malevich

Matisse

Dali

Bosch

Whistler

Picasso

Schwitters

Mondrian

Barnett Newman

Lucian Freud

Orpen

Turner

Augustus John

Roger Fry

Bomberg

Peploe

Alasdair Gray

My dad.

What schools?

And an editor comes home and it’s raining so the washing can’t go out and the dog is eating peanut butter and Radio 4 is moaning about the decline of the High Street.  Drink tea, make soup (literally) and think about the press, this is your day my son….

So the first 10 pamphlets are more a grouping of young poets I admire.  There’s nothing really linking them beyond their age and their fine poetry but I think they give the press a solid start: this is our remit, read it.

Thinking about the next 5, the Purple Experimentalists, I know why I went for the avant-garde.  I don’t want the press to be overtly avant-garde.  A lot of small presses get stuck publishing experimental poetry until they’re really publishing not-very-good experimental poetry.  I know what I’m not into.  I’m not that into vispo or anything too disjointed.  I like to see the ideas and thinking and craft and  style within the poetry, I like to know the poet understands what they’re doing and not just writing something loose as opposed to being erm disciplined and giving into form etc.  Two of the poets I’ve got for the Purple Experimentalists are certainly aware of what they’re doing, they’re intelligent poets that challenge and delight (is delight a bit camp?).  Is this a difficulty I might find with publishing experimental poets?  I am sort of one myself, to an extent, but I often find it hard to connect with that style.  I prefer the poetry that joins the gap, the gap between the traditional (mainstream?) and the experimental.  I think Roddy Lumsden said something once on Facebook about poets, young poets, combining a kind of lyric tradition with a willingness to experiment.  That interests me.  But where does that lead me after the Purple Experimentalists?

Should Holdfire be then completely open to submissions leading the groupings?  Will that work?  Will I get, in the space of a couple of months, 5 poets I can say have a uniting style or poetic philosophy? What poetics will I be looking for?  Maybe I should ask new submissions to provide a 2000 word essay on their poetics.  This is a ridiculous idea.

There has been attempts to group poets.  Todd Swift did something with an American magazine but I can’t find the articles and wouldn’t want to jump on board someone else’s definition of new poets.  So maybe I should look for poets who write about nature, about landscape.  Hawk poems.  Hedgehog poems.  Or I could look for the urban poets, poets that represent a city.  That appeals to me.  I’m just starting a collection myself, Lyrpole, and it’s about Liverpool, a kind of poetic view of Liverpool.  45 views, places, spots, and 3 poems about each one – written at different points in a year.  I could pick 5 cities – Liverpool, Belfast, Aberdeen, York and Brighton – 5 poets?  Hmm, I’m not sure.

How about poets who have just completed MAs.  That could be good.  Try to get a feel of how courses are influencing young poets.  There’s always outsider poetry – poets living in the UK who are not British.  Would this go against the idea of young British poets?

Obviously these are only ideas.  I have many ideas at the moment and I am writing many ‘To Do Lists’.  My wife is unnerved by my ‘To Do List’s, she sees something obsessive in them.  I shouldn’t show her my notebook, every other page is a new list and something always gets missed.  For instance today apparently I need to; Contact Liverpool Council to look into free office space, Send a book to Toby Rivas (forgot completely about this), Scan my hand drawn map for The Forsaken North, look into self-publishing for The Forsaken North (GP Taylor did it), blog and twitter for The Forsaken North, print off covering letters and “Write a poem you fool”.  Writing the list out kind of makes me think the lists have become pointless and, I agree Noelle, obsessive.  I will reject the list and instead take the dog to Sefton Park.