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CREATIVITY AND INSOMNIA

I’ve come to learn that if I wish to be more productive in terms of poetry, I need to read a lot. When I start to read poetry, I’ll come upon a line or an image that will trigger something in the memory reserves that causes me to start writing. This nearly always happens very early in the morning when I wake with insomnia. The cause of the insomnia is usually having drunk wine the night before. I find that wine is the main culprit here – beer or cider don’t have the same effect. At about six am. my imagination is highly active – I pick something from the pile of poetry books at the side of my bed and after a little reading I’ll be reaching for the notebook and pen. Sometimes I rush down to the laptop, eager to see how I can lay the new words out and at other times I just put it away and try to go back to sleep. Often I forget what I’ve scribbled and come across it weeks or months later. When it turns out to be decent it’s almost a free gift, like finding a tenner in the pocket of an old coat. I’d say that probably about ninety percent of my poems are born in this way. Recently I haven’t been drinking wine and so sleeping well and having pleasurable dreams. Consequently no poetry.

24/4/20

NOSTALGIC REFLECTIONS

Yesterday I heard the famous sonata for violin and piano in A major by Cesar Franck on Radio 3 and it brought back memories from years ago. Apparently Franck, second only to J.S. Bach as an organ master was not given to displays of emotion, but seemed to have fallen slightly in love with one of his pupils, Augusta Holmes ( later a renowned composer and partner of the French poet Catulle Mendes with whom she had five children). It was this infatuation which is speculated to have inspired the A major sonata and listening once again it does seem to pulsate with love. Or maybe it’s just the power of suggestion at work but it offers a kind of insight into this beautiful piece.

When I lived in Leeds in 1980 I had just finished a degree in Philosophy and Religion and spent a year pretending to be an aristocratic poet (I was on benefits) floating around the large old house where I rented a room. I passed my time reading, writing, making cassette recordings from Radio 3 (the Franck sonata included) and learning classical guitar. I read Jean Cocteau and ate hashish. The (now) writer and occultist Dave Lee came round to visit me one day and when I opened the door in a silk dressing gown with a few sheets of poetry idly strewn across the writing desk, he seemed faintly amused.

I did actually get round to making one submission that year, to STAND magazine. The poems were returned promptly, rejected. Another friend said he was surprised as he thought my stuff was good. But I think we had no idea in those days (despite reading T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath etc.). Having been rejected, it didn’t occur to me to have a think and try again. I just assumed that was the end of the matter. It might have been helpful if the editor had said something like: Have another try and use a typewriter next time. It could have given me some clue to pick up on – an idea for the next step. But editors are always busy and with hearts hardened by years of doing what they do: spending hours every day just panning for the gold they’re after. Only when you provide the gold do they warm to you. In all fairness it can’t be easy.

2/7/20

SUBMITTING POETRY TO MAGAZINES

It all seems pretty straightforward now but it didn’t at all when I started. The poetry world was a mystery and although I knew I had to submit to magazines I didn’t have a clear idea of why or what it was supposed to lead to. A successful poet friend advised me: ‘Just go for a few mags’ which now seems like very vague advice. I started submitting in 2011 and after a spot of beginner’s luck there followed a period of endless rejections. In 2014 I had one acceptance and in 2015 none. I asked myself if all this effort was worth it, just to get one little poem in a magazine, and the answer is probably no. But gradually things started to get easier, over time poems came back rejected, were re-worked and sent out again. My hit-rate started to improve. I learned that a poem is not necessarily bad, in most cases it just needs more work. The problem was that I started late, which made me impatient. I had written poems since the age of sixteen but hardly submitted them anywhere. Now I think that no matter how long you’ve been writing, until you start submitting and generally engaging with the poetry world, everything that came before is just preparation. I’d suggest to anyone starting off that you should make at least forty submissions a year (it’s a numbers game) and don’t be put off by rejections. You need a track record of published work so that you can eventually approach a press. The two rules are: Write good poems (honed in the fires of rejection) and send them out a lot – I mean loads of times. And one more thing to add: as you progress you write more poems and discover more magazines so the target area gets larger and the whole enterprise becomes gradually easier. It’s hard at the beginning but, as they say, everything’s impossible until you manage it.

22/8/20

BORN IN A FIELD?

Someone left a door wide open today (one of my pet hates) and it reminded me of when I was in prep school at the age of five or six, taught to read and write and do arithmetic by nuns (1963-66). They used to say to any child who didn’t close the classroom door: “Were you born in a field?” Everyone would answer “no miss” except for one kid, Ebby Jackson, who burst into tears because he was Roma and really had been born in a field. Sister Dorothy tried to smooth things over by saying: “But Ebby dear, you know you’re supposed to close the gates in the countryside.” Amazing how I can still remember the names of those early schoolmates: Timothy Fulton, Denise Newkirk, Michael Bell, Francesca Divine, Francis Tilly, Marcus McCormick, who later disowned his name and changed it to John. Through my school years I encountered a number of people whose greatest desire seemed to be to remain nondescript and hide within conformity. At morning prayers the Mother Superior would often conclude by saying: “And we should offer up a prayer for the evil Mr Kruschev that God will have mercy and save his soul.” To my ears it sounded like ‘Crush-Chop’ and at night in bed I shivered with fear that Mr Crush-Chop was coming to get me. Or if not him then the Holy Ghost (I was terrified of ghosts) and would not say the word Ghost at prayer times when making the sign of the cross. Another thing I will mention is what’s referred to as Mondegreen. This is the tendency to hear song lyrics incorrectly, which I suppose must be more likely when very young, due to a lack of life-experience. I remember hearing often a song on the radio at my grandparents’ house called ‘Widdecombe Fair’ in which there is a line: ‘And Uncle Tom Cobbley and all’ but I heard it as ‘doll’ and wondered no end who this doll was. Likewise, in the song Scarborough Fair I heard the lines ‘Parsley sage, rosemary and thyme’ as ‘Parsley sage grows merry in time’. Oh well, just to conclude, the reason why this audio-illusion is termed Mondegreen is apparently something to do with someone hearing ‘Lady Mondegreen’ instead of ‘He died and they laid him on the green.’ But don’t take my word for it.

30/9/20

I’m delighted to have three poems accepted for The High Window literary ezine a couple of days ago. Many thanks to the editor David Cooke who has also agreed to post a review of my pamphlet Unknown Territory (28 poems about Greece), and for that review I have to thank my friend David Costello, the award winning poet, ambassador for Wirral libraries and butterfly conservation officer for the Wirral. Perhaps one day when the plague has passed we can get back to our poetry evenings in The Lazy Landlord micro-pub in Liscard? At present I’m reading his new collection Heft, which was recently published by Red Squirrel Press.

10/10/20

I was amazed today to receive an acceptance of four poems from Praxis. As this is a Nigerian magazine and three of the poems were on African themes I’d thought they might consider me crass and uninformed (from their perspective) but I seem to have cut the mustard. One poem Ullet Road, is a reworking of something I wrote in the mid-nineties about a Greek girl living in Liverpool who goes down the road to buy coffee for her pot and spends the afternoon reading the grains in cups (form of divination) for friends who come to visit. I just altered it to a Nigerian girl who buys rice and Tilapia, but didn’t change the bit about reading the grains. I’ve no idea if they do that in Nigeria but thought I’d chance it – well they didn’t seem to object anyway so I suppose that practice must exist there too. This is one more old 90s poem reworked for the Twenty-First century. In the meantime I’m working on the new collection which I started building in January and has undergone a number of quality controls (sporadically removing the weakest poems and replacing them with new material). I have a press in mind to submit to but the deadline is the end of October and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it. I really don’t think it’s a good idea to rush things but considering how slow the poetry world moves there’s no point in stalling either. My other collection has been in the editing queue for over a year and I haven’t had any communications from the press. With all the uncertainty of our Covid world I wouldn’t be surprised if it folded before my collection appears.

17/10/20

Well this morning I got up at 9.30 am. and turned on the laptop to find I’d had two poems accepted by Poetry & Covid (a project launched by Nottinghan University). Both poems are from my new collection. The truth is I wasn’t totally sure about these poems so it was great to know that an independent opinion has given them the thumbs up. As I mentioned, I was uncertain about the new collection and if it was too early to submit but this has kind of given me the signal to go ahead and I feel more certain now that the collection is okay and up to scratch. It’s been a long process of sifting but I think now all the poems cut the mustard and the whole collection coheres and has an evenness of tone and flavour.

2/3/21

Well how wrong can you be? The collection was rejected (and in a rather dismissive and unforthcoming way). Since then I’ve removed about a dozen poems that didn’t seem to contribute to the general thrust and cohesion of the collection, re-worked a handful of the others and added some new ones. Meanwhile, the earlier full collection Those Ghosts has appeared from Beaten Track Publishing and I’m pretty pleased with it and the two reviews it got on Amazon (even though I hate Amazon). It also has a nice new yellow cover to replace the original, which came back from the printer far too dark and sombre.

I was just musing today on how conformist the poetry world is and the lack of imagination evident. There are magazines I read where, if I didn’t know better, all the poems could have been written by the same person as all these poets compete in earnest to conform to the aesthetic model established by the editor who, after many decades of study, has decided this is how it should be. And it will be like this for ever apparently. The moment you dare submit anything slightly different it’s almost certainly going to be a rejection. For this reason I was delighted when I sent more experimental items to a couple of magazines (Rat’s Ass Review and The Cabinet of Heed) and had them accepted. Sincere thanks to Roderick Bates and Simon Webster for their broader vision and imagination. I am more successful at placing poems now but wonder how much originality we lose in the act of compromise. I know people will disagree with me about all this, and sure, we all have our own take on things.

11/4/21

I was really delighted to get an acceptance of three poems by Kathleen Strafford of Runcible Spoon, the Leeds E-Zine. One of the poems was an old one that had been languishing in a file for seven years and I hadn’t sent it anywhere because I couldn’t get the ending right. The other two are very recent and more or less wrote themselves. Not only was I made up to get the acceptance but the way it was worded was incredibly flattering: ‘As usual, your poems are a delight to read. Thank you. I’ve been reading such rubbish and turning writers down right and left and then you come along and make my day.’ Well that kind of made my day too.

WORKSHOPS

Personally, I’m not for workshops. I prefer to let the poems just come in their own time. I went on a workshop once and was forced to write something I didn’t really want to write in a timespan I wasn’t comfortable with and subsequently got told it was full of faults and needed more work. I’ve been on music workshops as well and my opinion is that I’d rather pay for a one to one lesson. Poetry workshops are very popular at the moment and many people seem to derive inspiration and benefit from them but they’re just not for me.

13/12/21 ARCTIC DELIGHTS

These days, thanks to the internet and You Tube videos, you can travel to distant places and see all the lands you dreamed of visiting but sadly never could, for one reason or another. Last night I watched a video about Arctic Russia: the Kola Peninsular, not far from Finland, and in particular, one godforsaken town called Teriberka. The fact that it sees itself as a resort and is hoping to attract tourists appealed to my surreal sense of humour. It has a recreation centre, a few bleak one-star hostels, a campsite and even a beach with sand. Visitors can go snorkel diving and wind surfing if they’re brave enough to face the daunting frozen depths. It’s marked on Google maps with beach parasols. Such ridiculous optimism has to be admired, born probably from a desire to escape poverty and a life in the fish factory. 130 kilometres south (but still extremely north) lies the city of Murmansk which, among other attractions, including a nuclear icebreaker warship The Lenin, boasts a Mexican restaurant called Amigos Bar & Grill. According to its review section it is a fabulous venue for a true Mexican eating experience. It makes perfect sense really. Where shall we go for authentic Mexican food? Murmansk in Arctic Russia, of course. I don’t wish to scoff at the Kola Peninsular, where I’ve never been, but I can’t help finding all this a bit Monty Python. Next summer I’m going camping in Teriberka, on the Barents Sea.

25/12/21 CHRISTMAS DAY

Well, here I am, alone in the house having a very solitary Christmas with my mother in hospital and Mary in Spain. I set up a festive table with decorations and goodies and a miniature tree (bells that light up when you plug in) for my miniature Christmas with a handy instant Christmas dinner for one. I was gutted that there was no Sound of Music on the box today and had to settle for White Christmas instead. This was followed by Raymond Briggs’s Father Christmas: a little film I’ve never seen before and which I thoroughly enjoyed, and it seemed to resonate with my solitude. I’m now listening to Horatio Clare on Radio 3, as he climbs mountains, evidently trying to upstage Julia Bradbury as a media walker. Admittedly, his tales of Victorian eccentrics are interesting and amusing but he’s nowhere near as tasty as Julia, who I was in love with until she committed an unforgiveable linguistic crime, which I explained in a little poem, never before made public.

Lying in a cornfield

with Julia Bradbury.

A glass of champagne

and a big bar of Cadbury.

But she whipped out a sausage

and called it choriTzo

so then all the romance

just went arse over titzo.

Crumbs, that was a bit of a digression. I’ll now get back to the orchestrated ramblings of Horatio Clare. Nice work if you can get it.

9/1/22

IDENTITY POLITICS AND HYPOCRISY IN CONTEMPORY POETRY

Browsing recently in a local charity bookshop I came across an anthology of modern British poets from 1960 and noted there were about 55 male poets and only 5 women. I own another anthology which is even worse: Poetry 1900 to 1965 (editor George Macbeth). In this anthology there is sadly only one woman, Sylvia Plath, for no especially good reason. This seems very wrong to someone like me who has always hated any kind of injustice or inequality and it takes a leap of imagination to grasp the mind-set of an editor who would produce such a book. It’s even more grotesque to consider that, at the time, no one saw anything wrong with this.

When I became a student in Leeds in 1976 I noticed that things were beginning to change. Virago press had been launched by Carmen Callil in 1973 (one of several feminist presses set up to tackle the problem of inequitable gender dynamics in publishing) and generally more women writers were appearing on the shelves of bookshops. From that time, female and feminist literature has been on the ascendant and rightly so because something needed to be done. After all, almost half a century later, any real social progress relating to women has only taken place in certain parts of the world like North America and Western Europe, whereas elsewhere the plight of women generally remains dire.

In the last 40 years however, in the small realm of poetry, the situation has changed dramatically (and I do want to focus on poetry now). As with more or less everything in human society, things never gravitate to a happy and sane medium but go from one extreme to another. I’ve been actively involved in the British poetry scene for about 12 years and have noticed substantial changes. Last year I counted up all the editors of magazines and ezines I’d submitted to and found the male-female divide to be roughly equal. However, the number of female poets these days vastly outweighs the number of males. In fact, to cite an example, a closed online poetry group that I’m a member of, has approximately 230 members, of which I estimate roughly around 200 are women. As a male member I feel that I’m accepted as long as I don’t say anything that the consensus (female) mind-set doesn’t want to hear.

In my 12 years of submitting to poetry editors and reading realms of poems online and in print magazines, I’ve noticed how many women get their work accepted solely on the grounds of the poem’s feminist message, rather than on the quality of the actual poem. Also, there are a number of magazines, presses and competitions only for women. This seems like a contradiction, as they claim that they’re working towards gender equality. Poetry is a sphere of endeavour where men and women compete equally so why these advantages for women? (If I’m missing something here and anyone can enlighten me, please do). It’s like female jockeys demanding races only for themselves, in which case it would probably be seen as an admission of inferiority.

Of course these feminist poets, occupying the untouchable high moral ground and grouping together like a Greek chorus with largely one voice and telling each other how great they are, never stop for a moment to consider what it feels like to be a male poet these days, out of fashion and favour and permanently working under the stigma of past wrongs (like the next generation of Germans after Hitler). As a poet who has never been knowingly sexist, I eventually started to become a bit demoralised as I read endless poems by women about their bastard lovers, abused childhoods etc. and while this is a sad reflection on society in general, it doesn’t often make for good poetry. There are more people writing the stuff nowadays than reading it – and the ones who read it tend to be other poets. So what is this overworked theme achieving? Firstly, preaching to the converted (other female poets who feel the same) and secondly, psychologically harassing the initially sympathetic and supportive male poets who are now starting to feel a little uncomfortable although they are not guilty of anything. Meanwhile the Donald Trumps, Putins and other patriarchal tyrants who really need to change aren’t listening. They probably don’t read or write poetry.

I talked about the state of modern poetry with another male poet friend and he said that Identity Politics was the problem now and that it was no longer about the quality of the poem but rather about what classification of person had written it. Nowadays, he said, you have to tick one of the fashionable boxes or you’ve no chance. We live in the age of the celebrity poet whose success and fame is mapped out even before the collection is finished.

Personally I think that this kind of fad-ism is inevitable as a feature of the capitalist world we live in. This isn’t specifically the bee in my bonnet, though. A punk rocker begins as a symbol of rebellion and ends up a few years later selling car insurance. A book called Why We Should Resist Amazon ends up itself on Amazon. Capitalism is all-consuming and it seems the battles against it were lost some time ago. My beef is with delusional poetry editors who send out submission guidelines saying: We particularly welcome submissions from women (as if the poetry scene is still controlled by white males and they’re on a mission to redress the balance), people of colour, LGBTQ, disabled etc. These groups, although marginalised in society, now have an edge in poetry and find favour by virtue of the hype they receive. A recent glance at the events list for A Lovely Word poetry group in Liverpool informs me that out of the last 33 events, only two have featured straight white male poets and while privileged white males continue to run the world, I can’t see this bias changing any time soon. But in my opinion the only thing that should concern an editor is the quality of the poetry. And the hypocrisy lies in the fact that groups of people who used to be under-represented are behaving as if they still are.

11/2/22

I had a story accepted by Yellow Mama Webzine (USA) last December. It forms part of a collection that I’m putting together about the years I spent in Athens (1998-2007). I was pleased to get an email three days ago containing some feedback from the artist Henry Stanton, who was assigned to provide an illustration for the story. I liked his watercolour but I especially liked what he had to say about the story, and the fact that someone out there appreciates my efforts. Indeed, his brief but profound analysis seemed to suggest he had a better understanding of the story than me. He pointed to meanings that, I must admit, I hadn’t figured out but upon reflection, agree with.

A QUALITY GUY

‘This is a really good story. John Short is a refined writer (wow!) I really loved this piece. For me, it’s about Maria, despite the title. There is something innocent and pure that is being lost at the heart of the story. The protagonist’s lifestyle has a dog-eared beauty that is alluring and comforting. There is a spot in space-time, usually when we are young but not always when we can be completely devoted to our artwork with only ancillary concern for survival. For me, the writer is losing his paradise of the simple artist’s life, drawn along by a river that is relentless and ultimately more powerful than he can be. Maria personifies that relentless, darker power. The saturnine keeps penetrating the narrator’s busking life, intervening to gather him in. Maria is the agent of that intervention. Mystery, drama and female power flow the depth and length of the river. The attached watercolour ‘River of Her’ is my attempt to capture the alluvial beauty that I experience in this story’.

I have to thank Henry for this, and for his beautiful watercolour. Unfortunately I am not very good at saying perceptive things about other people’s work as (occasionally) they are about mine. If all this sounds a bit mysterious, you’ll have to read the story (with watercolour) in the next episode of Yellow Mama. Oh, and a big thank you to editor Cindy Rosmus for accepting the story.

6/9/22

WRITING PROTOCOL?

Back in 2010 when I was just starting to try to build a niche in the world of writing after years of filling exercise books and doing nothing more, I got up one autumn morning at 6.30am. and cycled to the train station. I was heading to the Sheffield Literature Festival to attend a reading by a well-known female novelist who I’d developed an enthusiasm for. I fancied we had quite a bit in common. Especially our respective connections to France. I approached her after the talk and asked if she’d like to read my stories (I’d brought three on a CD). It was like talking to a block of marble. She was completely expressionless and unforthcoming. So, a bucket of cold water was thrown over my enthusiasm and I never read a book by her again. She did accept the stories but she never replied. Not even ‘These stories need a lot more work’ which you’d think anyone could manage. I told myself that if I was ever a published writer and someone approached me I would make a point of never being that unresponsive, even if the world of literature is generally pretty mechanical.

So, today I get an email from a novice poet in New Delhi, India, who tells me that they have read some of my work on the Write Out Loud poetry forum website and they want to make contact with like-minded people. Okay, we know this is not really the done thing, the protocol of the writing world, but it was quite endearing to be reminded of that early enthusiasm. Instead of deleting the email I read the poems and responded with some feedback. I suggested some re-wording in certain places and said I didn’t presume to rewrite the poems, just what I would do if they were my poems and feel free to ignore my suggestions. I thought it wouldn’t be too much hassle to spare an hour for this person and it just happens that tonight I have nothing else particularly pressing to attend to. I hope my response has helped in some small way. Everyone has the right to pursue their aspirations.

1/12/22

SMALL WORLD SAD WORLD

A couple of days ago I cycled to Crosby Town Hall to sign for the Death Certificate for my mum, who passed away on the 23rd of November. On the way back I took a glance at my old school, Saint Mary’s College and walked through Coronation Park. Nothing much had changed and I felt a stab of impossible nostalgia as I came upon the bench where I used to sit with Anne-Marie every lunchtime. I thought how different my life might have been if we’d stayed together and I’d got a sensible job, perhaps as a librarian or something and been a normal person. I bought a couple of poetry books in a charity shop. One was a Bloodaxe collection, priced at 50p. When you consider how much work it takes to get a collection published with them (or any reputable press) and how many years of effort for a book that ends up in a charity shop for 50p it seems ridiculous. But as we all know, there’s no money in poetry and for most poets it was never about the money. Cycling back I passed the Punchbowl and decided to have lunch. I hadn’t been in there for years and don’t pass very often. What used to be an old pub with its own identity has now been blandified and looks like every other corporate gastro-pub. Later, when I went to pay, the barmaid/waitress asked me what I’d been reading between courses and I said just a poetry book. She said she also tried to write poetry herself. She was Irish and advised me to check out the Dublin poet, Sean Hewitt. She also knew a friend of mine from the Dead Good Poets. Small world.

9/3/23 NAIVE POETRY?

For many years I was in a weird space (some may say I still am) and wrote weird verse. Around 2009 I started engaging with the poetry world and things began to develop. It’s hard to say what happens when you take this step. I can only describe it as a subtle and barely perceptible transformation which I don’t fully understand. At one point I was writing poetry without reference to anyone and then I began to interact with the consensus wisdom which, I suppose, has developed over the centuries: the generally accepted opinion of what constitutes good poetry. When anyone takes this step, what follows is a process of continual compromise, like having been single and then entering into a relationship. You have to meet the poetry world half-way and the challenge is to conform thus while still retaining originality. As I recall an editor once saying in their submissions guidelines ‘we want new blood but it has to be the right sort of blood.’

I sometimes wonder if there could be such a thing as Naive Poetry that might ever reach public attention. The fact is though that there are already endless numbers of people writing and appearing on the mainstream circuit as it is, and no-one is concerned about a naive ‘find’ in the way that the art world took an interest in old guys (like Alfred Wallis) painting outside their cottages back in the 20s and onwards. However, I’m sure there must be a few maverick geniuses out there who are scribbling in notebooks and then putting them somewhere in a drawer or cupboard, much in the same way that the English painter Edward Burra (1905-76) claimed to have done with canvases in his early days before he was ‘discovered’.

1/5/23 BONNEVILLE

I was kicking myself today for having deleted a poem I wrote earlier this year because I decided that it wasn’t really good enough – it was all telling instead of showing and I didn’t envisage much chance of it being whipped into shape. I’d gone against my own principle of never deleting any piece of attempted creativity because you just don’t know what it might turn into. After all, I recently had something accepted for publication which I first wrote in 1989 but could never quite get right until now. Fortunately I found a copy of said poem in another file. It’s about a friend I had who fancied himself as a biker and was killed in a motorbike accident at the age of seventeen. I called the poem Bonneville although in reality he preferred Japanese bikes and owned a Honda. That didn’t seem like a very good title. Recently I overheard someone on Radio Three saying that although in literature we are constantly told ‘show don’t tell’ this is not strictly true and that Shakespeare was successful because he combined showing and telling. Anyway I have my poem available and ready to be turned into something more effective if the right ideas manifest.

22/7/24 STAYING CREATIVE

This morning I woke up at seven with an idea for a poem based on something I’d been thinking about quite a lot over the last couple of days. Well that’s a good start, I thought, the fact of having already given it quite a bit of consideration. I came downstairs and set to work and spent about two hours writing and crafting a poem, which is the first new thing I’ve written this month. If you have an idea it’s always best to put it down immediately, I think. Anyway, I worked at it until it was as good as I could make it. But of course, it’s too early to tell if it will need more work. After this I also did another draft of a poem I wrote a few weeks ago. I had submitted it to a magazine and it was rejected but I think I’ve nailed it this time. It’s funny how with some poems it can take weeks or months before you suddenly realise it needed more work and you wonder how you ever thought it was okay as it was. In extreme cases it can take years to get it right.

22/9/24

In Search of a Subject (Cerasus 2023) Review in Dream Catcher 49 by Pauline Kirk.

The cover image and the title may put some readers off this collection. Neither does it justice. I enjoyed reading In Search of a Subject in one day, following its biographical development and recreation of places and characters. I then reread the poems more carefully. While the poet may have spent his life ‘in search of a subject’ there is a clear subject in all these poems. Nor is the collection as dark as the cover suggests.

John Short has been writing for a long time and his list of acknowledgements is impressive. His poems are well-crafted but deceptively so. Thet seem conversational but every word is carefully chosen and imagery, structure and rhythm are fitted to the themes. There is a strong sense of place; the poet making us ‘see’ scenes through telling phrases rather than descriptions. He catches characters’ voices and the sounds of places. The pervading atmosphere is one of poverty: from 1950s austerity and then living rough or working for low wages. But material wealth is not everything as the cultural richness of the last poems demonstrates.

The first section ‘Late Sun’ was the most memorable for me. Here, the poet draws on his memories of youth in a 60s small town and of student life in Leeds. I recognized areas I knew. The title of the second section ‘Endless Travel’ sums up Short’s life after graduation. These poems are full of light and foreignness, and the voices of characters met during travels. They tend to be a bit sporadic, like his travels, and some do not have the same intensity as the earlier ones. In the third section ‘African Rice’ he captures the atmosphere and vibrancy of different cultures. These poems are set in hot countries, contrasting with the drabness of modern Britain. They round off the collection neatly.

It is hard to extract individual lines as the poems tend to work as a whole. The first section begins as a sequence. ‘Liverpool 1946′ is a sensitive recreation of his parents’ courtship, while ‘The Visitor’ captures a character from memory. ‘Ursulines’ conveys the atmosphere of his convent school but is fair in its assessment of a painful memory.

‘So, I don’t bear them grudges, it wasn’t their fault, just the times …’

‘Like Detectives’ reminds us of the Saturday cinema shows for children.

‘On the bus home excited upstairs while our mothers talked adult through Woodbine clouds…’

The title poem ‘In Search of a Subject’ conveys the sense of being different, which many poets experience:

‘Not from here nor there; not middle class or worker and wrong accent …’

The colour and atmosphere of later poems is appealing, as in ‘Endless Travel.’

‘At chiaroscuro dawn, farewell to a narrow street deep inside the blue mosaic city.’

Or ‘Night Ritual, Gascony’: ‘Lamps attract a carnival of airborne life, we breathe vegetable dusk down stag beetle lane…’

France, Spain, Kurdistan, Greece, Italy are all recalled with deft touches. The sudden jolt of being back in the UK is conveyed well in ‘Winter Light’ and ‘Biscuit Factory’, the latter using sound to good effect:

‘The thunderous megalomania of machinery means action dismissing tinnitus as collateral.’

There are tender poems too, especially in the third section, like ‘Love Poem’:

‘I love the cool simplicity of you, that you’re not complicated …’

There is a lot going on in this collection, which will merit second readings.

Pauline Kirk

1/8/25

The weather continues to be freezing. I took the bus to Maghull Central Square and thought I’d made a mistake and got off in Urkhutsk. Although shod and gloved it felt as if the extremities were not far from frostbite. Anyway, I was pleased to have a poem appear in episode six of The Fig Tree, a solid northern ezine managed by editor and poet Tim Fellows. I’m in some reputable company too. It was a positive way to start the new year and I have another poem appearing in Mugwort magazine in March. This is Kate Garrett’s brand new venture. The year 2024’s literary endeavours resulted in 11 acceptances from 43 submissions (25% hit-rate). This was 19 poems compared to 20 poems the previous year. However, the good thing is this included no less than six magazines that I have never been in before.