Pattern beyond chance? The story of a poetry collection: guest post by Stephen Payne

Stephen Payne has just had his first collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, published by HappenStance.  I’ve written on Displacement about my own journey to pamphlet publication (also with HappenStance), so this seems like a good place to publish his account of his journey to a full collection. 

But first: hear ye, hear ye all.  On 5 December sixty poets are taking part in a Poem-a-Thon for Refugees – a day-long reading in London.  We are raising money to support the work of Médecins Sans Frontières with refugees in the Mediterranean.  They have two search-and-rescue ships.  They run hospitals and clinics, both mobile and static, in many of the places refugees are coming from, passing through and/or getting stuck.  Vaccination, clean drinking water, safe childbirth, medical and psychological care - they provide all these.  

Each of us is reading for 8 minutes.  I’ll be reading poems from mid-20th century Greek poet George Seferis' Mythistorema, which came out of his own experience of displacement and exile in the Mediterranean nearly 100 years ago.  Plus one poem of my own.

So far we’ve raised over £8,000 and there are still ten days to go…  If anyone would like to contribute, my fundraising page is here!  And if you’d like to come and hear us / cheer us on on the day, the Poem-a-Thon will take place from 12pm-10pm at Vout-o-Renees, The Crypt, 30 Prescot Street London E1 8BB.  Saturday 5 December.

If not now, when?

Now over to Stephen.

If there’s a pattern in the story of Pattern Beyond Chance, it’s a wonky one.  The sequence of events is nothing like a straight line from submit to accept to publish. It seems self-indulgent to tell the story, but I’m keen to acknowledge some kindnesses as well as the role of chance: the sheer contingency of the process and my own good fortune throughout.

I first emailed my publisher, Helena Nelson, in 2006, through a website called Word Doctors. This was not long after I’d moved from Cardiff University to the University of Manchester in an odd career move that had a more positive effect on my poetry, allowing me to join Poetry School classes at Linda Chase’s Village Hall — especially with Linda and Grevel Lindop.

I asked Nell if I could engage her professional critiquing service. After a short email conversation, she suggested instead that if I sent her some poems she’d be happy to give her thoughts for free. It’s better not to dwell on what this might imply for the commercial prospects of HappenStance Press; I’d say it attests to more important qualities for a poetry publisher.

Anyway, I sent a few poems, and received more critique than I’d perhaps bargained for, including overall impressions and advice, and line by line suggestions on the poems. If this was the moment of my ‘discovery’ as a potentially publishable poet, it didn’t feel like it. Contrasting my poems with the prose style of my emails, Nell was drawn to the adjective ‘constipated’. She also commented that I seemed to be avoiding poems where I was ‘at risk as a person’.

It may seem strange to say that I was pleased to receive such feedback, but it’s the truth. Something to work on. And in among the criticism, there was warmth and wit and encouragement, as well as an invitation to keep in touch as a friend.

Which is what we did, through occasional emails. I became a HappenStance subscriber and a reviewer for Sphinx. I read Nell’s own poetry, in particular Starlight on Water (winner of the 2003 Aldeburgh Prize), with its marvellous Philpott poems, and a couple of stunning poems in The Dark Horse, which had been recommended to me by Grevel Lindop as the best magazine in the UK. (And whose editor, Gerry Cambridge was to become a HappenStance poet himself. )

In July 2008, Nell visited Manchester to read for Poets & Players and to stay at Linda Chase’s house, where I was by then a lodger. Several times thereafter, Linda suggested that I submit to HappenStance, and I eventually did in July 2009.

Good news! But soon after I received it, Nell emailed to ask if I’d heard from Michael Laskey. I had no idea what she meant, but the very next day Michael’s (paper) letter arrived, offering me the Smiths Knoll mentorship for 2010: a year of tuition culminating in pamphlet publication, offered on the basis of my submissions to the magazine over the previous few years (most of which had been rejected, of course: evidence in itself about the contingent nature of poetry publishing).

I immediately asked Nell what I should do, and she unhesitatingly said that I should accept the mentorship, despite all the editorial work she had already done on my behalf. The Probabilities of Balance was published by Smiths Knoll in December 2010.

Being mentored by Michael and Joanna Cutts was fantastic, and having a published pamphlet was affirming, even if it didn’t change my life. I received few reading invitations and zero begging letters from major publishers. Three things to mention, though. One is that Nell reviewed the pamphlet herself, for Sphinx, and gave it a lovely review. Another is that Fiona Moore reviewed it beautifully on Displacement, and wrote to tell me. We discovered we were both going to that year’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and agreed to meet up. Now we’re good friends, and see below.

Third, I did send my pamphlet to a well-established publisher, and received a very encouraging response, so that for a long time I was rather confident that they were going to publish a collection. But, after more than a year of interaction, something seemed to shift, and I sensed, before any formal announcement, that the decision would be No after all. I told Nell, who replied, ‘Well, if they won’t publish you I will.’

And so it has transpired. I delivered my first more-than-full manuscript by hand, at the 2014 Poetry Book Fair. Nell and I had our first editorial meeting during the 2014 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, when Nell told me her idea for the structure of the book. One of the more distinctive aspects, she’d noted, was that the language and ideas of my academic interests inform many of my poems.  So she set me a challenge, to organize the poems according to this undercurrent, and to find some scientific quotations to introduce each theme. The next version of my manuscript, was organized into four sections —Design, Word, Mind, Time — each headed with a quotation from a scientist I revere.

From here on, much of our work was done by email, but the most intense and detailed editorial discussions took place by telephone. Nell has a deal where the first hour of a landline conversation is free. Several times, we would ring off just shy of the hour, and begin again. Perhaps some authors wouldn’t enjoy such an attentive approach to editing, but I love it. I loved it with Joanna and Michael, and I loved it again with Nell. I’m sad it’s over; I hope it might happen again.

What were our phone conversations about? The works: choice of poems (did they belong? —something it seemed possible to judge even without knowing what it meant); order of poems (were they kind to their neighbours?); punctuation of lines; poem layout. Most of the discussion was about accuracy: a tiny adjustment of cross-hairs aiming at clarity, tone or balance. A few changes were bigger. We changed a prose poem to free verse,  partly because Nell worried that it might seem a fashionable token. I’m convinced this improved that poem, because of one line break. We centre-aligned one poem; such a taboo in some parts of poetry-world, but which seemed to us right, and a bit rebellious. We had fun: poetry is too important not to have a good laugh about it.

When we both thought the collection was almost done, it was sent to Charlotte Gann, whose helpful and encouraging comments we were both thrilled to receive.

‘Pattern beyond chance’ is a phrase from a poem. It was almost the first title I thought of, and a couple of friends approved, or didn’t disapprove. Which makes it sound as though I didn’t obsess over it. Let me correct that impression, by observing some of its properties. It chimes with my pamphlet title: probabilities in one, chance in the other, the first a phrase from a poem about my son, the second from a poem about my daughter. It rhymes with my publisher, Happen beyond Stance. It is an anagram of The Payne Concert Band.

Also, as it turned out, it prompted Nell to design a patterned cover which I’m very pleased with, and which could be no other main colour, once it was mentioned, than Payne’s Grey. HappenStance Press styles itself as ‘anti-blurb’, and the cover has only a single, short quote, from ... Fiona Moore! It’s a quote from her review of The Probabilities of Balance, before we knew each other at all, but I enjoy the way it seems to cock a little snook at convention.

The flap on the hardcover also has a short puff by Nell. The publication plan was for hardback only, but one more accident changed things: the printer messed up with the bindings of many copies, and then went bust before they could repair the damage. Now I have the rare privilege of being published simultaneously in soft and hard cover. I recommend buying one of each.

A last detail to mention is the font. I’m interested in fonts, the very idea of them. My first academic article (Green, T.RG. & Payne, S.J. (1983), The Woolly Jumper: Typographical problems of concurrency in information display) was published in a journal called Visible Language, adjacent to a paper by Douglas Hofstadter criticising the suggestion that font design could be fully understood (and represented on a computer) in terms of quantitative variation of stroke thickness, length and curvature, etc. Font is pattern, but more complex and mysterious a pattern than that. Hofstadter used to say that the challenge of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is to know what an A is.

Pattern Beyond Chance is set in Trinité. When Gerry Cambridge was preparing his HappenStance pamphlet on typesetting, The Printed Snow, Nell asked him to nominate a favourite font. Gerry mentioned Trinité as highly regarded by afficionados, but expensive. In another example of love trumping economics, Nell chose to mark HappenStance’s tenth birthday with the ‘crazy’ purchase of Roman Condensed and Roman Condensed Italic, Trinité No 2 .To my eyes, it’s beautiful, and a little strange. I read about it: it has no perfectly straight lines.

Pattern beyond Chance is out from HappenStance.

Aldeburgh: birds, poetry, swimming

Things to take to Aldeburgh:

Binoculars for watching birds on the Alde marshes; bird book

Shoes that will cope with mud and salt water

Hat, gloves, scarf (too warm for the gloves this year)

Book bag

Nytol to improve the chances of sleeping at all when there is so little time to do it

Elastic bands to put round porridge bags etc in containerless cottages

One poetry book to be read and thought over (Peter Riley’s Due North)

Swimming things

Fleece long enough to go over swimsuit to be halfway warm and decent on the way to/from the beach; mac long enough for same (and to wrap the towel) in rain. 

There’s not time during the festival to do much of these things except book buying and early morning swims, so I’ve stayed on with Jeri Onitskansky to write, walk etc for a whole week.

Aldeburgh mystery: when you’re out walking along the shore in the dark, what is the will-o’-the-wisp that sometimes appears out to sea?  Unlike fishing-boat lights, which move slowly in relation to where you are, it whizzes by in the opposite direction like a silent speedboat.

Wednesday 

This afternoon I walked out towards the Martello tower and then along the dyke round the first wide loop of the river Alde.   I met Anna Selby, Richard Scott and Richard’s partner Dan on the way, heading for Orford Ness.  They’ve stayed on too, with Ed and Renée Doegar and Chrissy Williams; various combinations of the six appear around town, in the pub or on the sea wall.  They have a tough jigsaw puzzle going and a crazily unliterary poetry-book card game involving vital statistics such as Amazon ratings and Google hits.  Only to be played when drunk… but still just sober enough to wonder why my card for Shakespeare’s Sonnets said number of poems: 174.  

Birds!  Several small flocks of Brent geese today (I had to look them up) cropping marsh-grass as if there were no tomorrow.  Little egrets, one close enough for me watch how it lifted each marsh-green foot high and splayed it down in what to human eyes is exaggerated care: half-delight, half-disgust.  Curlews carrying out precision surgery on the mud with their bills and one on the bank close by, surveying the river so that I could admire its chocolate brown back patterned with beige sand-ripples.  Their bubbling cry went up and down the river.  Oyster-catchers and a couple of redshank(s)**; more haunting cries.  A couple of herons stalking the mudflats.  Small pale-patterned waders scuttling around in a flock, too far off to see: turnstone?  A serious birder would know at once from the choreography.  Shelducks.  Some ducks too far away to identify and it was getting dark by then; teal?  Once a squeezy lapwing sound came from the flooded fields on my right.  Suddenlyzoom!highintheskyoverheadthirtyfortysmallbirdszoomingupriver.  Then sameagainmorezoom!!lowskimmingriverfollowingitscourse.  Zigzag mix of dark and light: dunlin? 

Two hours passed in no time.  The tide was coming in: less mud for the birds, now mere shapes whose dark or light was hard to see.  The trees towards Iken on the other side of the Alde glowed as the day darkened, their yellow leaves thinned to gold coins.  A marsh harrier was gliding and tumbling over the marsh in front.  Iken’s church and the big tower stood out romantically against dappled cloud behind which was one of those late skies you expect to turn red but glows neon white.  Later there was a small red glow where the Alde was headed.  I stumbled back inland by reeds along a stream, avoiding the wettest mud by its glimmer of the sky, finding my way by the pale feathery reed-heads and the rustling of their dry horizontal leaves. 

I was benighted and said so to (American) Jeri when I got back; had to explain it and Ah, knighted by the night!  she said. 

Walking along the Alde it occurred to me that the birdscape/riverland/birdsoundtrack was reeling out against the festival background: human voices in the head. 

Thursday

There were birds in some festival voices too.  John Burnside started his talk on birds in poetry by saying one of the best things of the festival.  When you go alone into the natural world, something happens to you; each time, each experience is different.  (Yes – the Alde walk!)  Then he read us Edward Thomas’ ‘The Unknown Bird’.   He talked about how birds can change in the imagination, and stand for something.  There was a blackbird night-singing in Berlin’s Tiergarten, and local English residents were going there to hear the ‘nightingale’.   That happened in the present day; John Clare had a similar anecdote from London’s outskirts. 

It is always good to hear about people’s favourite poets.  Burnside’s is, after Chaucer, Marianne Moore and he read ‘The Frigate Pelican’:

                                 He glides

  a hundred feet or quivers about

    as charred paper behaves——full

    of feints;

It’s also good to hear about their new discoveries but I didn’t catch the name of Burnside’s.  Youngish, American; Nick Lance or Rance?   Your search - "of the parrot and other birds that can speak" - did not match any documents.  It could be Nick Lantz, see here: worth following up.

Birds, he said, can help us express otherwise inexpressible aspects of personality or explore thoughts about the world.  He read ‘Evening Hawk’ by Robert Penn Warren. 

                                      His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look!   Look!   he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error , and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow.

That’s an extract from the middle.  I avoided choosing the end because the last line-and-a-bit is even more extraordinary, not to be quoted out of context. 

Burnside’s talk was at the Baptist Chapel in Aldeburgh – packed.  I loved the fact that there was a run of events there all afternoon but had to get back to Snape for Christine Webb and the buses didn’t work.  So I stood at the chapel gates and asked for a lift.  Some kind people got me there in time to hear Christine’s excellent short reading.  She chose a varied set of stand-out poems and threaded them all together perfectly.

More birds: Helen Macdonald was at the festival, standing in for Richard Mabey who was under doctor’s orders to stay away.  She and John Burnside held a Rialto-sponsored conversation about language and nature.  It was lovely to hear her read a passage from H is for Hawk, though I was sorry that she was presented solely as author of that book and not also for her first, little-known and so far only collection of poems, Shaler’s Fish, which I wrote about here a while ago.   Maybe that was her choice.  Anyway she told me afterwards that an American publisher is going to republish the poems.  They are difficult, dense and strikingly original.  They involve birds a lot (I wonder if John Burnside has read them?)  I hope she writes more one day. 

Macdonald told a story she’d read in Walter Benjamin: after the Fall, Adam forgot all the names of the animals and renamed them all a little wrong.  She and Burnside talked about taxonomy, the fungal life-networks under the forest floor, appropriating nature… and the literary selfie, ‘here I am in the natural world’.  Burnside’s recollection that the Sami have names for birds they eat; other birds are Bird.  Macdonald’s imagining of the hawk perspective – everything nameless, exquisitely detailed, in the eternal present.  She made a plea for difference: we tend, she said, to use nature as a mirror for our own concerns, reflecting back what we want it to.  But the non-human is different and it’s important for nature writing to address that. 

They asked themselves how to communicate looming disaster, from the absence of large lapwing flocks to the deadness of our romantic/pastoral landscapes to the science of global warming.  They didn’t have an answer, but in a way their conversation and Burnside’s bird talk were the answer: go on writing and communicating in whatever way you can, make whatever connections you have to make. 

Other Aldeburgh highlights.  Impassioned conversations about the poetry of Tony Hoagland (questions of attitude to race and women) and Choman Hardi (how can/should one present utterly horrifying material, what makes it work/not work as poetry).  Kim Addonizio: smart, sassy, and other such American words.  Her craft talk on turns in poems was smart too.  “No turn, no poem.”   Turns that engineer surprise and/or reflect the writer discovering something unexpected to say; turns that enact the poem’s meaning; epiphanic turns; rhetorical structures such as past/present or present/past or a 3-way switch.  She recommended a book, Engaging Poetic Turns by Michael Theune. 

Zaffar Kunial’s reading as part of New Voices – passionately low-key, down-to-earth and soaring; time and origins, love and loss – I think that will have been among many people’s highlights.  I bought his pamphlet after his Friday evening craft talk but unwisely left it on the dining-room table and have been looking for its forceful mid-green ever since.  It seems to have been taken hostage in an early-morning rushed departure in semi-darkness, and will be posted back by a very apologetic house-mate.  You can hear ‘Poppy’, one of the poems he read, here on Soundcloud.  He also gave a craft talk on line endings with examples from Seamus Heaney and ‘Q’, one of his own poems whose line lengths he changed.  Other people’s redrafting processes are fascinating.  The two beginnings are:

[early draft]

Somewhere (thank you, father)

over the hills,

through some trap door in my mind,

despite having no calling

to speak it, and hearing of it so long ago,

I know the Urdu ishq

is love…

[redraft]

Somewhere (thank you, father) over the hills,

through some trap-door in my mind, despite my having

no call to speak it, and hearing of it so long ago,

I know the Urdu ishq is love.

The first version feels dreamier, more detached; the second more intense, closer. 

More things: the other three New Voices.  Kei Miller’s craft talk on the image that doesn’t quite close (thus leaving a door open for the reader).  Helen Mort’s short take on Norman MacCaig (“the long haul to lucidity”, he called his poetic progress).  Both their readings.  Mexican poet Pedro Serrano’s reading voice.  All the close readings I went to – they are free, and always so interesting.  Festival founder Michael Laskey’s return, in the otherwise sad absence for urgent family reasons of new Festival Director Ellen McAteer.  Michael introduced some events just like in old times and when I told him how lovely that was he gave me a hug.  

The Rialto had a stall!  Strategically placed between the cafe entrance and the Recital Room.  Michael Mackmin heroically manned it for two days, with occasional help from Matt Howard and me.  (Michael and Matt are both serious birders so I'm hoping they will read this blog and answer some of my bird questions.)  We sold poetry!  Lots of Dean Parkin's festival-launched first collection The Swan Machine, and magazines and pamphlets too.  We made money!  And Michael was touched by how many people passed by and said good things about the magazine, or reminded him that he'd published their first ever published poem. (He published my first ever too, so I know how they feel.) 

More things: the stars, so clear, was it Saturday night?  Orion’s belt and sworded hip swinging out over the sea.  Staying up late round our table to talk.  Pub sessions in the Cross Keys.  Sitting in a bay window overlooking the sea listening to someone playing Bach on the piano.  Not sleeping.  And swimming: every day so far.  The first swim was a record with four of us – Joanna Clark, Hannah Lowe, Jeri Onitskansky and me.  One of us was in her underwear.   The sea was rough that day (yesterday too) but has mostly been beautiful, less cold than usual in this weirdly warm November but still cold enough to shock and then cradle and then numb…  That shock is the best cure I know for sleeplessness and hangover.  Panoramas of sky and sea, shingle and coastline.  Their detail: breaking-wave- and cloud-scapes. 

The Aldeburgh will-o-the wisp – I noticed one of them last night, and then… there was a dark triangle on the shingle, denoting a fisherman.  The light was at the far end of his long fishing-rod: not far out to sea at all, but tethered. 

Just as I was finishing this there was a knock on the door and there were Anna, Chrissy, Dan and Richard looking windblown and happy/sad, come to say goodbye.  (Chrissy's blog about the festival is here.)  Jeri and I have four more days that they don’t, stretching out...

Off for a swim now. Blue sky. 

**When are multiple waders singular, and when plural?