First Poem

People keep mentioning ‘Tarantella’ – it seems to be having a Moment.  My mental map for childhood memories can locate where I was when I first heard it, aged 7: in a classroom with walls the colour of the less lurid kind of mushy peas.  On one wall was a grid with our names down the side and x2, x3, x4 etc along the top.  Whenever one of us mastered a new times table, the relevant square in the grid was filled with a coloured star.  Or were the stars all gold?  The room faced south and I’m seeing the sun lighting up our stars, which made an interesting pattern, though one very unlike real stars. 

It didn’t matter who this man with a strange name was.  I don’t think I associated him with the Cautionary Tales.  The poem’s rhythms, rhyme, speed and descriptive power took root.  The pattern of the sounds went in and out like the dance.  I could see most of the poem though had trouble with “the wine that tasted of the tar”; how could this adult drink taste of the sticky stuff that melted on roads in the summer?  I can still see what I saw – the courtyard of an old, white-painted inn with several floors of wooden-railinged galleries, red flowers/leaves and everyone looking Spanish.  There wasn’t a picture, I’d never been abroad and we didn’t have a television at home.

Attachment to the romantic sublime in landscapes must start early… re-reading the poem brings back my visualisation of the second verse too.  I relished the abrupt change of mood to doom and gloom – all those long vowels, “more.. hoar.. falls”, etc, and the feet tramping in the dead sound of the words ending in d, “sound.. tread.. ground.. sound”.  Not knowing what had happened only drew me deeper in.  Probably not understanding all the words (muleteer, tedding, hoar) did too.  So, I think, did the idea of remembering something that couldn’t be retrieved from the past but  could be recreated on the page.      

Of course some of the above may be false memories, as dubious as the goldness of the stick-on stars.  But at least some of it’s valid; and above all I can remember the feeling of the experience – my first ever grown-up poem, and the first time I got what poetry could do.  Anyway, here’s ‘Tarantella’.  You can listen to Hilaire Belloc himself half-reading, half-singing it on the Poetry Archive.  There’s an interesting piece about him on the same page.    

Tarantella       by Hilaire Belloc

Do you remember an Inn,

Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

And the tedding and the spreading

Of the straw for a bedding,

And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,

And the wine that tasted of the tar?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?

Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,

Do you remember an Inn?

And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

Who hadn't got a penny,

And who weren't paying any,

And the hammer at the doors and the din?

And the hip! hop! hap!

Of the clap

Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl

Of the girl gone chancing,

Glancing,

Dancing,

Backing and advancing,

Snapping of a clapper to the spin

Out and in –

And the ting, tong, tang, of the guitar.

Do you remember an Inn,

Miranda?

Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;

Miranda,

Never more.

Only the high peaks hoar:

And Aragon a torrent at the door.

No sound

In the walls of the halls where falls

The tread

Of the feet of the dead to the ground

No sound:

But the boom

Of the far waterfall like doom.

Charlton Lido, swimming poems, Waterlog

Londoners, especially south-east Londoners, where are you?  Why not here?  Forget all London’s other best-kept secrets, this is The One.  5pm on Good Friday: me and 3 other swimmers in this heated, 50 metre, open air pool. 

Swim on your back and align yourself by the clouds – not many of them recently, instead blue sky which goes up, and up, and up.  Swim on your front and, if the sun’s out, watch the net of light-ripples on the pool floor.  In calm conditions, there are extra bright points of light where ripple lines intersect, reproducing the knot pattern of a fishing-net.  You, shadowy swimmer, are the fish, or, as you spread your arms/legs, Leonardo’s (wo)man in a circle.     

The pool floor and sides are a perfect pale, coolish blue.  Black lines down the centre of each lane have the fat certainty of masking tape.  At lane end they make a T-junction and break into dots (why is this satisfying?)  The water is heated to 25oC, which makes it a lot warmer than the air on a cold day like today, yet refreshing in hot weather.

Plodding up and down the quaint but dirty and run-down 25-yard local indoor pool can be a slog, though the aftermath involves mild euphoria.  Lido swimming is something else entirely – exhilarating while it lasts, and 4 hours later I’m still on a high.  

Photo: News Shopper

The peripherals are unfussy – changing cubicles round the side, (hot) poolside showers, lockers if you need them, all surrounded by plain art deco brick.  There’s a café plus terrace upstairs, newly opened, which looks good.  There’s a gym and stuff too.  And new loos; when the lido first re-opened briefly a couple of summers ago, the loos were ruin porn, a reminder of the pool’s precarious survival through the last three decades. 

Next to the lido is a beautifully kept small park – more a garden, really – full of blossom trees, birds, lavender hedges for the summer, and formal flower beds.  Today there was a single yellow rose, fully out. 

Anyway the lido is back now and is going, they say, to be open all year round… but each time I’ve been there in the last month since it re-opened, usually at lunchtime on a sunny weekday, there’s only been a handful of swimmers.  Last summer it opened for a few weeks and was so packed in the hot weather that you could scarcely spread a towel.  I’m afraid that if people don’t visit out of season, it’ll go back to the summer-only opening of former days.  The lido website is here, with a map, directions etc. 

People, go, it is heaven!  It’s also part of the much-vaunted and much-criticised Olympic legacy. 

***

Walking and poetry go together; swimming and poetry not so much.  There’s something about the swing of the walking legs, beat of the feet, beat of the heart that invites thoughts into a pattern.  But I love the rhythms of swimming, the sweep and frog-kick of breast stroke or the different water-wheels of front and back crawl.  Being in the semi-alien element of water does inspire poems. 

This is an extract from ‘Going Swimmingly’, from Katherine Pierpoint’s collection Truffle Beds (1995) which has several swimming-pool poems. The whole poem is here. 

Sheer weight and size of water!

Remembering some geography and its clean, cross-section diagrams–

The sea is an upside-down mountain of water,

An upturned yogi

Alive with pulling, fluid muscles;

A pressing city of water; a universe;

The town pool is an inverted block of flats, something

Gathered and gently milling. Container for a small revolution.

Hannah Lowe’s Chick also has a few.  This is from ‘What I Think About When I’m Swimming’:

           It is boring to watch me swim.

What is beautiful are the tiles

           with their century of rust,

                       the pool spread like a sunken ballroom,

marbled with the winter sun and here,

           the deep end’s edge

where I hang breathless,

           wet and warm and sad…

Then there’s Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, not poems but prose, a sort of diary of a swim through Britain.  He lived in north Suffolk in an old house with a moat (not that uncommon around there – you can drive around with an ordnance survey map, finding all the houses with boomerang-shapes or squares of water – moats must have been bang on trend there for a while).  The book opens with him swimming in the moat, with a “frog’s-eye view” of a rainstorm.  Mostly his swim-journey was about getting away from lengths but he did visit some pools, and expressed hope (in the late 90’s) that the re-opening of some famous lidos might signal a move back towards public provision.  Here he is in Parliament Hills Lido, almost alone on a sunny, cold November day:

..you can breathe and move in perfect rhythm, so the music takes over.  Mind and body go off somewhere together in unselfconscious bliss, and the lengths seem to swim themselves.  The blood sings, the water yields; you are in a state of grace, and every breath gets deeper and more satisfying.  You hunker down and bury yourself in the water as though you have lived in it all your life, as though you were born to it, and thoughts come lightly and easily as you swing up and down in the blue.  The sublime word ‘swimmingly’ is born of such moments; so is the Greek word ekstasis, root of ‘ecstasy’, which means simply to be outside your own body – exactly the state you achieve in a cold-water swim.  If you tread on air on your way from the pool, it is because you are floating somewhere above your corporeal self. 

   The beauty of a swimming pool is in its graphic simplicity, framing the contrasting, exquisite complexity of the snaking, opalescent mosaic of wave-forms projected on the bottom.  What you are seeing is changing so fast your eye can never quite catch up with it.  In every way you are dazzled.  It is not water you perceive so much as light, and how water can play with it.

Charlton Lido is open throughout the Easter weekend.

Selling a poetry pamphlet

It’s almost a year since the first box of The Only Reason for Time arrived in the post.  I wrote then about how the pamphlet had been put together, and more about the editing process in Chapter 8 of The HappenStance Story, in which Helena Nelson (Nell) gives an annual update on the ups and downs of being a small poetry publisher. 

This is about what’s happened since publication, mostly from the perspective of sales.  If that seems mercenary: poetry without sales won’t butter the publisher’s parsnips.  I reckon my experience was typical for a moderately successful pamphlet.  I’m hoping some people might find this useful, and/or comment on their own experiences.     

The print run was 300 copies, fairly substantial for the micro-world of poetry pamphlet publishing (any novelist reading this will now have swooned in horror).  Around 50 went to libraries, reviewers, PBS, etc.  Nell and I sold around 230 copies in less than 2 months. Then we declared the pamphlet sold out.  Nell wisely advised me to keep some, for people I’d meet in the rest of life.

Selling out fast was very nice.  But becoming, so quickly, a published poet without a book was a shock.  Nell and I discussed reprinting.  HappenStance pamphlets are lithographically printed, so a reprint costs as much again.  There was still demand for the pamphlet but it wasn’t clear whether this would anything like absorb the minimum print run of 200 copies; and it might fall off entirely by the time reprinting happened.  I did have one reading a month lined up for the autumn, though, and it was going to be awkward without any books. 

Nell reprinted three months later, in September.  We’ve sold over half the reprint and are still selling several each month.  Nell describes this as having a long tail. 

Overall, I’ve been responsible for about a third of our sales.  There’s an incentive for HappenStance authors to sell as many as possible, because they get 25 free copies in lieu of payment and pay half-price beyond that. 

My main concern was whether Nell would break even, which she will have done on the immediate costs of printing, cover design, p&p for the 50 free copies, etc, and I hope also on my share of overheads such as running the HappenStance website.  But if one costed her time, there’s no way it could happen.  I wonder if there are any pamphlet publishers for whom that isn’t true.       

The pamphlet sold well, by this micro-world’s standards.  There are various reasons why,  some of which feed into each other:

***HappenStance subscriber system.  For £10 a year, subscribers get a free pamphlet, reduced prices, newsletters and – above all – feedback on poetry submissions for people who want to get published.  In effect, Nell is providing a reading service which is extremely good value.  There are a few hundred subscribers, potential readers for each new book. 

***HappenStance profile.  Nell is an established poet herself who networks extensively including on social media, writes a weekly blog with a big following, and has a good reputation for publishing mostly first pamphlets.  Some of her authors have gone on to publish first collections with larger publishers. 

***HappenStance website and marketing.  The website is easy to navigate and buy from.  See above for social media.  Nell produces coloured flyers for each new publication, with a poem on one side and info on the other.  She says that ‘The Shirt’, the poem she put on mine, sold the pamphlet many times over; and that choosing the right poem makes a difference to sales.  Also relevant, in my view, was the flyer’s paper – a delicate, textured green, the colour of apple snow.  

***The pamphlet’s appearance.  (OK, there are a lot of nice looking poetry pamphlets.)  A combination of plainness – cream paper, plain type etc – with a beautiful cover image and deep green endpapers.  At one reading late last year the generous host flourished his copy of my pamphlet and invited everyone to buy it, partly on the strength of that green… but alas the printers had run out of green and the new lot have rich red endpapers.  Audience feedback: they preferred the green!

***The pamphlet’s subject matter.  Nell thinks this drew people in.  I’d include here her short, enticingly unblurblike description that went on the website, flyer, back of pamphlet, etc.  She doesn’t use famous poet blurbs.

***This blog, which had been going for 2 years by the time the pamphlet came out.  Its specialist readership is from the group most likely to buy poetry pamphlets.  The piece on putting the pamphlet together got many hits and multiple Facebook shares, and a lot of supportive comments.  A blog provides free marketing space (see on the right).   [Update, mid-April: Nell says that this blog piece - the one you're reading now - has generated some sales, most of them together with HappenStance subscriptions, and she's now got fewer than 50 copies left.]

***Knowing people in the poetry world – from magazine editors to poetry tutors to people I’d been in workshops with, some for several years, around which strong friendships can develop.    

***Facebook: despite my low profile and limited number of friends, it was useful for spreading news, sharing links and organising the launch.  I should probably have been tweeting but wasn’t.  Nell was. 

***Poems published in various magazines.  Probably not enough to get name recognition, but enough to have some good credits inside the pamphlet, and improve the chances of getting reviewed, see below.  I’d also written a few reviews.  I’ve never been placed in a competition, and rarely go in for them; do people who have had competition successes think this helps book sales? 

***Aldeburgh Eight seminar.  I did this in 2011, and its excellent reputation probably led to a bit of name recognition.

Chrissy and Fiona launching

***The launch, which was a joint one with Chrissy Williams, someone I was proud to pair with, she is such a good poet.  Launching with someone else was fun, too – decisions and problems were shared, and it was much less scary only being half the centre of attention.  It was smart of Nell to publish us together.  While our guest lists overlapped a lot, each of us brought in people the other wouldn’t have.  I know that some of my friends bought my pamphlet when they arrived, and Chrissy’s after the reading.  We had a great venue – upstairs in the Crown in Clerkenwell, with ornate mirrors reflecting the tall windows onto trees on the Green, still bare in that cold spring – and it was packed, with a true launch atmosphere of supportive excitement that I won’t forget.  Sales: nearly 60 pamphlets. 

***Readings: at the Shuffle, the Torriano, Sweet Thursday (in Richmond), Words & Ears (in Bradford-on-Avon), the Troubadour, Made in Greenwich (local art gallery), Poets’ Café (in Reading).  Around a third of my sales came from these readings, between 2 and 10 from each.     

***HappenStance poets: they tend to be mutually supportive, and the experience of having stable companions was one of the unexpected pleasures of being published.  Several came to the launch and other events.  Tim Love and Matthew Stewart both reviewed the pamphlet on their blogs. 

***Bookshops: I didn’t even try.  I knew that even if they said yes, I’d moreorless have to pay them to stock the pamphlet.  It’s only for sale at Made in Greenwich which at last count had sold 7 copies.

***Reviews.  Publicity makes reviewers / review editors aware, so they are more likely to review.  Reviews generate publicity.  I was lucky – the first review was by John Field on his excellent blog Poor Rude Lines.  Like several later reviewers, he had insights I could never have had.  One, blogger Gareth Prior, bought the book because he’d read John’s review.  There have been nine reviews in blogs and online magazines, plus various other mentions online, eg Anthony Wilson named it as his pamphlet of the year.  There have been four reviews that I know of in print magazines, three of which I’d had poems in.  One good thing about the online/print mix is that online reviews tend to appear relatively quickly, filling the long gap between publication and most print reviews.  It’s hard to make a direct link between reviews and sales.

***Other recognition.  The pamphlet didn’t get on the Michael Marks shortlist (yes, I was disappointed, along I’m sure with everyone else who had a pamphlet just out).  Nor did it appear in a TLS poetry pamphlet round-up.  The PBS selectors recommended it alongside the Pamphlet Choice (which was Mimi Khalvati’s Earthshine – I don’t often want to eat poetry, but this book has something delicious about it).  I doubt that had any effect on sales.  And – a big surprise…

Launch

***Inclusion in the Guardian’s pre-Xmas round-up of the best poetry of 2013, alongside various full collections by much bigger publishers.  I wonder how the reviewer came across it; maybe he’d been reading my critical gender audits of Guardian poetry reviews.  You might think this would boost sales.  Not much: barely a dozen through the Guardian Bookshop, which isn’t set up to deal with small publishers, as Nell and a present-buying friend of mine found to their exasperation.  But it appeared to stimulate sales on the HappenStance website, and Nell sold a few after recounting the Guardian Bookshop story at an Edinburgh event (no doubt she made the audience laugh a lot).  So total extra sales maybe 25-30.  One interesting phenomenon was the availability of The Only Reason for Time on bookselling sites on the internet.  I happened to search for it a couple of weeks before the Guardian piece, and found several copies – all costing more than from HappenStance.  Afterwards they all disappeared. 

***Getting new poems into magazines, with mention of the pamphlet in the biography.  Missed opportunity: I sent nothing out between late 2012 and summer last year, and then of course there was a time lag before publication.  Nell thinks that doing this does make a difference. 

***Rialto editing.  This didn’t start until the autumn, but may have added the occasional sale. 

That’s a lot of writing, for a few hundred sales.  Many of the factors above feed into each other.  People would be doing case studies, perfecting formulae and drawing flow charts, if poetry was worth millions.  Of course if you’ve read this far you may think it is anyway.    

Launch photos by Bernadette Reed.