Liz Bassett poems at wordhappening

Clydebuilt Reading

My Clydebuilt group will be reading at the CCA on 3rd May - please come along. Mentored by the wonderful Gerry Loose, we had an adventurous year, and produced a diverse range of poems. Come and hear us read some of them upstairs in the CCA at 7PM. It's a free event and it's gonnae be a good un!

OAt last I'm allowed to say (now that the prize giving has happened) that I won a commended place in this year's Bridport Poetry Prize! As the judge was none other than Carol Ann Duffy I'm an extremely happy bunny. It's amazing to think she read one of my poems, never mind picked it out as a good 'un. So thankyou CAD, thankyou Bridport and your dedicated panel of readers, and thankyou Frances, the fabulous Bridport administrator and all round star who organises everything, and then some. I couldn't go to the prize-giving on Saturday because it fell on the day of my brother's wedding, but I'm looking forward to receiving my copy of the anthology in the post.

Here's the poem:

One step at a time

My grandfather stops on the stairs

00000to pick up

0000000000a thin white hair

- it is the evening perhaps

and he touches the bed-warmer on the wall

the promise of aired sheets; of sleep

held in its banjo of copper and oak -

or maybe the morning, and he climbs

away from the kitchen's chilly tiles,

the cup and saucer, rinsed

and draining on the board -

and picks up

oooooothe thin white hair

and offers it up to the light in the way

we might hold a photograph

or a wedding ring; as if it is the light

from the morning street or the gas fire

or the desk-lamp, wet against the night's window

that will show us what it means to us.

oooooooooooooooooooEver since she died

he's been finding these traces of her, caught

on his coat, or resting in the air

like the words he can't quite hear;

it's like falling in love

oooooooonly somehow in reverse

- those promises we read in one another;

a smile, a touch, nudging his chest -

and yet, these are not harbingers of love

so much as parting gifts, that leave him

startled and knowing himself once more

in the spaces between the clock's slow chimes

or the warmth of his body

edging through the bed.

OOOOOOOOOOOOO

I'll be reading at the CCA, Glasgow on June 16th as part of the Clydebuilt showcase, hosted by the Scottish Writers Centre. Clydebuilt is an apprenticeship scheme run by St Mungo’s Mirrorball and Glasgow City Council. I've been part of the Nor'wester group (Clydebuilt 4), along with Amy Anderson, Janine McEwan, Kathrine Sowerby and Geoff Cooper, all mentored by Gerry Loose. We'll be reading some poems and selling our little pamphlet. It's a free event, so please come along and lend us your ear.

CCA. 16th June 2011. 7pm. Free.

I just had to post this interview with Kay Ryan. Rarely have I heard someone talking about poetry and its process in such an elegant and compelling way.

Ok. So I said I'd come up with some new year challenges, and when better for that than February? I've been looking for a charity to support this year - something beautiful, tiny, right on the mark - and here it is. A micro-finance project in Kathmandu, Nepal. It's so simple and tiny it squeaks. The Quilts for Nepal Appeal. The Director is James Hopkins and his plan is very simple. Women make beautiful quilts. He buys them outright. He then sells each quilt for $140 (about £86). This is the exact cost of sending a child from the camp to school for one year. It covers: school fees, two uniforms, two pairs of shoes, one backpack. Result: The women get to support themselves and their families without begging. The kids get an education and a better future. I told you it was good.

So where does the new year challenge come in? Firstly - running. You are allowed to chortle. Last year saw me complete my first two 10K races. I'll be running again this year. Secondly - I'll donate my margin on my pamphlet How to Wire a Life for Love. If you've been thinking of buying one, now is the time. If you've slept with it under your pillow (or propped up that wonky table with it) and you need a new copy, now is the time. Email me and I'll post it out £5.50 inc p&p.

(*thanks* to my friend Iso in Nepal :)

What a wonderful day! I've just got home from an all day writing event to mark the beginning of spring on the 1st of February. The day was dedicated to Brigid, patron saint of poetry, smith-craft and healing, and organised by Lapidus, an organisation working with words to promote health and wellbeing. Held in the calming and embracing Maggie's Centre in Glasgow, the day began with two tellings of Brigid's story by storytellers Allison Galbraith and Margot Henderson. Margot also ran a workshop about the process of writing poetry, in which it was lovely to share thoughts about how poems are made. In the afternoon I took part in a workshop with Donny O'Rourke. His knowledge and insights about the poems he shared with us made for an invigorating and hugely rewarding afternoon. Both workshops were transformed by people's willingness to share ideas and energy so freely. There was a book launch of The Poet's Way by Manjusvara, and an open mic session complete with some wonderful songs. The day ended with a fire ritual to mark leaving the old behind and beginning the new. I've returned with a notebook full of things to look up and ideas to develop and a resolve to begin anew.

I had a lovely email last week from Elizabeth Welsh, a writer and editor in New Zealand, asking if she could post my poem Allotment up on her blog and link it to the Tuesday Poem blog. I am delighted! So here it is. And if you click on the quill it should take you to Tuesday Poem, a site well worth checking out for fresh poems each week.

I love these lost days between Christmas and the new Year. Time to walk around in slippers and make a mental note to do the hoovering tomorrow. Time to talk to friends on skype. Time to set new challenges for the new year (more on those later). And time to sit fiddling about with poems, dusting off some to send in to competitions next year, and editing others.

I spent this afternoon cutting up old poems and rearranging the sections to see what came out. This technique was used by William Burroughs amongst others, to generate new combinations of words. There's a film on youtube where he discusses it.

The process seems to work on the basis that a piece of writing is coherent and so the elements can be be moved and retain some of their connections even when in their new positions. It worked better on some poems than others, the outcome course, being combination of chance and decisions made in editing. Gerry Loose showed me this technique, and I was resistant at first because I thought it was a rather artificial way of treating a poem. I like it though. The results of the cut-up process remind me of the impression of poems you get when you hear them at a reading and carry away key elements some of which get muddled.

With my poems The Consultation seemed to work quite well - both the original and the cut-up version are below:

The Consultation

How little we know of those afternoons now
when you, who knew how to mull wine,
how to fix a bike, to wire a life for love,
sat in rooms on impossible chairs
learning to fold kind words into frankness.

Hands clasped to one side and elbows out
you were a parachutist falling to a waiting field;
fragile arms in firm parallels with the earth.

Some nights you lay like that in bed

and imagined the moment when we land:
when the ground folds up to meet our arms
as the sky turns sideways.

The Consultation (cut-up version)

How little we know how to fix.

You, who sat in rooms.
Firm parallels with learning to fold.

You lay like that in bed,

hands clasped.

The moment when you
were a parachutist for love,
folds up to meet fragile arms.

Sideways – how to wire a life.
Some nights you, on impossible chairs,
imagined out kind words.

The ground, waiting field;
the sky turned to earth.
One side and falling now.

I'm looking forward to reading at Shore Poets in Edinburgh this Sunday. Other readers are Frank Kuppner and Angela Mc Seveney, with music from Alan Coady. It promises to be good.

31st October 19:30 - 22:00

The Lot
4 - 6 Grassmarket Edinburgh

Admission £4 (concessions £3)

I'm very happy to be one of five Clydebuilt poets this year. This innovative poetry mentoring scheme is run by St Mungo's Mirrorball in conjunction with Glasgow City Council. We're working with port Gerry Loose in a series of workshops through the year. Working with other poets is contrast to my usual very solitary writing practice and I'm gaining from their feedback. Gerry's suggestions for poets to read is invaluable, and are taking me in new directions.

I'll be reading at St Mungo's Mirrorball on the 7th October alongside other Clydebuilt poets. 7pm. All welcome.

My new pamphlet, How to Wire a Life for Love, exists at last and it's beautiful - thanks to all the hard work of Jane McKie at Knucker Press and Angelica Kroeger for the lovely illustrations. The launch was on Thursday 20th May in Edinburgh at the Jazz Bar. It was a fantastic evening, with friends and family, and also a reading from Ken Cockburn, who was launching his pamphlet 'Reading the Streets' with Duende press. If you'd like to buy a copy of How to Wire a Life for Love, you can do so by going to KnuckerPress using this link or email me: liz_bassett73@hotmail.com.

Poem titles are difficult to decide on. You want something that sums up the poem, or better still, adds something to it. Sat there at the top of the poem the title leads the reader in and sets their mind running a particular way seconds before the poem begins. If you get the title right you can influence how the reader approaches your poem. It's a bit like stage lighting - you are effecting what light the poem plays out in. Titles are tricky though, you don't want to give too much away, or use them like labels. This week I've been finding the title for my pamphlet of poems. I met up with Jane McKie, editor of Knucker Press and we ran through possible lines and phrases from the poems looking for something that feels right for the group of poems together. It wasn't easy but we've settled on How to Wire a Life for Love, which is a line from the poem The Consultation. Angelica Kroeger has almost finished the illustrations and they are lovely. I'm working on the final edits with Jane now and we should be ready for publication by May.

Yesterday was the Bridport Poetry prize event. It was a beautiful sunny day. This year's competition was judged by Jackie Kay, and the short story competition judged by Ali Smith. It was a lovely event and a seriously good lunch! It was good to meet with the other prize winners and hear them read some of their work.

I was struck by the generosity and enthusiasm of both the judges, who seemed to have genuinely enjoyed reading and engaging with the poems and short stories. I came home clutching my copy of the anthology and am enjoying reading through it. Shameless plug: copies available from Amazon or the Bridport website. Travelling down to Bridport gave me the opportunity to see my friend Jacob and his lovely family in Bristol. It was lovely to see him.

This is the archive for visitors to the site over the last 12 months.

I shall be going along to Reading Allowed at Tchai Ovna on 13th November to listen to some poems and do a quick reading myself. The evening runs from 8 - 10pm at 42 Otago Lane, Glasgow, (off Gibson Street). See you there!

Time for a plug! My poem The Consultation has been published by White Leaf in their anthology Poets from Britain and America. There are some great poems packed into this little book, and I'm delighted to be part of it. Copies available from Amazon.

I had a lovely time at the launch of Twinset at Glasgow's Women's Library on the 19th. I just love the space of the library anyway, with the archive all boxed up and ready for its move to the Mitchell, and the books and the brightly painted loos, complete with a bicycle. (Who's bicycle is that?!) Add music and people milling around and new books and a gin and tonic and I'm happy indeed. Run by Jane McKie, Knuckerpress is fast gaining a reputation for beautifully produced pamphlets, and Twinset is no exception.

I'm still singing along to tunes from The Second Hand Marching Band gig last night. Mainly in my head, but every now and again I break out into a chorus on the train or in a lecture. Good, good stuff, and lovely people.

The Orange

Today I bought five cups and saucers
from the charity shop. I like them;
they remind me of the orange tulips I bought you,
of holding them underground on the Circle line.

That night you told me about the photo
of your grandfather, how after the war he cut a hole
where his chest had been so he could stay
framed on the wall in his uniform.

The next night I sat in bed and peeled an orange
so I could hold its fleshy heart up to the light;
so I could feel how heavy it had been inside its skin.

In postwar Germany the display of nazi symbols was forbidden by law. It was common practice to cut a hole in photographs of family members in uniform, in order to remove the medals so that the photo could be kept on display in the home.

The exams are over and I have some time to write. In the meantime, this is a poem I wrote for a good friend a few years ago. It's just been published in The Red Wheelbarrow, 17.

This painting of a peeled orange is by Michael Naples from Illinois, and captures the orange just how I imagined it, partly translucent, but heavy.

So why is it that when you're unwell you end up reading all those books from when you were a kid or a teenager that you've carried around with you ever since? Carried around literally in boxes from college room to rented room to first house, and metaphorically too. These books just sit there on the shelf and at the back of your mind kind of waiting for you to get that high temperature and aspirin induced haze that lets you give yourself permission to sit around in bed and read. For me it's like entering spaces and landscapes I'd half forgotten but which are important to me. It is somehow like getting to know yourself again. Now there's the web it's also possible to find interviews like this wonderful one with Alison Bechdel for the Rutgers Reading Series. Her reaction to the last question is magical.

Labels: Alison Bechdel

Ok. I gave in and went to the doctor. Thank goodness for Amoxycillin. After three weeks of throat and ear infection I'm feeling seriously grateful to live somewhere where I can just go to the GP and pick up a prescription. I don't know why I'm so stubborn - I should have gone weeks ago. For the rest of the time it's revision for the anatomy and pathology exams and no chance of thinking about writing. I'd love to be able to sit down with a big sheet of paper and just scribble ideas.

There is always reading though, and I'm reading Michelle Margorian's Goodnight Mr Tom, my absolute favourite book when I was a child. There's something immensely comforting about reading it - especially from the same copy. I realise that when I read it as a 10 year old I imagined the layout of the cottage and the village slightly differently than how it is described, and now I can't see it any other way. Never underestimate how strong the imagination is, or our power to hold on to imagined or remembered landscapes.

A new year and it's been lovely here on the coast. We went for a walk along the beach in the sunshine and the haze. There were lots of people out walking their dogs and enjoying having somewhere to walk. It's quite cold though - it was good to get back to scrambled egg and smoked salmon on toast! The sun is setting now behind a bank of blue clouds that have sat in front of Arran all day, and the sky is milky pink and orange. Feeling very wintery.

We watched Joanna Lumley's journey to see the Northern Lights last night - we may not have a telly but there's always i-player! The scenery was fantastic. As you'd expect, she was a fabulously enthusiastic presenter, carrying with her a childhood copy of Ponny the Penguin and a sketchpad for pastel drawings of blood-red fishing huts with pale blue window frames. Ok, so this little penguin saw the Aurora Australis not the Northern Lights, but out in Malaysia the young Joanna Lumley didn't realise that. We took the same train from Trondheim to Bodo back in 2003 when we travelled through Norway by train. It made me want to go back to Norway. Maybe that's a resolution for 2009.

Labels: Northern Lights, Ponny the Penguin

I was very saddened by the news of Adrian Mitchell's death just before Christmas. I remember meeting him fleetingly back in 1996 when a group of us gravitated to London the summer after graduating. One of our group got the job of house-sitting for one of the Poetry on the Underground group and they very generously turned a blind eye to the fact that quite a few of us spent that summer dropping in and sleeping on the floor. I remember that Kirsteen had a pet rabbit called Banjo and that I met Adrian Mitchell one afternoon as I helped to carry Banjo in his cage through Adrian's house to the garden. I can't remember why now. I rather think that he had kindly agreed to give him lawn space. I remember Adrian being very smiley and completely unpeturbed as we trooped through with this rabbit. He just nodded and smiled for us to carry on as if this was perfectly normal for a Sunday afternoon. A lovely man.

A shameless plug ( - if not here, then where?) Two of my poems are being published in The Red Wheelbarrow, a magazine of poetry published by the School of English at the University of St Andrews. Issue 17, that's issue 17 folks, available from their website: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~redbarrow/.

A wonderful evening yesterday at the Glasgow Planetarium listening to Liz Lochead and Jim Carruth read poems about stars. Some old favourites of mine such as Elizabeth Jennings' Delay, and others that were new to me. The selection would make a great book, or better still, CD. It was magical.

Douglas Dunn's reading at St Mungo's Mirrorball the other week was fantastic. I'd not heard him read before. I remember reading his poems at school - I loved the poems about Terry Street - the way objects are transformed in them - the trowel catching the light or the lawnmower becoming a sign of hope for a better life. I think his poems are metaphysical in that way.

I'm really enjoying hearing poets read now that I'm up in Ayrshire. The fabulous Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh hosts wonderful readings through its Encounters series. I really enjoyed hearing John Burnside the other week, and Kathleen Jamie is going to read a week on Thursday.

A blustery day at home working my way through lecture notes and feeding washing through the machine. From the top of the garden I can look out across the sea to Arran and watch the clouds blowing in. Most of our weather seems to come in from the west and today it's curling the sheets over and over on the line. I love the way all the birds (field birds and seabirds) seem to get muddled up here. When I sat on the bench looking at the sea I could hear a robin (like a coin chipping away at a glass, but wetter!) and when I turned around to look into the field behind the house it was full of seagulls.

CANDLE FOR TIBET

I'll be lighting a candle as part of the Light Protest on August 7th. This peaceful protest is being organised online and more information can be found at:

http://www.candle4tibet.org

Here is an excerpt from their website:

August 7th 2008 is the day before the opening ceremony of The Olympic Games in Beijing. On this day we aim to create the world's greatest LIGHT PROTEST, when at least 100 million people from all over the world will light a candle and say YES to freedom in Tibet!

All you are asked to do is to light a simple candleon August 7th at 9 pm in your own time zone.

nnnnn

Light the Candle at your home, workplace or in a public place. Put the candle in your Window, or on your desk, or anywhere else where other people will see it and hopefully do the same.

nnnnn

Our light protest will be seen by billions on TV screens all over the world on the day the Beijing Olympics open. We are not against the Olymipcs or anything else for that matter, we stand for Freedom.

On the following day we will issue letters to every head of state in the world to tell him exactly how many people from his country wish Tibet to be free. We will also demand that each one of them will act for the freedom of Tibet.

We will also issue letters to the general secretary of UN, the government in Beijing and to other global organizations with data on global participation.

The post delivered a pamphlet today for me to review for Sphinx. This magazine and website all about poetry pamphlets has gone from strength to strength. I don’t know how Helena Nelson finds the time to produce this as well as run HappenStance press, but I’m very glad she does. Reading through the pamphlet this morning and jotting down first impressions, I realised how valuable this process of reading and responding to other people’s writing is. Writing poetry can sometimes feel such a solitary undertaking and yet there is so much to learn from and enjoy in reading other people’s poems. Feeling that you are part of a larger community of people who enjoy poems is valuable in itself. Maybe it’s time I got writing again…

I've just found out I have some poems published online in Agenda's Broadsheet 9. This is a great extra that Agenda produce alongside their printed mag. I especially like it because it features artwork alongside the poems. You can download the pdf via the link below: http://www.agendapoetry.co.uk/documents/Broadsheet9.pdf

A gorgeous morning in Matlock - one of those autumn mornings when the sun picks out the yellows and reds of the leaves and the sky is a milky, hazy white. Writing this before I catch my train back down to Hertfordshire. The festival was lovely, especially meeting the other people in the anthology and pamphlets. A huge thankyou to Alex and his sons for all their hard work producing and running the press and the festival. It'll definitely be a festival worth looking out for in the future.

I find talking to other people who are also finding time for writing in the spaces in their lives really positive. It's always great to swap email and myspace addresses and perhaps exchange drafts of poems in the future.

There were a range of poets, styles and subject matters in the poems and the variety was part of the pleasure. I always learn a lot by listening to people who write in very different ways to myself. This week I enjoyed and learned from Katrina Naomi and Linda Cash in this way. I especially enjoyed readings by Pat Borthwick, Dawn Wood, Stephen Wilson, Jo Haslam and Judy Brown. Judy has a pamphlet, Pillar of Salt, published last year, and Pat was one of the winners of the competition this year with her pamphlet Wave. Jo Haslam is published by Smith Doorstep. Read them, read them, read them!

A copy of the Templar Anthology arrived in the post this week. It's great to see some of my poems in print - a lovely feeling! Copies are available via the Templar website or Amazon.

http://www.templarpoetry.co.uk/Solitaire.html

I'll be heading up to the Derwent Poetry Festival in October for the launch and to see Simon Armitage and Jean Sprackland, amongst others, read. Details of the Festival are on the Templar website.

My poems reached the shortlist for the Templar pamphlet competition and I’m absolutely delighted. It’s fantastic to have poems selected, and especially so as the judge this year was Jean Sprackland, as I admire her writing very much. Three poems will be published in the competition anthology in October.

A week since I got back from Westray, a beautiful island in Orkney. A week spent watching gannets and puffins on the cliffs, trawling the beaches for bird skulls and eggshells, listening to radio Orkney (97.3 fM, 7.30am – try it), stewing large quantities of rhubarb and ginger (rhubarb is about the only fruit that grows there), and climbing into a box bed by a log fire at the end of the day.

The weather was sunny, and hey, I have thermals. I loved it and came back wondering if I could live in a small community like Westray. As we stood on the deck of the ferry, singing into the wind and hatching plans for self-sufficiency and island life, fulmars coasted alongside just above our heads. Perhaps they knew that island life can’t support a hospital worker and a research scientist with no discernable practical skills, but if they did, they didn’t let on.

It’s been a month or two of discovering new books, art and music that makes me feel excited. I was fortunate to stumble

across a talk given by Maggi Hambling at new Hall, Cambridge in April. Some of her wonderful ink drawings were exhibited at the Fitzwilliam museum, alongside one of a series of paintings of waves, which are extraordinary. Listening to Maggi Hambling talk about her life and painting was inspiring as the two are completely entwined. She said that two of the most important things she had been told were to be her own critic rather than listen to others, and to make her painting her friend and paint no matter how she felt.

It’s so long since I’ve written on here, and so much has happened since the summer, although, until recently, not much writing of poems. I lost my nerve for a while and it’s taken time and space to put the rejection slips to one side and enjoy looking at an open sheet of paper again. So, this entry could be a splurge about the risks of rejection, and the power of poetry magazines. But let’s not! Instead, let this be a big smile about connection through poems. This has happened to me in two simple and solid ways in the last few months. The first was a poem on a poster on Glasgow’s SPT subway in a project run with the Scottish Poetry Library. I stood reading Rosemary Dobson’s poem Folding the Sheets and missed a

train but remembered why I love poems so much. Then I watched two elderly ladies stand there in their macs and clear plastic hair protectors talking through the poem. They were canny enough to catch their train though. Maybe there’s something about plastic hoods. I might get hold of some for when I’m in Glasgow in May!

The second point of connection has been through a couple of poetry mailing lists and of course

the wonderful Guardian online Poetry Workshop. Whenever I can’t write I look through the workshops. They’re a fantastic resource. It’s also a great way of accessing feedback from a varied group of poets. For a more light hearted online poetry challenge, with feedback from other posters, I enjoy Helena Nelson’s Worddoctors site. Follow the Bulletin Board link at the foot of the page and look for the weekly Polympic challenge.

July

I have to tell you about a pamphlet of poems that is out this month from HappenStance Press called Uncertain Days. The poems are by Gill McEvoy and this is her

first collection. They span her life from childhood to her years living with cancer and are remarkable for their imagery, humour and humanity. Some of them are naturally more solidly edited than others but they make for an uplifting and thoroughly enjoyable collection. You can get hold of a copy via the HappenStance website.

I drove out to the Fen very early one Sunday morning to join the BTO volunteers at Wicken and watch them catch and place identification rings on birds. We arrived in the pouring rain and waited in the shelter with everyone waiting for the clouds to pass. Bird ringing turned out to be a gentle and precise sport practised with an eclectic bag of equipment. The volunteers sat on deckchairs behind a 1960s picnic table on which they had set out weigh scales, identification books, an alarm clock and old tobacco tins containing the tiny pre-numbered aluminium rings in various sizes for different birds.

Every half an hour we walked out to the nets strung out between

the hedges like outsized tennis nets. These had pockets in which the birds lay safely until they were picked out and placed in cotton draw-string bags the volunteers wore around their necks. Back in the shelter the birds were weighed and their wings gently splayed out to examine their feathers. Warblers, blackbirds, bluetits, a robin, and a woodpecker were all caught and carefully ringed before they were released. I wrote a poem about a lovely grasshopper warbler that I released. They have an amazing call like a mechanical grasshopper; like a fishing reel.

The spectrogram or sound map of their call is from www.avisoft.com/sounds.htm

April

One of my poems Washday is going to be included in the Second Light anthology MY MOTHER THREW KNIVES: poems about women’s lives. I’m really happy about it! It’s

part of a group and relies quite a bit on information and plot from other poems, so I’m delighted that someone felt it made enough sense to stand on it’s own too. I’ve been making a few alterations and tightening it up a little. I'm not quite happy with the transition from the second to third stanza yet though:

Washday
Imagining my great-grandmother, Bertha Pitt 1879-1951

Each week they arrive, the clothes of strangers;
the tongue tied bundles, the chattering baskets,
until she can’t see where one ends and another begins,
where a sleeve leaves go of a cuff,
or where a tramline of shirt-front branches
as a collar unbuttons from a neck.

On Mondays she washes them,
pounds and mashes and sorts and boils,
and mangles and hangs the clothes of strangers,
a stream of soap washing through the pocket
of garden that is hers; through the brookweed,
the starry saxifrage, the vanilla and hay of bedstraw.

And in the evening she sits under the soapy sky,
by the breathing sheets with marks like moths
where bodies have turned slow flights across nights
to fall and wake and land where they slept,
as brick-harboured, the house lists,
and dandelion heads love her, love her not.

© Liz Bassett 2005

Second Light Network are bringing out this small anthology in the summer alongside the main publication Images of Women. Further details of both can be found on their website.

Picture credit: www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk

March

I find it takes a few days for an idea to take shape and begin to turn into a poem. At the end of March I was able to write really slowly, taking a few days annual leave that I had left over. I

wanted to write about a story someone told me about a man who looked after an elephant when she retired from a circus. He noticed that wherever the circus stopped the elephant’s skin turned the colour of the local mud. In Dixie and Mr George retire to Whipsnade Zoo I wrote about the places I imagined the circus going to and the colour and texture of the mud. I was struck by how the poem took on lines depending on where I wrote it. During an afternoon in the university library in Cambridge on a very windy day watching people battle past on bikes I wrote about it as if it was under water. It was a real luxury to be able to move around and write from different places on the same poem.

February

Norway was fantastic – it snowed and snowed. Julie emailed a few days back and said that they’ve had the most snow since 1968, and it’s still falling. I found I was able to edit some poems

there. Perhaps being in a new place helped me to see them in a different light. It certainly allowed me to put back in lines that I’d taken out previously and feel more generous about them.

This is a poem I wrote about a strange house in California that was built by Sarah Winchester. She inherited the vast Winchester Rifle fortune following the death of her husband in 1881. Haunted by the ghosts of men killed in the American Civil War she spent her remaining years and wealth in building a maze-like mansion to house their souls. Esther Morgan’s Guardian workshop was a starting point for this poem.

Mrs Winchester’s House

How many rooms the human heart
- downstairs led neither to the
cellar nor upstairs to the roof
and chimneys rising from empty

grates stopped short of ceiling and sky.
You had no blueprint; sketching out
each day the lines that other hands
made window in a floor or doors

open to the lawns below or
sometimes just a wall. They won’t catch
you now; not the ghosts of men who
lost their breath to The Gun that Won

the West, or your dear family
prising open chests in search of
the stash: the gold dinner service
they think you used to feed the dead,

the bonds and the cash, to find just
his obit and her knots of hair,
some woollen underwear, your Will
signed thirteen times, some old fishlines.

© Liz Bassett 2006

I also started writing notes for a poem about a duvet! I used Helen Farish’s Guardian poetry workshop on writing in the first person. I love using these workshops. I find them almost uncomfortable at first because they make me write about something I wouldn’t necessarily write about. I usually find that the poem I was going to write gets written anyway, but it gets written from a different angle. I’m not sure where this duvet poem is going right now, it may involve geese!

January

A new year and I’ve promised myself that I’ll start submitting poems to magazines. In the past I haven’t felt brave enough to send poems, preferring the anonymity of competitions, but the time has come! I’m also finding out more about pamphlets and chapbooks. There are some amazing poets out there who aren’t signed with the major publishers. Chapbook publishers print much smaller runs at lower cost and so can take a risk on less well known poets.

I’ve just read Sphinx, a fantastic magazine from HappenStance press that reviews poetry pamphlets and gives information on pamphlet presses. It’s well worth a look – I’ve put a link to it in the publishers section.

I’m off to Norway for a few days next week to stay with my friend Julie who I met on an Arvon course a few summers back. Julie very patiently reads through my poems when they’re in a fairly rough state and emails me her feedback, which is invaluable. It makes such a difference having people I trust to send my writing to. Next weekend we plan to stay in a hut/chalet outside Oslo and write and cook and fall over our feet in the snow. I’m excited about seeing Julie again and writing in a different environment.

I’m hoping to read at the Open Mic at CB1 in Cambridge on Feb14th – see you there!

December

Earlier this month I went to the celebration of Michael Donaghy’s poetry at the South Bank. I have to admit that I hadn’t read his poems before, although I must have been about the only

person there who wasn’t already a huge fan. I liked his shorter poems the best, perhaps because they were new to me and so the shorter ones were easier to imagine as they were being read. I liked his humour and his refusal to make poems difficult. Safest, a collection of the poems he was working on when he died, is published by Picador.

A family friend and poet Janet Harrison died at the end of the year. Janet wrote poems all her life. Her poems often described small details or events such as a conversation or a walk in the countryside in Northamptonshire. When I was a kid Janet was the only adult I knew who wrote poems and it seemed important to know that poems were something worth doing when you grew up too: that they were worth taking seriously. More recently Janet and I wrote to each other and she kindly sent me feedback on poems I was writing and struggled to sort out my use of punctuation. We didn’t always agree on how a poem should be, but that made the conversation more interesting, and I’ll miss her letters in the post. Janet published a collection of her poems called Recognitions.

November

A slow bus journey in torrential rain across Cambridge to reach Clive Wilmer's reading from his new collection The Mystery of Things. His poems have a really balanced, solid feel to them, and I enjoyed hearing him read.

Tragically, Nadia Anjuman a young poet from Afghanistan was found dead a few days ago. She recently published a collection of her poems Gul-e-dodi (Dark red flower).

The following report was posted on Radio Free Europe:

Anjuman, a 24-year-old poet and journalist, was found dead on 5 November in her home in the city of Herat, Pajhwak Afghan News reported on 6 November. Colonel Nesar Ahmad Paikar, a spokesman for the Herat Province police, told Pajhwak that Anjuman's husband and mother-in-law were missing from the house where her body was discovered along with her newborn baby. According to the police, Anjuman's husband, Farid Majid Naia, later confessed to beating his wife but denied killing her. Anjuman's family has not allowed an autopsy, but an investigation into the case has begun.

I have been unable to track down translations of her poems in English but am still trawling the web for any - if anyone finds a link please post it up.

October

Feeling inspired after spending yesterday in London at a series of workshops and readings held by the Second Light network. It was the first time I’d been to one of their events and I had a

lovely time. Everyone was extremely friendly and approachable and the workshops were excellent. Mimi Khalvati ran a session looking at the differences between poetry and prose, which has made me reconsider, amongst other things, how I use line-breaks in my own writing. I felt like I needed to go through all my poems immediately and edit them. In the afternoon Myra Schneider looked at writing difficult material through extended metaphor or myth. This was fascinating, and made me think that I might be able to find a way of writing when the stories aren’t completely mine to write.

Have been reading some poems by Lynne Wycherley, having come across a review of her collection At the Edge of Light. Her writing is beautiful and very simple, using images from the landscape in East Anglia. I’m looking forward to reading more of her poems.

This month's Guardian Poetry Workshop was run by John Burnside. He gave examples of poetry from a variety of traditions and asked for poems written from a point of view outside our usual way of viewing the world. I found the exercise quite inspiring and I think the poems it prompted are really fresh - you can see them here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetryworkshop/0,15165,1314872,00.html

wordhappening

Friday, April 20, 2012

Clydebuilt Reading

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Friday, May 13, 2011

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Thursday, February 24, 2011

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