Poetry competitions

Why can I never get myself together enough to enter poetry competitions? I suspect it's something in my noddle. I get the entry forms, online or otherwise, and I think, "That sounds like a comp worth entering", and then time passes and I realise I've missed the deadline. It happens every year. This year I'm definitely entering the Edwin Morgan comp (details on the Vital Synz website). Possibly.

I've judged a few comps in my time, however. Some were quite daunting, but one I had a lot of fun with was a recent one for children, writing poems inspired by Robert Burns. I judged the upper primary age group - over 200 entries in this category. It was a real pleasure, and the winner and runner-up were obvious even on the first reading.

Maybe I should approach all comps in this light - that I'm going to give the judges a lot of pleasure through reading my entries? But then again, maybe not.

The Edwin Morgan archive

The Edwin Morgan archive at the Scottish Poetry Library was well and truly launched this afternoon. I walked up the stairs in the Library and you could have knocked me down with a feather, because there was Eddie! Fantastic to see him, and he clearly enjoyed the occasion. Scotland's Culture Minister, Mike Russell, MSP, threw away his prepared speech, and spoke from the heart, ending with one of favourite Edwin Morgan poems. Hamish Whyte, who has been assembling the archive over many years, spoke about working with Eddie as his friend, bibliographer and publisher, and Liz Lochhead gave a warm and personal birthday greeting, for it was (is) Eddie's 89th birthday. It was one of those wonderful occasions when everyone comes together to honour one poet. As we toasted him in champagne and sang Happy Birthday there could be no doubt about the affection with which we all regard him. There are other poets we respect and admire, but Eddie is one we quite simply love.

My own addition to the archive is the photo above, which I took back in 1997 on the occasion of the laying of the foundation stone for the new library. Holding the model of the then virtual library are Eddie (in the red hat), with Iain Crichton Smith on the left, and George Bruce in the centre. I showed it to Eddie, and we discussed the day - a very happy one - and our two absent friends, for Eddie is the last left. An unforgettable day, as was today.

Getting on with things

Underneath the dressing on my purple arm, it's very hard to tell what's happening. The swelling has definitely gone down, and I've got better mobility in my fingers. I've got to keep the dressing on until I go back to the clinic next Wednesday for an X-ray and a check-up from the orthopaedic surgeon. It's meant that showering is an awkward experience, holding my left hand above my head and out of the spray, wrapped in a poly bag. However, I'm getting on with things. I've been doing a fair bit of walking, up to Dunbar High Street and harbour, down to the shops, visiting the 1650 Café for latte and cake. (1650 was the date of the 2nd Battle of Dunbar). You know how it goes.

I've also been catching up on a lot of other things. One of them was to update the cumulative indexes to Poetry Scotland magazine. Previously, I had indexed up to issue 44, but now I've taken it up to the most recent one, issue 60. So that's now up on the Poetry Scotland website. It's split into 8 sections to make it quicker to load. After completing the indexing, I checked the statistics. Poetry Scotland has published well over 2500 poems by 704 poets in the 60 issues. I can't be more precise, because for those issues dedicated solely to one poet (and the occasional duo), I haven't indexed individual poems. The true figure will therefore be closer to 3000 poems. That's about the equivalent of 60 conventional full-length poetry books. That's a HUGE labour of love by the editor, Sally Evans, who deserves the gratitude of the entire poetry community.

On other fronts, I've been sending Calder Wood Press publication details to the Scottish Pamphlet Poetry organisation, and choosing sample poems by the four authors most recently published. I also had a visit today from an author I'll be publishing later this year - Hilary Graham - who lives near Greenlaw in the Borders. I've heard her read her poems at the Eyemouth writers' group (called Eyewrite, by the way, and it predates Glasgow's Aye Write). However, it was great to get a good sized portfolio of work from which to make a selection for a pamphlet. It'll probably be ready in September.

My next two Calder Wood Press titles have both been delayed for reasons not connected with my current one-handedness, but I hope to have both back on track in May.

One of the down sides of my condition is that I've had to call off a proposed visit to Gray's School of Art, part of the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. I was due to talk to some design students about haiku and Japanese culture, to give them some background for a Japan-themed project they're working on, but it clashes with my clinic appointment.

Tomorrow it's domestic chores - tidying up my mountainous paperwork etc - although it seems, sadly, that I can't do my ironing at the moment. Every cloud has a silver lining.

J G Ballard

There are a lot of tributes being paid today to J G Ballard, who died yesterday, and deservedly so. He was a fine novelist and short story writer, with an original perspective and great skills. Much of the attention is being given to 'Crash', but since I've never read it, I won't comment. I liked Empire of the Sun, and The Kindness of Women, but the books which made the most impact on me were three of his 'hard SF' titles - The Drowned World, The Crystal World, and The Drought. In each of these he was able to realise a future Earth subjected to extreme conditions, as reflected in their titles. In each of these worlds he portrayed the 'inner space' of normal everyday human beings and their necessary adaptations to a radically changed environment. What stays constant and what changes when the world becomes unfamiliar and the normal rules of existence no longer apply? I thought his imaginative reconstructions were well thought out and poetically described, and the human reactions were entirely believable given the premise. For me, these novels blurred the boundary between SF and the conventional literary novel, and I still think they are major achievements. In an excellent interview on Channel 4 News last night, Martin Amis said that "no one else could have written Ballard's works," and that is true. I'm going to re-read them as my personal tribute.

Grounded

A short note to say I've broken my arm going over the handlebars of my bike, and had to have surgery to insert a metal plate, otherwise I'd have lost most of the use of my left hand, according to the consultant. So I'm grounded for a few weeks - no driving, no cycling, no gym.

I'm glad to be home and resting now, and one of the nice things waiting for me was a note to say that my Walking in Glencanisp poem is now up on Bolts of Silk.

4 Jazz Albums

On Friday night (I think it was Friday), there was an interesting programme featuring four albums released in 1959 that, it was argued, changed jazz and took it in new directions. They were Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Charles Mingus' Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz To Come. I know all of them, having first heard them in 1960 or '61. I'd describe Kind of Blue and Mingus Ah Um as evolutionary, Time Out as an attempted revolution, and only Ornette as truly revolutionary. I hated it at the time. It's exciting, but it's also at times very ugly, musically. Along with the writer Alan Bold (a fellow alto sax player), I remember discussing it with the late Tubby Hayes at an Art College dance. It's taken me a very long time, but now I can recognise the effect it had on jazz musicians of the time. It really did change things. And the song Lonely Woman is very beautiful, my favourite version being by the MJQ. The Mingus one is ragged, at times chaotic, but its strength is in the emphasis Mingus placed on improvisation, and on insisting that his musicians should showcase their individual talents. Plus some of his songs are beautiful - listen to Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat - a tribute to Lester Young. Brubeck's album featured music written in different time signatures, unusual for the time. Paul Desmond's lyrical alto playing was what attracted me to it at the time, but the experiment didn't really 'take'. It's taken for granted that today's musicians will be able to play this way, but nobody makes a big thing of it when it's used. The Miles Davis album was the one that I liked most, and today, 50 years on, I still do. I know all of the solos by heart, and I have been known, when there's nobody else in the house, to whistle along with Miles, John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley (I no longer play sax). In my view its effect derived from the quality of the musicians and their musicianship, rather than any musical innovation, but that doesn't detract from its importance. A fascinating programme.

Monochrome photography

At the local Camera Club there's been quite a lot of interest in monochrome images lately, and I thought I'd try my hand. Since I've been scanning a lot of my old photos this week, I thought I'd see if it worked on this 1999 shot of Yosemite Valley in California. The thing is, before converting it from the colour original, you should attempt to get the original as good as you can make it. This one is taken from pretty close to the viewpoint where Ansel Adams took his famous Yosemite photo. I had to tweak the curves and lower the contrast so I could get the whole tonal range in, and I'm not sure I made it. Right at the back of the shot there is this blindingly white granite mountain which I haven't manage to darken sufficiently. Anyway, it shows El Capitan near left, Half-Dome centre rear, and the Bridal Veil falls near right. The scale of the scenery is just breathtaking, and I can imagine John Muir's feelings on seeing it for the first time.


And this is the original colour version.

+++++++++++++++++++
PS: New poem

Yosemite Valley

Where’s the knife
that made such perfect cuts
in these hard mountains?

Melted, run off
the smooth polished
surfaces, jetting out
and down
in white thunder.

In the soaked meadow
deer twitch ears
to catch the heavy footfalls,
the click of claw on pebble,
above the roar of water.

Colin Will

Akros Publications to close

My friend Duncan Glen ran Akros Publications until his death last year. He published a wide range of publications, from poetry to local history, including the wonderfully eclectic (and at times eccentric) magazine Zed2O. I was very happy to build and to manage a website on his behalf, and to work with him on its updates and developments. After his death his widow asked me to continue with it until she had decided what to do about the press. Well, I suppose inevitably, she told me this evening that she's closing the press at the end of the month, and I'll close the website at the same time. End of an era, end of a good man and his good publishing house, end of an independent and kenspeckle Scottish literary and cultural magazine.

It leaves a gap though, in a field which is already sparsely populated. I don't know what the print run was for Zed2O, and I doubt if another print publisher could be found to take on a relaunch, but I wonder about a webzine? Poems, reviews, essays, photos and graphics: it might just translate into an online publication. I need to think about this.

What's with Bukowski?

When I was at an impressionable age (I think I maybe still am) my first poetic influences were the Beats - Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Orlovsky, and the total outsider Kenneth Patchen. Later, I turned on to the Black Mountain School - Olson, Creeley et al. Later still, my American influences tended towards a non-school of poets; diverse writers, including Gary Snyder, Larry Eigner, Edward Dorn, Denise Levertov, Philip Whalen, William Everson. I didn't encounter the poetry of Charles Bukowski until much later - maybe just 15 years ago or something like that.

I've read three of his collections - Burning in water, drowning in flame (1974), Love is a dog from hell (1977), and The last night of the Earth poems (1992). These are thick books, not slim volumes - he was very prolific. He wrote many other volumes of poetry, novels and short stories, and from about the mid-1990's he has acquired what's now labelled as cult status. His life style was chaotic, especially after leaving the US Post Office to become a full-time writer. Booze, sex, and betting on horses were major preoccupations, through which the poetry emerged. He's an interesting writer, but not one whose example or style I'm tempted to follow. I can recall well-turned lines by Creeley, Barbara Guest, Levertov, but none by Bukowski. And yet he has his adherents, sometimes passionate ones. Maybe it's a failing in me, but I just don't get it. Somebody tell me what I'm missing.

The real story

On April 1st I had a lot of fun over on Surroundings commenting on Rob's discovery of a lost poem by R D Thomson. However, much of what I wrote there was actually based on fact. In 1961 I was a barman in the North British Hotel, and at times it was a bizarre place to be. There was an old guy in a shabby mac who took the lift from the Waverley Station into the hotel foyer, lifted the Glasgow Herald from its rack, and read it cover to cover over a half pint of shandy. I've no idea who he was - none of us ever asked - but he did exist.

The other thing was that the NB's Corner Bar was one of the very small number of gay bars in Edinburgh. This was at a time when it was still illegal to be gay, so there was a lot of pretence and subterfuge going on - nobody was 'out' when the Vice Squad were so active. However, there was one guy who regularly came in wearing eyeshadow and mascara. He said he was an actor, but nobody was fooled. When I made his dry martini and asked for payment he would tell me to wait until he'd sipped it first, to make sure it was to his taste. And the toilet attendant made a fortune in tips by keeping lookout for the customers. Speaking of tips, the (getting on a bit) barmaid, who looked a bit like the Julie Walters waitress in the 'Two Soups' sketch, ripped off my tips every week by claiming that the kitty was a lot smaller than it really was. I was only 19, straight and innocent, writing poetry in the afternoons (bars closed between 2:30 and 5 in those days), and playing jazz after 10 o'clock closing time at weekends. Happy Days? I don't know, but they've given me a lot of material for writing since then.