An appreciation of HappenStance Press

Now that Nell, aka Helena Nelson, aka Helen Beaton, founder, publisher and editor at HappenStance Press, has sent out her final newsletter and announced that the press is winding down, I felt this might be a good moment to celebrate its achievements.

HappenStance started out as a poetry pamphlet press in 2005, publishing slim volumes by all sorts of poets, gaining most recognition for the début pamphlets by up-and-coming names. Several significant contemporary poets cut their teeth with HappenStance. People such as Niall Campbell and Will Harris, etc, etc, not only benefited from Nell’s editorial input at an early stage in their development, but they also obtained a calling card from HappenStance, in the shape of their pamphlets, which enabled them to make the step on to bringing out their first full collections with major publishers. All of the above led to the press being awarded the Michael Marks Award in 2010.

Moreover, in editorial terms, Nell ran a system of submissions windows. Poets sent her batches of their work, and she then replied with detailed feedback. Numerous well-known poets might never have been published by her, but her crit of their work still played a huge, invisible role in their development back in the day. Just imagine how many hours she dedicated to this selfless task!

And then there was Sphinx. Sphinx Reviews was a project that ran alongside HappenStance. It specialised in reviews of poetry pamphlets, a format that has long struggled to receive critical attention, and provided an incredible service to poets, publishers and, of course, readers.

By my tedious manual count, a total of 1461 books were reviewed on Sphinx, many of them by more than one person. That’s the equivalent of over 2,000 pamphlets that were received by Nell, repackaged and sent back out to her loyal band of reviewers. 2,000 batches of stamps to be paid for. Countless treks to the post office. 2,000 reviews that were edited by her (often to the huge benefit of the reviewers themselves, whose prose style and critical approach to poetry were often transformed via this process). 2,000 posts that were formatted, uploaded and optimised for search engines.

In later years, HappenStance shifted its focus to full collections. And again, it punched above its weight, garnering a T.S. Eliot shortlisting for Fiona Moore’s The Distal Point, providing opportunities to fine poets whose writing didn’t fit in with the criteria that major publishers employed to select their manuscripts.

And though Nell would probably admit that she was far more comfortable editing poetry than selling it, let’s not forget that HappenStance Press shifted several thousand units over the years, all via an unfunded subscription model with barely any distribution through bricks-and-mortar bookshops. What’s more, it published several volumes that reached out beyond the poetry bubble and found their way to readers via farm shops and wine merchants, etc, finding new readers for the genre.

As for myself, I’m hugely indebted to HappenStance Press and to Nell herself. But that’s another article for another occasion. Of course, Nell herself is battling on, still publishing her own excellent poetry every now and then, still helping poets out on an informal basis, still writing critical articles with a pen like a scalpel. It’s just that HappenStance itself is coming to an end. Time to celebrate and appreciate what it’s meant for so many people, the friendships and connections it formed among poets and readers. Time to recognise that it represents so much of what’s good about the poetry scene in the U.K..

For umpteen reasons, umpteen of us can say ‘Thank you, Nell’!

The best editor a bloke could hope for...!

At the launch with the best editor a bloke could hope for (with thanks to Clare Best for the photo)...

What's in a title? How and why we decided on Whatever You Do, Just Don't...

A few years back, Nell from HappenStance sent me feedback on a poem. She told me “I like it, Matthew, but the title’s dead.” That phrase has stuck with me ever since. What did she mean? Well, the implicit conclusion is that the title wasn’t contributing anything extra, not drawing the reader in, not adding an extra layer, not coming alive. It was simply there as a placeholder, as if for internal use only.

And I was very much reminded of this exchange when we went through the process of deciding on a title for my second full collection. My initial suggestions were perfectly neat, summarising key themes or bringing them together, but Nell rejected them all, one by one, explaining once again that they weren’t bringing anything to the party.

She then came back to me with a list of potential alternatives. One of them leapt out at me. The one that she might not have expected me to embrace, the one that threw caution to the wind but worked perfectly: Whatever you Do, Just Don’t.

I was recalling her advice from years ago when we made the decision. This title is memorable, and that’s a good start, though it’s not enough on its own. From my perspective, the most important quality is that it intrigues and ushers you in, making you wonder exactly what you’re being told not to do. And in terms of getting to grips with the book, the implicit question is significant. Otherwise, this title could simply be seen as a gimmick.

So…what does Whatever You Do, Just Don’t actually refer to? Well, if you want to find out the answer, the best way is to get hold of a copy via this link to the HappenStance webshop…!!!

A celebration of Sphinx Reviews (2006-2023)

Sphinx Reviews is a project that has run alongside HappenStance Press since 2006 (see its website here). Founded by Helena Nelson and co-edited for the last six years by Charlotte Gann, it specialises in reviews of poetry pamphlets, a format that has long struggled to receive critical attention, and provides an incredible service to poets, publishers and, of course, readers.

By my tedious manual count, a total of 1461 books have been reviewed on Sphinx, many of them by more than person, the equivalent of over 2,000 pamphlets that were received by Helena Nelson, repackaged and sent back out to her loyal band of reviewers. 2,000 batches of stamps to be paid for. Umpteen treks to the post office. 2,000 reviews that were edited by her (to the huge benefit of the reviewers themselves, whose prose style and critical approach to poetry were often transformed via this process). 2,000 posts that were formatted, uploaded and optimised for search engines.

What’s more, for many poets, the review of their pamphlet on Sphinx was the only critical response they’d ever receive. That’s a hugely generous gift in anyone’s language. Looking back at the archive, there are a fair few poets who have sadly died in the intervening years, though their reviews on Sphinx remain. As a record of pamphlet poetry in the U.K., it’s irreplaceable.

And now, of course, Sphinx is coming to an end. Helena Nelson has given so much to poets over the years via HappenStance Press itself and via Sphinx Reviews, in both cases to the detriment of her own writing, but even this labour of love must inevitably be finite.

Like so many positive presences in our lives, Sphinx has probably come to be taken for granted, as if it were destined to accompany pamphlet publishing forever. It will be sorely missed once poets and publishers bemoan the absence of alternatives. However, its online archive is to be cherished and celebrated. Here’s hoping that in the aftermath of this closure, we at least start to see more of Helena Nelson’s exceptional poetry…!

A celebration of poetry editors

Close editing is an act of colossal creative generosity, one of the best gifts a poet can receive. It's no wonder that such scrupulous, time-consuming attention is becoming less and less commonplace, but a top-notch poetry editor is worth their weight in gold and very seldom valued.

Stanza by stanza, line by line, word by word, comma by comma, a good editor enables a poet to understand their own method, makes them question and/or justify their choices, helps them spot their own weaknesses, encourages them to raise their game a notch. Such close editing places a draining demand on the person who does it, requiring a high level of engagement. It takes so much out of the editor that they often struggle to sustain their own writing at the same time. And this sacrifice is another reason why editing is generous.

Helena Nelson at HappenStance Press is the editor I know best, and her example is the point of departure for this post. Few publishers work as closely with their poets. What's more, her graft on others' behalf is definitely detrimental to her own terrific poetry. I’d suggest that U.K. Poetry could do with a few more Nells, though she's a one-off. In fact, you could do far worse than get hold of her latest top-notch collection, Pearls, which hasn’t received the attention that it so richly deserves. It’s available to purchase here.

Nuances and undercurrents, Helena Nelson's Pearls

When we approach Helena Nelson’s new book, Pearls (HappenStance Press, 2022), certain potential misnomers and misconceptions are worth addressing and dismissing.

First off, it isn’t really a collection as such. Instead, it’s subtitled ‘The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems’, and includes several poems that were previously published in earlier collections, now reprinted alongside a whole host of uncollected pieces. And secondly, Pearls isn’t thematic if we take that term as it’s understood by most people in the poetry world, i.e. preconceived, planned and executed as a whole. There are no fillers here, nor are there poems whose role is to link themes or join up a narrative. These are individual, connected poems that accumulated over decades.

And the above points lead us to a third clarification: Pearls is not a novel in verse. This is demonstrated by the fact that every single poem retains its value as a stand-alone piece while also adding to the sum. Nelson employs a collage effect throughout the book, implicitly building her characters and their stories via juxtaposition, each scene, each moment, each episode enriching the reader's experience, page on page, pearl after pearl. As a consequence, it’s useful to quote Nelson’s own explanation, which reaches beyond the structure of the manuscript, taking her title as a point of departure to understanding life itself:

...But now I feel there’s a sense in which all the moments of our existence are suspended timelessly, pearls on a string. Each moment contains the whole story: beginning, middle and end...

And then there’s a fourth issue to clear up. Poetry readers don’t often encounter the explicit, sustained deployment of three-dimensional characters, so it’s important to underline that these poems are far from being confessional in tone and content. This statement would be superfluous if we were discussing a novel, but even experienced heads often seem prone to seeking out pointless biographical parallels when it comes to considering poetry. Of course, any character contains a proportion of the writer that created them, but that’s the case in any novel too.

Moving on to the poems themselves, one of Helena Nelson’s greatest attributes is her knack for observation. Not just watching people and then portraying them, but the capacity to pick up on the nuances and undercurrents that play crucial roles in social and human relations. One such example is the closing couplet to ‘Back’:

…She is back. He is glad. And the bed is glad
and a pot of coffee is almost ready.

The ‘he’ and ‘she’ of this extract are the Philpotts, of course, the protagonists of this book. Their relationship, a second marriage in middle age, is evoked via snapshots such as these lines in which emotion is conveyed indirectly through the active role of objects such as the bed and the pot.

In technical terms, meanwhile, this couplet is fascinating. For instance, the penultimate line features three anapests before a iamb kicks in, drawing the elements together and offering a musical reassurance that’s mirrored by semantic warmth.

And what about the punctuation? At first glance, it might seem artificial or unusual. Two three-word sentences without conjunctions are then followed by a longer, unexpected sentence that goes against convention, not just by starting with a conjunction but also by refusing to place a comma midway through (at the end of that penultimate line). However, this punctuation is actually riffing on our expectations, surprising us and then turning inevitable, guiding us through the couplet’s delicate cadences.

As the clichéd rhetorical question goes, which came first, the chicken and the egg? In this case, however, we’re referring to the poet and the editor. Is Helena Nelson such a scrupulous editor because of her highly tuned understanding of the importance of the tension between sentence and line or has her poetic skill-set been further developed by her work as an editor?

Deep down, of course, the important thing remains that her awareness of syntactic and semantic cause and effect, already keenly felt in her first full collection, Starlight on Water (The Rialto, 2003), has only increased over the years. In fact, one of the aesthetic pleasures in reading this book is derived through observing an expert at work, admiring her control of sentence and line, learning from it.

In other words, Pearls possesses numerous attractions both for previous readers of the Philpott poems and for newcomers. Perhaps the most moving facet of this book can be found in the previously uncollected pieces that portray the couple’s ageing process and their slow-looming awareness of impending death. In this context, the books closing lines from ‘Peril’ pack a huge punch:

...of course they are not all right

but she takes him in her arms
and she tells him that they are.

The mirrored, satisfying rhythms of this final couplet strengthen its comforting effect. And once again, there’s that slipping-away and stripping-back of punctuation, leaving behind only the words and their latent power.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that critics’ and judges’ prejudices might well kick in and indicate to them that Pearls will only be of interest to women of a certain age and certain social origin. They couldn’t be more wrong. Pearls matters to us all. Like any great story, its specificality is what makes it universal. And then, moreover, for poets themselves, it provides an implicit lesson in the roadcraft of writing poetry, far more useful than any handbook or workshop. With such wide appeal, here’s hoping Pearls reaches the swathes of readers that its poems so richly deserve.

Workshops with a Whizz

In normal circumstances, not only would you have to travel to a festival such as Poetry in Aldeburgh or StAnza if you wished to attend a workshop run by the whizz that's Helena Nelson, but you'd also have to get in quickly once booking went live, as her sessions are invariably among the first to sell out.

However, lockdown, or partial lockdown, or the dismembering of lockdown by a caring father, does bring certain advantages, and one of them consists of Helena Nelson's forthcoming double-header of online workshops. The first (with the help of Annie Fisher) is titled Writing about Fear, and will surely develop fresh slants and approaches to our latent feelings about the current situation and beyond, while the second (with Charlotte Gann's assistance) uniquely concentrates on the art of writing reviews.

It's my firm belief that writing reviews is one of the best ways for a poet to improve. By doing so, we're forced to get to grips with our thoughts about other people's writing, implicitly reassessing our own work at the same time. Moreover, the juggling of prose to formulate opinion and argument can only help our use of language, prose feeding back into poetry. Of course, writing reviews is an intimidating task, which is why this workshop is such an excellent opportunity to throw off any nerves and take the plunge under the guidance of one of the best editors around.

Here are the details of these exciting workshops, including all the information you need to sign up for them while there are still places available...

Unlocked: Writing about Fear
Helena Nelson & Annie Fisher
Dates:
Monday, 1 June: 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
or
Thursday, 4 June: 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
 
Duration: approximately two hours, with some optional follow up.
Cost: £25.00 (one place available free to those on low incomes)
Number of participants: 9 (this excludes the two presenters)

If you'd like to reserve a place, please email nell@happenstancepress.com, with your preferred date. She will send you more information and explain how to pay.

and

OPOI REVIEWS: for new or low-confidence reviewers
Helena Nelson & Charlotte Gann
Date:
Wednesday, 10 June: 10.30 am – 12.30 pm
 
Duration: approximately 2 hours.
Cost: Free
Number of participants: 6 (this excludes presenters)
 
Description
This is a fully participative workshop, in which we will

• read and talk about poetry pamphlets and how an OPOI review is developed 
• clarify the house style and principles of the OPOI reviews
• share some experience of the editing process
• encourage participants to write their own OPOI

Email nell@happenstancepress.com for more information and/or to reserve your place.

The International WrapperRhyme Challenge

Helena Nelson is first and foremost a poet. As such, she's just published a pamphlet with Red Squirrel Press. It's titled Branded and subtitled Some WrapperRhymes, and I'm very much looking forward to getting my hands on a copy..

However, she's also an editor at HappenStance Press. In that role, she's seeking submissions of WrapperRhymes from all over the world for a projected exhibition/installation at StAnza (Scotland's Poetry Festival) in 2020. You can find out more about WrapperRhymes in general and about this project in particular at the HappenStance website.

Writing simply

Helena Nelson's blog posts after her reading windows are always fascinating, and the latest one is no exception (see here). Of particular interest is her remark that she wrote the following on many poems this time: ’Writing simply is the hardest thing.’

I'm personally drawn to this statement, as it very much mirrors my own poetic approach and method. Helena Nelson suggests that one reason why poets are afraid to write plainly is because they're worried the result wouldn't be a poem at all. I'd agree with her, but argue that writing simply also carries huge risks. There are no accoutrements, no verbal fireworks, no make-up to hide any flaws, and the consequence is that any mistakes become glaring.

Countless poets, editors and critics appear to equate ’simple’ with ’easy’ or ’facile’. However, the reverse is true, as many readers recognise. This last point seems to me a good thing. We all want readers, don't we...?

A poem by M.R. Peacocke

Original poetry seldom features on Rogue Strands. Today is an exception.

I recently received a copy of M.R. Peacocke's pamphlet, Honeycomb (HappenStance Press, 2018), was hugely impressed and have since been hunting down this veteran poet's back catalogue. A review will be forthcoming here in due course, but I'd also like to contribute in some additional way to seeking out more readers for Peacocke's terrific poetry.

As a consequence, I feel privileged and honoured that Helena Nelson at HappenStance (and the poet herself) should have granted me permission to post one of my favourite poems from the collection. M.R. Peacocke's work is clear and vivid, yet also layered. She gives the lie to false assumptions that accessible poems must be facile. Instead, she makes every word graft its socks off, as this piece amply demonstrates:


Running

Once there was running, a spurt of joy
in the feet, some unbidden riot
under the skin. Then there was running,
willed. Now the body's dull as lips
of animals mumbling frozen grass,
and if I say, Do you remember running?
it pauses, puzzled. It knows its tasks.
It can't recall.

M.R. Peacocke


The line endings in this poem are a joy, but my personal preference is L3 to L4. The whole piece lifts off from the moment that ’willed’ is held over from the end of L3 and dropped into the start of L4. The word shakes us. It makes us pause and reassess ’spurt of joy’ and ’unbidden riot’ in its light, before we move on to the rest of the poem with a sudden understanding of its ramifications. Only outstanding poets are capable of such adroit control of language.

I very much hope this post will encourage you to get hold of a copy of M.R. Peacocke's pamphlet, Honeycomb, for yourself. And that's why I'll now make a second exception to my usual rules by finishing with a shameless plug, mentioning that you can buy it at the HappenStance Press website here.

Tickets for Poetry in Aldeburgh

With little more than three weeks to go, tickets for Poetry in Aldeburgh are selling fast. A quick look at their website (see here) tells you that several of the workshops have already sold out, although seats are still available for all the readings.

As for my own event, it's titled "Poetry of Food and Cooking", and will take place in the Peter Pears Gallery on Sunday 4th November at 1 p.m.. Helena Nelson will be introducing Alison Brackenbury, Rosie Sheppard and myself, and there's also sure to be a drop of free Spanish wine on show, maybe even from deepest Extremadura.

The build-up to the festival is an exciting time: I've already got tickets for several events apart from mine, and I'm now weighing up whether to fill up my timetable even more or leave some gaps to relish the people and place as well as the poetry itself...

My reading at Poetry in Aldeburgh

Sixteen years after my first visit to the festival as a member of the audience, I can't quite believe that I'll be giving a reading myself at Poetry in Aldeburgh 2018.

I'll be appearing alongside Helena Nelson, Alison Brackenbury and Rosie Shepperd on Sunday 4th November at 1 p.m. in the Peter Pears Gallery in a slot titled "Poetry of Food and Cooking". Suffice to say, wine might also play a part at some point!

I'm very grateful to Paul Stephenson, The Poetry School and Poetry in Aldeburgh for this opportunity, and I'm also looking forward to attending lots of other top-notch readings during the festival. You can view the programme in full on the festival website here.

OPOI review of Miriam Gordis' Vinyl

My OPOI review of Miriam Gordis' pamphlet Vinyl (Eyewear Publishing, 2018) is now up at Sphinx and you can read it by following this link.

OPOI stands for "One Point Of Interest" and asks the reviewer to respond to a single aspect of the collection in question that especially interests them. It's an excellent concept, yet another Helena Nelson project to help pamphlets gain exposure. To get a fuller flavour of what I mean, why not browse the extensive OPOI archive while you're over at Sphinx?

Poetry Rules...

...or at least it does in this household!

On a serious note, however, following social media reaction to Helena Nelson’s blog post with a list of Thirty Poem Snags (see here) that she encountered in her recent submissions window at HappenStance Press, I’ve been reflecting on the importance of rules for poets.

By my invocation of rules as a term, I don’t mean the slavish following of norms. Instead, I’m referring to the idea that the rejection of metrics/punctuation/standard grammar/ conventional line endings, etc, tends to my mind to be more successful if the poet first gets to grips with them before jettisoning them to specific effect.

In other words, I’m not usually convinced by poets who simply eschew the learning and understanding of rules and decide to plough their own furrow from the start. In those cases (to this reader’s eye and ear), the poems often don’t manage to argue their rule-breaking case sufficiently.

Of course, there are always exceptions to that rule too… 

A killer ending

Just for the hell of it, for the sheer relish of its rightness, I'd like to share with you the killer ending to Helena Nelson's "Ultimatum" from her terrific collection, Starlight on Water:

"...Come to bed, I said
shivering, now. Time later
when sad love's fed
to talk ultimata."

A Demand and a Promise

Being a HappenStance subscriber makes you feel part of a community: newletters turn up, full of chat, info and opinion, while a regular flow of pamphlets invites you to discover new names. And then there are the occasional surprises. Like the recent unexpected arrival of A Demand and a Promise, an essay by Helena Nelson, HappenStance editor. Subtitled A poetry manifesto, it's a six page text that homes in on a key issue in contemporary poetry: the lack of readers.

There are lots of thriving creative writing groups, M.A.s and Phds, lots of people wanting to be poets and seeking publication, lots of working poets who need students to keep their courses running and mortgages paid, lots of funding applications, but we're short on readers, and readers are our life-blood. Here are a couple of quotes from the concluding lines to Helena Nelson's essay:

"...If you want to write poetry, you can do exactly what you like. - just throw your text into the ring. But you will need readers, if the poems are to have a chance of being read and remembered. And a good and loyal reader is harder to find than a poet...."

"...Readers of poetry have lost confidence, and therefore poetry has lost readers. Many people don't know what to make of the current cacophony of alleged "poems" all competing for attention. Some wonderful pieces of writing get lost in the hubbub, and there are many bluffers. But if we could change the focus by looking at each poem as no more and no less than a demand for close attention, coupled with a promise of something durable and valuable, perhaps everyone would feel empowered..."

I'm at the front of the queue to sign up to Nell's manifesto. What about you?

Helena Nelson, poet

Many casual observers of the U.K. poetry scene will have heard of Helena Nelson. They’ll know that she’s the editor of HappenStance Press. They might even know of her limericks and performance pieces. What’s unfortunately fading into the background is that she’s a significant, major-award-winning “serious” poet.

I’d been wanting to write the above paragraph for several years. Why didn’t I? Because I didn’t want my views to be coloured by my readers’ knowledge that she was the publisher of my pamphlets. Now that Eyewear Books are bringing out my first full collection next year, it’s time for Rogue Strands to celebrate Helena Nelson’s terrific verse.

Today’s post will concentrate on Nelson’s first full collection, Starlight on Water (The Rialto, 2003), which was a joint winner of the Aldeburgh Jerwood Prize. Let’s start with an extract from section IV of its pivotal sequence “From Interrogating the silence”:

“Your letters matter more than you will know.

You write; I keep them, one by one, as snug

as acorns in their shell. I go to them

if all else fails. When the north-east wind blows

and tugs at the curtains, when my heart has dug

a hole for itself, when nothing can stem

obliteration – no place else to go –

I open them...”

There’s no need to explain these lines, yet their clarity doesn’t impede their emotional impact. Quite the opposite is true. This isn’t so-called restraint. Only rare talents have so light a touch as to be capable of transmitting such depth and authenticity of feeling via apparently simple words. Nelson is keenly aware her challenge is not in expressing something that is true to her but in making it true for the reader.

And yet she’s also at ease in several different registers. Among the performance pieces and biting satire, there are sudden changes of gear like in the following extract from “When my daughter goes down in the dark”:

“…Her eyes deepen. She puts on pearls,

dresses herself in darkest blue.

Shadows soften her mouth and chin,

new frost sparkles beneath her skin."

Anorexia is never explicitly invoked, but its menace is all-pervading in this poem. Language becomes sensuously dangerous in Nelson’s hands. Yet again, another tone, yet again a coherent idiosyncratic eye holding her broad poetic vision together.

And there are more examples to come. The Philipott poems, for instance, deserve a post to themselves. The collection’s closing sequence, they dissect an entire society via a single couple’s relationship.

The shorter pieces, meanwhile, are simply exquisite. I’m delighted to have Nell’s permission to quote one of my favourites in full here:

Completing the outfit

I used to wish you’d put your hands just so

about my waist, spanning me here and here,

encircling me in love and trust, although

you never knew I cherished the idea.

A small thing. Doesn’t matter. Time is gone.

Your hands, so square and kind, don’t speak to me.

My waist has come to terms with life alone.

My breathing’s calm. My heart goes quietly.

I find these days I like to wear a belt.

I bear it like your touch around the core.

It keeps me safe. Quite recently I felt

I had to tighten it. I think it’s more

than reassurance in well-seasoned leather:

it may be all that’s holding me together.

This poem’s strength lies in its ability to undermine itself (and its narrator) throughout. The reader only realizes its perfection when reaching the end and immediately heading back to the start.

Helena Nelson’s poetry must be read. For that reason, I’m making a unique exception on Rogue Strands. You can find Starlight on Water’s product page at The Rialto here and at the HappenStance website here.

The story of a poem

Looking back through my files, I find the first typewritten draft torn from the secondhand dot matrix printer I bought not long after arriving in Almendralejo. A creature of habit, I've only ever dated poems once they move from notebook to screen, so here it is: January 1998. The title is different, of course, as is the layout of the stanzas, but the poem has been born.

I must have gone back to it in a couple of months later, as there are handwritten corrections all over the sheet and a note: "Rev' March '98". Of course, I'm sure to have thought it was finished at that point. How wrong I was.

A few weeks afterwards, I returned to the poem. There's another typewritten draft, which indicates more extensive revisions back in my notebook prior to a second visit to the dot matrix. However, frustration must have set in: "UNF" for unfinished is scrawled across the bottom.

Later on that month - April '98 - I had another go at polishing off this awkward, obstreperous bunch of lines. I must have been reasonably happy with the result, as I sent it, with a shiny new title, as part of a submission to Evangeline Paterson (a fabulous, understated poet and editor, much missed) at Other Poetry. She published it that autumn.

At this point there's a pause, although I recall having posted it that year to a dear friend who died in a mountaineering accident not long afterwards. It was hidden among many failures. She chose it as her favourite.

Come 2009, I was preparing my submission to HappenStance Press for what would become Inventing Truth, my first pamphlet. I picked this poem up again, reread it and realised I could improve it, change the flow of the stanzas, tweak the title. Helena Nelson, my editor, wasn't fully convinced. She sidelined it to a list of possibles in early 2010, so I went at it again. Still she put up cogent arguments against its inclusion. It correctly lost out a couple of months before publication.

I knew that poem was important, not just because of its journey, but because it highlighted a specific facet of my verse. Nevertheless, I also knew it wasn't quite over the line. Every few months, I continued to chip away at it: November 2013, August 2014, May 2015. My first full collection was the aim.

Until today. It's still in my manuscript, holding on for dear life. This time, in adulthood, over eighteen years after its birth, it's going to make the cut. When might the book appear? More news on that in due course...

Helena Nelson on Andrew Waterhouse

Over at Anthony Wilson's blog, Helena Nelson has written a guest post about Andrew Waterhouse.

She tells the story of how she discovered his poetry, how it affected her and stays with her even today. Moreover, she also gets to grips with the linguistic mechanics of why, and that's where her insight reveals new facets to his poems.

Her post is a lovely read for a bank holiday weekend. If it encourages readers to learn more about Andrew Waterhouse and seek out his startlingly original verse, so much the better!

How (not) to Get Your Poetry Published by Helena Nelson

The best poetry editors do what their often unpaid job says on the tin: they get their hands dirty and edit, encouraging their poets, helping them and challenging them every now and then. I can tell you from personal, subjective experience that Helena Nelson at HappenStance Press is one such editor.

This is why Nelson's new book is so significant. Titled How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published, it's a guide to finding an outlet for your verse. From magazines to pamphlets and collections, she goes into common pitfalls that tend to mean a poet's submission doesn't even make it over the first hurdle.

All of the above is combined with specific case studies and even twenty-one poetry prompts to stir the reader's creative juices. At this point, I do have to admit a vested interest: one of my poems, 01252 722698, is among those prompts.

If this morsel has managed to whet your appetite, the book itself will blow your taste buds away! You can grab a copy via this link to the HappenStance online shop.