Author: Kirsten Irving

Two events you should know about, for they are exciting!

Nine Arches Press team up with Sidekick to bring you Poetry Rodeo on Thursday 17 May. Spellbook and Birdbook stars Edward McKay and Nia Davies join 9A’s Alistair Noon and Andrew Frolish at the Big Green Bookshop, Wood Green (gorgeous shop – check it out) for a night of poetic fantastitude.

Click the image below for el event page:


Secondly, for those in London on 8 June, Sidekick’s own Jon Stone is launching his PBS-recommended first collection (YEAH!) School of Forgery, alongside the magnificent John Clegg, whose first collection, Antler, is a source of great toe-tapping excitement in the Sidekick camp. Check out their wistful author shots!

Where? The New Moon, London EC3V 0DN, from 7pm. Click the image below for the event page!

Excited to announce that the ever-curious Penned in the Margins has just released this handsome delight, the PBS-commended Adventures in Form. Jon and I were lucky enough to be included in this tribute to constraint, which features a wide range of forms, from the classical to the very recently invented. Out to prove that there is life in form beyond the Petrarchan sonnet, Aventures in Form celebrates play, challenge and the strange and often beautiful results that issue forth from the poetic lab. Get your copy pronto.

In college, a friend conducting a survey for her A level Psychology class asked a range of girls to name a strong female role model. When she came to me, I hadn’t got a clue. Finally I came up with Anita Roddick. Not because she had particularly influenced me, but because it was acknowledged that she was a Strong Female Role Model.

“Anita Roddick,” sighed my friend. “Everyone seems to say her.”

So we come to another International Women’s Day, and the release of further depressing studies showing that women still make up only 13.7% of the boards of top European companies. According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, 59% of European university graduates are women, but 82% of the continent’s full university professors are men.

Of course, we’re way beyond the days women being written off as less intelligent. Perhaps the answer lies in studies such as Stereotype susceptibility in children: effects of identity activation on quantitative performance (Ambady, Shih, Kim, & Pittinsky, 2001), which showed that girls performed worse in traditionally male-dominated subjects, such as maths, when their gender had been highlighted beforehand.

If others give up hope on you and saddle you with lowered expectations, however baseless their reasons, it makes it doubly hard not to give up on yourself. If we really want to normalise the idea of women, or any under-represented group, in positions of power, authority and respect, we need to start by fostering the self-confidence that enables women to believe their gender isn’t the deciding factor.

Take the oft-lamented pay gap. It’s just sort of accepted, really. Women are paid less than men for the same work. A recent European Parliament feature explained that women have had to work until 2 March 2012 to catch up to the amount earned by their male counterparts as of 31 December 2011. Sucks, doesn’t it?

Since it’s illegal to overtly offer more money to a male candidate than a female one, what’s actually happening to maintain this disparity? I suspect, although some pay-bartering is perhaps done through old networks or rapport, a sizeable part of the problem is that women don’t feel as comfortable asking for the salary they believe they are worth as men do. Or perhaps they’re not confident enough that they are worth that salary; they just feel a vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, but don’t want to rock the boat, for fear of judgements based on their sex.

I’ve been wondering recently whether there is in fact a critical period for the development of self-confidence, the results of which travel with children into adulthood, greatly affecting their self-perception. As someone who experienced bullying in quite a few arenas in childhood, it’s only been very recently that professional and personal discussions have thrown up exactly how these early experiences have knocked my willingness to take risks, value my own work or try new things. The last time I was invited to put forward a statement as to why I should be given a pay rise at work, I didn’t even bother. I felt too exposed, as if I were setting myself up for failure.

The intense scrutiny I felt I was under may have been, in part, my imagination. But when girls grow up being told that doctors are men and nurses are women, or that fluffy, bland programmes like the 1980s version of My Little Pony (the new series is going some way to making things right), or Care Bears are their programmes, and the exciting, proactive shows about winning battles and inventing things are only for the boys (leaving aside the problematic Smurfette principle), I wonder if the message of acceptance, meekness and passivity gets welded to gender identity in the long-term. Let the boys do all the challenging, dangerous tasks – we’ve got hair to plait! Of course it’s not the fault of cartoons, but a general gassing with perfume that has the potential to negatively affect womens’ self-esteem.

On top of this, there are those areas of industry that thrive on relentlessly undermining women’s confidence. They have a knack for it. The beauty industry is the obvious one – a facehugger targeting younger and younger females with a slow-acting poison – but there are many other businesses heavily invested in sucking women’s money, time, energy and security dry, hence their social and economic power. Today I walked past a sign in a salon for Hair Botox. Hair Botox – where does it stop?

Say a woman does make it onto the board of a company. She will almost always be in the minority, and so will stand out. She unwittingly becomes a representative for ‘women’. Any criticisms of her way of working are all too easily attributed to her sex. Is it surprising that few women consider this career step? The gut reaction to outspoken women and girls by many male commentators is to resort to gender-based insults and threats. This is particularly noticeable in internet commentary. Are online forums really such a world away from the macho environment of big business?

When I was small, I didn’t shy away from the dream of becoming a pilot or a mathematics professor or a free-runner or an MD at any point because I consciously filed them under ‘for boys’. They were simply never suggested to me. It never occurred to me that women could be doctors. Growing up, I recognised that, logically, of course they could, but it still felt unusual and somewhat of a novelty to see a female in such a role. I’m concerned that, just as with age we lose the ability to naturally absorb new languages, so too do we lose a degree of openness, and the ability not just to consider new possibilities, but to believe in them. If we want to normalise women making global business and political decisions, women creating and curating, broadening views everywhere, women conducting ground-breaking research and saving lives, we need to start spreading the message to young children that they can achieve anything. And don’t just tell the girls: tell everyone.

Happy International Women’s Day everybody!

Mike West has donned many guises over the years – bingo caller at the poetry-hybrid night Bingo Master’s Breakout, underboss of well-versed satirical night Celebrity Euthanasia, false biographer of hangman Jack Ketch for Fuselit: Jack‘s ‘Hijacks’ booklet and human jukebox of intriguing fact and fiction. Having enjoyed countless whimsical conversations with him in the past, we decided to make it official with an interview…

Tell us a bit about what you get up to in poetry and beyond.

Indeed. I started my first blast of poetry performing in the later years of the previous century (I love saying that!). I dropped out several years ago worried I’d become too vapid, but never stopped going to gigs. Then last year the Vintage Poison collective plucked me to co-host one of their nights along with Kevin Reinhardt, and I broke my vow of performance abstinence to take on the best job in poetry: bingo caller at Bingo Master’s Breakout.

I’d been spending my wilderness years developing my old comic techniques for more biting subject matter, and writing a kind of verse that doesn’t mesh very well with most gigs, or most mags, because it is too long and too old-fashioned (it even rhymes, for Heaven’s sake). Fortunately I am not at all interested in publication. Anybody who’s been in Foyles, seen the number of books they’ve got, and concluded that the world needs a few more of those things is a special kind of mad.

One of my ongoing unpoetic projects is www.historyxls.com, where I (and anybody else who fancies it) will be cataloguing the history of the world in the form of a spreadsheet. It would be fair to say that there is still quite a lot of work to do on that.

Who or what influences you in your own work?

I am interested in getting verse to do things that it used to do very well but is rarely called upon to do these days. Before the Aeneid, Virgil wrote the Georgics, which is a handbook for farmers written in the same epic style. It contains possibly the hardest-to-translate bit of classical Latin verse we’ve got: a description of how to assemble the parts of a plough. Its content is on a par with instructions for a flat-pack wardrobe, but it scans and jingles in the mouth beautifully. You can almost hear the bits twisting and clicking into place. I have recently had great fun writing heroic couplets to describe the loading action of the Ross Mark II rifle.

I have been trying to write a little more like Philip Larkin. He’s the only poet I know who can explain emotions and abstractions in precise terms, without having to stop and steady himself on a metaphor like I just did. A more realistic target for me, though a distant one, is the 12th-century “Archpoet”, who wrote Goliardic poetry: cheeky medieval Latin verse about hard-drinking students and wayward monks, frequently in the meter of “Yankee Doodle went to town riding on a pony”. His work features in the libretto to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and if he had known his words would live on to accompany a surfer in a famous deodorant advert he would have been well chuffed.

What makes for a good or bad gig?

Blimey, I wish I knew that. I am constantly surprised in both directions. But over my years of poetry gig attendance, I have found that the quality of poetry is directly proportional to the size of the wooden beads worn by ladies in the audience. Roddy Lumsden’s themed readings in the Betsey Trotwood always have some good stuff, and the beads come in around 15mm in diameter for those. I’ve seen TS Eliot prizewinners pulling in over 40mm.

What’s the strangest experience you’ve had as a performer or host?

The Celebrity Euthanasia series went a bit Apocalypse Now towards the end. There was that night when the stage lights blew up so we sat round a wicker lamp reading Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercian Hymns”. Another night I had a nasty head cold: I’d just mumbled to a plausible stopping point in my opening spiel, inwardly thanking Superdrug and the mic stand that I hadn’t collapsed, and brought on the first act when a black-clad man glided into the single-figure audience. It was not Death, but Pete Doherty. Obviously I’d read about him in Metro, and was thinking if he started causing trouble I was in no fit state to handle it. But he was good as gold, cheered all the floor spots, and it shaped into a fun little show. He can come again. Camden School of Enlightenment – what’s happening, when and what have we got to look forward to?

Ooh yes! It will be a chance for performers to explore themes more ambitiously than the spoken word circuit normally allows. The Enlightenment part is that we should all end up knowing a bit more about something, or seeing something in a different way, through comedy, poetry, music or suchlike. All the featured acts will pick a specialist subject, and we’ll have some “resident lecturers” who get to expand their theme over three shows. The part I’m most looking forward to is the Dead Poet Society spot, where a performer will dedicate a set to one of our favourite poets of the past. We’re starting with Hovis Presley, and Ivor Cutler’s coming up in November. We will be at the Camden Head, 100 Camden High Street, on the second Tuesday of odd-numbered months, starting September 14th. More info at www.csofe.co.uk.

Your tweets have quite possibly converted me to Twitter – what do you enjoy about it, who do you currently follow and if you could follow a fantasy Twitter thread, who would it belong to?

It’s my one concession to social networking. You get to select your own virtual 24-hour tea-party of people sharing their musings, and send them away if they get boring. I am enjoying Viz Top Tips, Robert Auton, a couple of people who write tiny mystery stories, and somebody who pretends to be Alexander Pope and comments on the news in Augustan couplets. Pope, Swift, Gay and the rest of their Scriblerus Club would have been the kings of Twitter. As would Jesus ben Sirach, whose pungent moral furballs narrowly failed to make the cut for the Bible (still, that must have been a rejection letter worth keeping).

Your karaoke turns are somewhat legendary (“Ebeneezer Goode” being a particular highlight). What songs would you like to do, but haven’t yet, and how would you make them your own?

The “Bingo Master’s Breakout” karaoke selection books are still awfully light on grimecore; and the Rambling Syd Rumpo songs of Kenneth Williams are surely ripe for the Dropkick Murphys treatment. One that’s on the list is “You Were Made For Me” by Freddie and the Dreamers, but the dance that goes with that song involves bending the knees at alarming angles and I can’t quite do it. I think Freddie could only do it because his childhood diet in 1930s Manchester would have been dangerously deficient in calcium.

What makes you facepalm?

The English comic haiku, where the writer has had a thought that isn’t significant enough to make a proper poem, and isn’t funny enough to stand up as a joke, so it’s been mangled into that 17-syllable Procrustean bed to guarantee some polite applause. The proper Japanese-style haiku is a thing of skyey marvel, but the English comic haiku is just the sickly cousin of the noble limerick.

Do you have any secret London-based places/events of wonder to share?

Up in Camden, the Pie and Mash shop on Royal College Street does a consistent job of serving delicious pies with existential despair, and then there’s the Phoenician supermarket in Kentish Town. Back in my “manor” of Fitzrovia, you simply must pop into All Saints’ Margaret Street, a multicoloured towering pre-Raphaelite universe wedged into no space at all. John Betjeman was a huge fan, and on Sundays they do a high-as-a-kite Anglican evensong that will better your appreciation of late T.S. Eliot no end. Then wend your way to Bourne and Hollingsworth, where cocktails are served in teacups with cucumber sandwiches. It’s done up like a 1950s parlour, feels like walking into the raucous end of a naughty duchess’s funeral wake, and gets extra points for being underneath the tobacconist’s in “Peeping Tom”. (I am writing this from the edge of a private croquet lawn off Regent’s Park but that is a whole other story.)

Who or what should we be watching?

I am confidently expecting good things to continue coming out of Jack Underwood, who is meticulously and thrillingly slapdash, and James Brookes, who has fully charged his poetry bowl at history’s all-you-can-eat salad bar without spilling any of it carelessly on the lino. And I am keeping half an eye on Sophie McGrath, who doesn’t put herself about very much but has produced one outstanding poem called “Lebanon”. My favourite live act right now is David J aka The Vocal Pugilist: apparently he’s been at it for donkey’s years but he was a new discovery for me this summer, courtesy of Rrrants. On top of playing with some genuinely fresh ideas, he can do such unbelievable things with his voice that in less enlightened times we would have had to burn him at the stake.

Do you have any Boltonian pearls of wisdom or suggestions for would-be comperes and performers?

Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. For a poet, until you’ve gained such a standing that people will hang on your every word, ideally this means knowing your material off by heart so you can devote your eyes and brain to your audience, but I accept not everybody has time to do that. Also think carefully about whether, and how, you need to preamble your poems. If you’ve told me in advance at what stage in your relationship you wrote that ex-boyfriend poem, I’ll be suppressing yawns. If you leave me to speculate, I might end up suppressing little whimpers of fascination. Comperes have it easy: when you’re dying on your arse you can just bring the next act on. But again, it’s preparation. Having my links sorted out in advance usually gives me the confidence to make up better ones on the spot. Eh, our kid?


For Enlightenment alerts, visit the CSofE site, and don’t forget to follow Mike’s bite-size wit and wisdom via Twitter at @camdenlight.

Photo by Ant Smith.

Helena Nelson is one of the hardest workers in poetry: head honcho of pamphlet publishers Happenstance Press, editor of pamphlet review Sphinx, a published poet in her own right and a general poetry gladiator, promoting, realising, supporting and producing work all over the place. We snagged her sleeve for a few questions.

How did HappenStance begin and did you have a mission statement in mind when you began?

That’s two questions. I can’t reply briefly enough to the first for you to include on a website, but it was a dream, literally. As for the second, I loathe mission statements. I don’t even have one now. At least, I don’t think I do. I haven’t got a vision statement either.

What really excites you in a piece and what makes you sigh and reach for a comforting biscuit?

What really excites me is something I’m not expecting but immediately recognise. And talent. And intelligence. I don’t find biscuits comforting …

Are there any underrated or little-known poets whose work you champion or simply recommend taking a look at?

I think that applies to everyone I publish. If they were appropriately rated, I doubt I would be publishing their pamphlets at all (Alison Brackenbury is the most popular poet for whom I’ve done a publication, and that was a rare opportunity). I’d like to think I was doing my best to champion them all, though my own ability as a Wonderhorse is open to question.

What is good poetry able to achieve that other media can’t? Is there any area in which poetry has yet to be surpassed as a method of communication?

Poetry has yet to be surpassed as a method of communication. When it works, it works like nothing else. As a method of communication.

Tell us about the style of reviewing that you use, and what does and doesn’t work. 

I like accessible reviewing – someone who has read the text closely and carefully, has a lively style and takes responsibility for a personal opinion, rather than someone who asserts an absolute ‘truth’, e.g. “this poem is crap.”

Obviously a beautiful cover can’t save a terrible collection, but how important do you personally find the aesthetics of poetry books/pamphlets in complementing the contents?

Hugely important. I don’t think the message IS the medium, but I do think the medium can and should be part of the message. I am constantly dissatisfied with what I do, but then that’s good because it means I keep trying.

How do you find the live poetry scene where you are and what is your favourite type of live poetry event?

It’s wonderful. I live 22 miles south of St Andrews, which hosts StAnza, Scotland’s international poetry festival. I’m within travelling distance of Glasgow, which also does all sorts of interesting things, the Aye Write among them. I jump on a train or drive into Edinburgh to go to Shore Poets, events at the Scottish Poetry Library, the Poetry Association of Scotland, the Edinburgh Book Festival and the Callum Macdonald award presentations, as well as the excellent readings organised by Rob A Mackenzie. Among others. Having said this, I am often too exhausted or busy to get to the things I really want to go to.

Oh – my favourite type of live poetry event? Hell’s bells, I don’t know. I like all sorts of things. I like old-and-formal-but-means-business, hit and miss, young and brash, flip and flop, cuts-a-dash. Anything that’s well-prepared and a bit different. I don’t like stodgy, up its own arse or didn’t-really-have-time-to-prepare-this-but-how-lucky-you-are-to-have-the-privilege-of-hearing-me.

What was the initial idea behind your ‘Unsuitable Poems’?

Fun. Timid attempt at rebellion. Also I don’t have a plan, as such. My own poems either arrive or don’t. They have a mind of their own.

What’s going to be happening in the foreseeable future with your own work, Happenstance and Sphinx?

That’s three questions.

Own work – just did another Unsuitables which may or may not be inferior to the first. Should have a Suitable collection within next 18 months, not published by me. And about time!

Sphinx – issue 12 is the final paper issue, due early 2010. New review facility on the web will continue and hopefully go from strength to strength. I plan to post features and interviews there too, in due course.

HappenStance, at present, will continue with poetry pamphlets, especially first collections. I will continue to work with poets – lots of interaction. Probably about 10 to 12 each year: already full for 2010 and probably also 2011. Increasingly working with people over the long-term, rather than publishing instantly ‘finished’ collections. I’ve started two new series – one will be poetry sequences – for poems that formally fit together as a set or only make sense as a group. Another will be PoLites – light verse. (It is hard to get good light verse and also surprisingly hard to shift it so there won’t be a lot of them.) I’m also doing PoemCards – I like those and plan to continue them.

Finally, what one element, given absolute power, would you remove from poetry altogether?

Money …


Helena’s pamphlets Unsuitable Poems and The Unread Squirrel: More Unsuitable Poems are out now. For more Nelson goodness, investigate her blog and stop by Happenstance Press.