Isabel Rogers's Blog, page 4

Legs and toffee hammers

There are some days when all the careful counselling about being trolled and clickbaited and manipulated evaporates into an urge to be Baseball Bat Beyoncé.

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I won’t buy the Daily Mail. Won’t click their links. I judge people – real, fierce, animosity-filled judging full of imaginative curses and leyline witchcraft – who have one in their supermarket basket. I don’t want their sexist, racist, Ukippy, sewer-crawling pages anywhere near me. (If you don’t know which picture I’m talking about you’ll have to search for it yourself. I ain’t putting it here.)

And who knew that what would finally break out my inner toffee-hammer-wielding rampant feminist (again, ok) would be a front page picture of four legs? Apparently, women who cover up too much are terrorists, and women who reveal their leg bones are jointed are simply bimbos with limbs. Limbo bimbos. Tibia totty. Feisty fibulars. Have you seen ’er femur? No wonder they don’t make any sense. Two minutes of this kind of nonsense and your synapses liquify.

The headline doesn’t even rhyme properly, unless you say ‘Brexit’ in that weird ‘Breggzit’ way. It’s wrong on so many levels.

Our country is about to camouflage the white cliffs of Dover and fill up the Channel tunnel with broken promises to stop anyone getting in, but let’s concentrate on four patellae. I must stop now. I can feel my tiny lady brain overheating.

And do you know what I’d wear if I got anywhere near a Daily Mail editor? Trousers. Because they have lots and lots of pockets where you can hide a really big toffee hammer.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Daily Mail, legs, utter nonsense

London launch of Don’t Ask

Yesterday evening I joined a team of Eyewear poets celebrating our Spring book launches in London: US Dhuga, Mariela Griffor, Marion McCready, Kate Noakes, Jason Lee, Dick Witts and me, together with the Director of Eyewear, Todd Swift.

We all piled into the LRB Bookshop, where I have to admit the big excitement for me was shaking the hand of (and – later – being bearhugged by) the person who tweets @LRBbookshop. Obviously I can’t reveal his identity. He may be called John. But that doesn’t really narrow it down, and in any case I believe it’s a cover name.

[image error]There was the usual panic about recognising friends from Twitter I hadn’t yet met in person. I did spend a lot of the evening staring at men I didn’t know, in case they were @mutablejoe who had threatened to turn up, but since nobody had an enormous khaki-coloured cartoon head I didn’t spot him.

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Rishi and I swapping books

Fellow poet Rishi Dastidar was there, whose own collection Ticker-tape is out next week. We decided to confuse everyone by signing our books for each other in the middle of everything.

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The lovely Jane Ide

A few of my wonderful friends had travelled hundreds of miles to be there with me, and I am so grateful for their support. Because there were so many poets, and I had been allocated the penultimate spot, one had to leave before hearing me. I’m trying to think up a suitable consolation prize for her. I don’t think there is one.

[image error]I read one poem, which fittingly takes the piss out of poets, called Things are like other things. I then tried to stop reading to move things more quickly to the drinking end of the evening, but was encouraged by Todd to read another, The train poem, which again takes the piss out of poets (male poets specifically this time). If anyone bought my book on the strength of those two alone, I’d like to apologise for all the unexpected death and heartbreak they didn’t know they were letting themselves in for.

While I was raving about my beautiful cover, I of course forgot to name Alan Slater as the wonderful artist who painted it. I also thanked my editor, Kelly Davio, who is now back in the States but has left her mark on every page of the book.

If you wanted to buy a copy of Don’t Ask, you can.

Here are a few pictures from the night. I have the best friends.

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This was taken by Alastair Horne (@pressfuturist on Twitter). I’m going to live my entire life in glamorous black and white now.

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Me, Isabel Costello and Rachael Dunlop.We always move as a group in strict height formation.

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Debi Alper and me trying to clink glass against plastic. Behind us you can see the elusive “John” working his till magic.

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Ben Blackman is the other friend who travelled miles for the event. True dedication. He deliberately wore contact lenses so my description of him to Jane Ide was useless, leaving her to accost strange men in bars without me.

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Todd Swift

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By the time we left, the shop window had steamed up. That’s poetry for you.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Writing Tagged: Don't Ask, launch, LRB bookshop, poetry

Book launch in America

I’m still punch-drunk with fatigue after my six-day trip to the States to launch my collection, Don’t Ask. [flashes up my subliminal Please Buy My Book frame here]

[image error]The AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference is, I’m told, the biggest literary conference in the US. It happens every year in a different city, and this year it was in Washington with over 12,600 attendees, 800 exhibitors and 550 events. Timing wasn’t great, with Trump’s travel ban being fought over in the courts. There were many protests throughout the week. Writers were speaking, marching and organising against this hideous political climate: it was heartening to see a huge commitment to fight. [I take it as a personal insult that while sightseeing in both Washington and New York I found myself walking past the gaudy carbuncles that are Trump buildings. There should be warning signs so you can make a detour.]

[image error]I spent most of my week in the Eyewear booth – one of hundreds in the huge exhibition hall – along with publishers and small presses from all around the world. Todd Swift, Eyewear’s founder, had decided to boycott travel to the US in protest of Trump’s ban, and unfortunately another editor could not come at the last minute, so several Eyewear poets volunteered to run the stand as a team. Kelly Davio, my lovely editor who worked with me on Don’t Ask, left Eyewear a short while ago but was staffing the adjacent booth with her Tahoma Literary Review colleagues: it was great to see her.[image error]

On Thursday evening we read from our newly published works at a launch reception. John Freeman (who publishes as Cal Freeman) kindly offered to host the event, and I was honoured to read with an array of fantastic poets including Rebecca Gayle Howell, Mariela Griffor, Hassan Melehy and Terese Svoboda, among others.

I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit New York for the first time, so I nipped north on the train for a whistle-stop tour. Less than 24 hours is not enough, but I walked miles in my trusty boots.

My NY hotel, I discovered to my delight, was a kind of new age health spa in disguise: they encouraged me to do a full yoga-inspired workout in my room and change the mood lighting depending if I wanted to ‘relax’ or ‘energize’. In the end I found I wanted to ‘sleep’, so turned the light off completely.

While I was walking through Penn Station in New York, a huge man crossed my path. He glanced at me, boomed ‘Hi there lady – you’re looking beautiful! Welcome to New York!’ and carried on his way. You don’t get that kind of hello at Waterloo.

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The original oil painting by Alan Slater, next to my book.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Writing Tagged: book launch, Don't Ask, New York, Washington

The end of Hampshire Poet 2016

It’s over. I can finally speak in prose again. Hampshire Cultural Trust let me loose across the county for twelve months, and it has been a busy time. You can read my half-year pause, which took us up to our Hat Fair team of poets in Winchester in early July – more details of that day here.

I’ve just sent my final report to Angela Hicken at Hampshire Cultural Trust, detailing what I’ve been up to. Going back through my calendar has brought home to me just how many events I’ve been involved with, and perhaps explained why I overheard one of my children telling the other when there was yet another babysitter booked ‘but it’s very good for Mummy’s career’.

There were many highlights in the second half of the year. In July, I led a workshop as part of the South Downs Poetry Festival and shared an evening reading in Havant with my predecessor, Joan McGavin (Hampshire Poet 2014).

August I spent with my kids. After hearing their earlier comment I thought I’d better get some parenting points in.

In September I ran an all-day workshop at Winchester Discovery Centre. I shared two newly commissioned poems at the Hampshire Heritage event, where I read with Stephen Boyce and Robyn Bolam. We were upstairs at the River Cottage Canteen in Winchester, which produced such delicious-smelling food during our readings we were all famished by the time we’d finished. I was also invited to be the Stockbridge Poetry Café guest speaker, where I met some lovely people and enjoyed hearing a ukelele. Poets keep interesting company.

[image error]October was the month I moved the fastest. For National Poetry Day on 6th, we produced my Messages-themed commissioned poem on a bookmark and distributed them to libraries across the county – I wonder how many people worked out my riddle. Earlier that week I had another ridiculously early morning at BBC Radio Solent to enthuse about National Poetry Day. Kermit flails really don’t come across on radio, but apparently I sounded very chirpy so it must have helped.

I spent the day itself running two school workshops for children in Years 3 and 6, on the Messages theme, and judging four poetry competitions. There were some top messages in bottles, I can tell you. One was so watertight I nearly couldn’t get in to read it.

Then there was the Winchester Poetry Festival: I went to as many events as I could. The Hampshire Writers’ Society had asked me to judge their Poetry Competition, so I went along to their event to give my feedback and hand out prizes.

At the end of October I took part in the So To Speak Showcase: part of Southampton Festivals. I’d been commissioned to ‘respond’ to British Art Show 8, which toured the UK last year and was in Southampton in the autumn. I wrote a nine-poem sequence, and was filmed performing it. Apparently there has been a glitch getting it online, but I’ll link when it is.

In November I gave a talk to Southampton Writing Buddies, ran my second workshop at Winchester Discovery Centre, and visited a Southampton primary school to deliver three workshops for Year 6 kids all about kennings to fit in with their Anglo Saxon project. Honestly, by the end of that day, having worked with a total of 90 children, my already high esteem for teachers was off the scale. Brilliant fun, but a lie down needed afterwards with the smallest of sherries.

In December I approached the Poetry Society about setting up a new Stanza group, after fielding numerous requests during my year to start some kind of critiquing forum for poetry writers. Stanzas are affiliated to the Poetry Society: Hampshire already has two (one in Portsmouth, the other in Southampton), so I thought the North Hampshire area could benefit. Lovely Paul McGrane at the Poetry Society agreed, and he has contacted all PoSoc members in the postcode areas I specified (around 40). As I find out who is interested over the next few weeks I’ll arrange our first meeting (in Winchester) and take it from there. If you would like to come along, you can let me know via my Contact page on this site, or on Twitter. You don’t have to be a member of the Poetry Society, but when I’ve finished outlining the benefits I think you’ll want to be.

[image error]During all this, I have been finalising the manuscript for my first collection, Don’t Ask, which is out with Eyewear Publishing in February. I may have mentioned this before.

So: the visible legacy of my year as Hampshire Poet 2016 will be 16 new poems, the online record of Written By Women at Basingstoke Literary Festival, and a North Hampshire Stanza group. Less tangible are the many friends I’ve made over the year, and the brilliant work I’ve heard and seen being written at all my workshops and events. I was told by a parent of a Year 1 child that she now writes ‘all the time’ and loves poetry. Calling that a win.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Writing Tagged: Don't Ask, Hampshire Poet 2016, Poetry Society, Stanza

Don’t Ask

After years of writing and months of planning, I have a book!

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Earlier this week I took an oil painting to be properly photographed for the cover. This painting is by Alan Slater, and has been hanging by my desk for a few years now. I met Alan through Twitter (we still haven’t met in person), fell for this painting and bought it. I’ve been losing myself in it when I write for so long now, I couldn’t think of any other image that would suit the cover of my book so well. Luckily, my publishers agreed. I think it’s beautiful. The original painting is square, so we lose a bit to the right, but this portion of it captures the sense of depth and calm I always feel when staring at it.

Forty-seven of my poems made it into this collection. Kelly Davio, my editor at Eyewear, sifted those out of nearly double that number that could have gone in, and I’ll be forever grateful for her steady eye and evaluation skills. She has organised them into four sections that bring disparate ideas into coherent themes, which makes the whole book easier to navigate as a reader.

There are some poems I love that missed the cut: they will either end up somewhere else or sulk. You know what poems are like. One long one about a chap in Paris having his head guillotined, investigating how long he remains conscious afterwards, didn’t make it in. One day I may write an entire collection about different deaths, but it just didn’t fit here. Some just weren’t good enough. Some were too much like others already in. There are some I wrote years ago and some from my current year as Hampshire Poet.

If you’d like to put Alan’s beautiful painting on your bookshelf and get some free poems stuck to the back of it, you can order it from Eyewear Publishing. It’s out in February.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Writing Tagged: Alan Slater, Don't Ask, Eyewear Publishing, Kelly Davio, poetry, poetry collection

Advent, or who let the atheist in?

Last night was our first Advent service of the year. Having a choirboy son means I am obliged to turn up occasionally. If you were around my blog a few years ago, you might have seen my experience of his first carolling outing (nose pegs required).

So there we were yesterday: Granny and me. Granny, as well as being a former opera singer (see previous link), now has problems with her eyesight which means she can’t see a) very far or b) in low light. A candlelit service with loads of people is no good unless we install her near the front, complete with her torch. If you’re now imagining a small lady in her seventies wearing a powerful head torch, sweeping a dazzling laser beam around an ancient chapel, sorry to disappoint. She has a discreet hand-held thing, and only uses it to read the words when we have to sing (more of that later).

[image error]We were early. You have to be, unless you want to be squashed at the back between fur coats smelling of mothballs and Chanel, both of which make me sneeze. There was ample time to observe the vicar lighting candles. All the candles. There were tall ones in glass cylinders for the choir. There were enormous ones the size of tree trunks either side of the lectern. Tea lights were crammed on every horizontal surface. Two complicated candelabra stood at each end of the altar, which were taller than the vicar: and lo, the holy stepladder was brought in and a lighted spill was carried aloft to illuminate the seasonal hairdos. By this stage, we were unbuttoning our coats as the combined calorific output of all these naked flames really powered up. He managed to do all this wearing a full-length robe and still not set his billowing sleeves alight. I was impressed.[image error]

Pyromania sated, he folded up his stepladder and darted out of a side door. A hum of expectation grew as the organ started to play some soothing Bach. Granny was uncomfortable on the hard pew, so I fashioned a seat cushion out of my scarf. The coughing man behind us started asking around for a throat sweet, so I offered Granny’s supply (she never leaves home unprepared). Things were going well. I watched as a portly gentleman excavated his back teeth with a finger for some time. He caught my eye and buried himself in his hymn book.

Then the organist decided to play some Messiaen. Heads that had been nodding happily to Bach suddenly stilled, and turned to their neighbours. What was this? It sounded odd. Angular. You couldn’t tap your foot to it. Kenny Everett couldn’t have woven an entire series of mime sketches to it. Necks were craned to see what kind of organist would challenge Christmas expectations so. Thankfully, Bach was resumed before too long and the pews grew calm again. We all had another throat sweet to settle our nerves.

It didn’t last. There was a commotion, and the pew in front of us filled up all at once with the kind of people who have their seat reserved with a laminated piece of A4 bearing their name. There was a long kerfuffle as the first person in realised their name was not at the far end but mid-pew, and tried to reverse, bumping into others, until they all backed out and filed in again in the right order. I suspect they had been at a festive soirée, judging by the wafting sherry fumes and hilarity levels. I just hoped we weren’t going to have the olfactory disturbances I’d had to deal with before. Drunk is ok. Rectally-challenged is not.

Soon our eyes began to sting, and I heard the first rasping coughs from the back before we started ourselves. I realised God’s tear gas was being deployed. Granny, an elderly asthmatic, produced an impressive coughing fit, but luckily she had brought her inhaler. The weak may well inherit the earth, but unless your lungs are A1 you can apparently forget it.

Finally, then, they plunged us into darkness (apart from the forest fire of assorted candle power) and the music started, sung by a choir processing doggedly up the aisle despite burning their knuckles with melted wax from their personal Wee Willie Winkie illumination kit. They were brilliant, of course. Granny and I joined in the congregational hymns with gusto. The drunks in front of us sang with equal gusto, but – let’s be honest – slightly less accuracy. Clearly Granny made her mark, because as we were leaving one of them turned round and complimented her on her ‘marvellous voice’. It’s always worth bringing an opera singer to this kind of thing.

It’s my son’s last year as a treble. I’ll almost miss it. Almost.

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Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: advent, carols, singing

What makes a spellchecker blink?

Last year, before his novel The Maker of Swans was published, Paraic O’Donnell wrote a post about words his spellchecker highlighted. You can read it here, and unless you’ve done that, and then followed him on twitter, we can’t really be friends. The idea grew from Sarah Perry while she was writing The Essex Serpent: Paraic shared her list, and his thoughts about it, here.

As I sent my editor final tweaks and suggestions to my poetry collection, I realised it was my turn. Being me, I couldn’t help doing a brief statistical analysis to save face:

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I adore The Maker of Swans, and goodness knows I adore Paraic, whom I’ve never met. However, I have had many and varied online conversations with him – about words, roses and life – all sprinkled with creative swears. His post intrigued me. I can’t attempt his level of grammatical filigree, but can lay this down as an homage. Looking at the final file of my words with tiny red squiggles under some of them makes me uneasy and somewhat cross. These words belong where I put them, even if I invented some. I won’t be gainsaid.

They are the kind of words that mark a book out as, if not special, at least off-kilter to some extent. Enough to make a computer stop and think. After removing my many English/American confusions, I am left with this list.

Some are aspirational and defiantly continental European in our drab post-Brexit dystopia: the Gaudis, the trouvèrents or the Saxony-Anhalts. Some are bizarrely earthy: Daz, moolah, plaggy (a dialect/accented version of ‘plastic’ I wanted to magpie* into one particular poem’s leap of voice). I’m disappointed only three of the un-words I love made it through; it would have been five had one more poem sporting two of them made the final cut. I have my love of the un-word in common with Paraic, and shall never apologise for it.

Make of this list what you will. My collection, Don’t Ask, will be published in February with Eyewear Publishing. You can read all these words in their proper place if you buy a copy. (I need to work on my sales pitch.)

* Yes, I did just verb ‘magpie’. Sue me.

#journorequest

Antoni

ceci

chainmail

Chawton

clickbait

Daz

Deptford

Dimbleby

enjamb

Gaudi

hermited

In Memoriams

jewelled

Mam

Maskelyne

mebbe

Möbiussed

moolah

mori

n’est

nubbed

pendula

perdu

Perseids

petrichor

plaggy

ploughed-up

porcino

recherching

Sagrada Familia

saltpanned

Saxony-Anhalt

screenhot

segestria florentina

Shoshoni

sinkstone

trouvèrent

twigtips

une

unfingered

unmouthed

unpeels

Filed under: Uncategorized, Writing Tagged: Don't Ask, poetry, spellchecker

’Tis the season

First day with both children back at school. One of them is already talking about what kind of Advent calendar they’d like.

Nights are drawing in, though not, as yet, getting any colder, so the mosquito with whom I appear to share a bedroom won’t be flying away from its nightly banquet any time soon. I have taken the sparkly purple nail polish off my toes. Summer is over.

Roll on proper autumn, with long walks, log fires, sloppy jumpers, thick socks, dark red wine and baked mushrooms. And cheese. Lots of cheese.

There is work to do. It glowers at me from my inbox. Time to get cracking and pretend I have a new term to start.

Things to remember remember the fifth change of season:

1. Ne’er put on the clout you cast back in May until this humidity has dissipated.

2. The pen is mightier than the very definite sword.

3. No man is an island. No woman is a continental shelf. I think that’s right, but all I remember from Geography is a bit of Australian sheep farming.

4. Better late than never for school, although after twenty minutes yelling ‘shoes! bag! games kit!’ in your child-free hallway you may prefer home schooling, when you can arrive after coffee and make the first lesson cake.

5. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Necessity is the mother of invention. Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration (thank you Billy Collins). Listlessness is the usurper cuckoo of inefficiency.

6. If it ain’t broke maybe spend the time you might have spent mending it to reappraise your grammatical skills.

I think we’ve all learned something here. Now get back to work.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Logic versus religion

We have reached the stage of the school holiday when I’m no longer sure what day it is. Routine has flown, leaving in its place two rolled duvets who pretend to be my children. I feed one end of the roll and remove dirty laundry from the other. It’s a foolproof system so far.

Lying in bed one morning, I realised it must be Sunday because helpfully there was a programme called Sunday on Radio 4. It sets the boundaries and also works as an alarm clock, making me leap out of bed with impatience at people talking terribly seriously about their imaginary friends.

Last week, there was a piece on Sunday about a proposed eruv in London. In case you haven’t heard of it (and I hadn’t), an eruv is an artificial boundary enclosing several private properties, exempting the area from ancient Jewish sabbath laws. There are complex rules about transferring things from private to public domains, forming an abstruse legal area that has occupied fine lawyerly minds for hundreds of years.

I’m going to deal with it in one irreverent blog post. I’m sure it’ll be ok.

I understand it’s a good idea to have a rest occasionally. I passionately defend labour laws limiting hours we should work in a week – I get it, I really do. But I also studied philosophy at university and have the kind of mind that likes following ideas to their logical conclusions to see what happens.

There are some religious rules forbidding switching electricity on or off on the sabbath, which makes me marvel at the prescience of those erudite scholars who made the rules before we knew what electricity was. Now we have a whole industry providing automatic “sabbath setting” labour-saving devices to let people who know and care what day it is carry on with modern life.

I know a Christian musician who won’t play in an orchestra on Sundays. Eric Liddell (also Christian) famously refused to run the 100m Olympic heats in 1924 because they were on a Sunday. His loss was Vangelis’ gain. Swings and roundabouts.

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How do you get from ‘it’s a good idea to rest now and then’ to ‘you must not carry a pen in public on the sabbath’?

I’ve sat in many, many Christian church services, being told about a god who seems to vary depending on who is doing the telling. The shared bits of religion between Christians, Jews and Muslims were written thousands of years ago by men living in a very different society. You can’t untangle history and religion. We can’t just go out and sacrifice a goat on a whim any more.

I’ve been told that eruvs are ‘wonderful’ and ‘freeing’. That, to me, sounds like people enjoy the freedom to bend the literal rule that was laid down thousands of years ago. I approve. But logically – and this is the crucial question for me – why do people not question the original rule rather than construct complicated ways of getting around it?

Of course a mother needs to carry her baby around. Every day. (Another clue these rules were written by men with their heads safely in a book while their children were looked after in another room.) I applaud arrangements letting mothers go out of their houses with their children. What appalls me is the rule that kept them in.

The first eruv in the UK had an eleven-mile perimeter and contained an area of roughly six and a half square miles. It’s mostly clear nylon fishing wire strung on poles. Apparently, God is ok with you pushing your baby buggy anywhere inside this, but gets really cross if you stray more than about six feet outside. Oh, and he also gets cross if the wire breaks and you haven’t noticed. But it’s ok on a Tuesday.

This kind of god sounds petty and vindictive. One who drinks too much on a Saturday night and wakes up on Sunday* determined to take out his hangover pain on anyone who gets too close. Within about eleven miles, by the sound of it.

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NOTE: This rant has been brought to you by a cheerful atheist. Please do not try to convert me in the comments. You can do what you like: I’m happy for you and reserve the right to find it daft. (I have form: if you hunt around this site there are several exasperated posts. Best not visit if it’s not for you. I even had a poem published called Confession of a worn-out god.)

 

 

* other sabbath days are available

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: atheism, eruv, god, logic, religion

Chawton House poems

Earlier this year, I spent some time at Chawton House in Hampshire. It belonged to Jane Austen’s brother; she lived nearby in the village of Chawton and visited regularly.

I was asked to write a few poems as part of their exhibition celebrating 200 years since the publication of Emma. This week, Chawton House has been releasing one poem a day on their website, showing pictures of where the poems were written (two in the house and two in the garden).

The four poems that came out of this are an unashamed modern response to how I imagined I would feel, living the life that Jane did. I didn’t conceal how frustrated I would be with the constraints placed on women at that time. I am convinced she felt the same frustrations, to a degree.

Now if you visit, you can read them all in a printed pamphlet, in the place they were written. Their Emma at 200 exhibition runs until 25th September.

All four poems are on the Chawton House Library site (you can scroll through on that site, but I’ve put individual links below):

Withdrawing room window

Long hall

Bench

Lime walk

I’ll be reading these four poems, plus others inspired by locations and events in Hampshire, on Thursday 8th September at the River Cottage Canteen, Abbey Mill, Winchester, in a Heritage Day event at 7pm, together with poets Stephen Boyce and Robyn Bolam.

 

Filed under: Uncategorized