It has just been under as month since we launched Ten of the Best and Nu2: Memorable Firsts in Chapter’s theatre. I had been particularly excited about this one as Chapter has been my home from home since 2005. Before it was refurbished and turned into a small version of Ikea where the furniture isn’t for sale, I would read poetry in the old beer garden every Saturday, while drinking coffee before my 6 o’clock beer alarm rang in my head. This was also the place I first met Dannie Abse on a sunny Saturday afternoon. For hours I watched him eat a meal with friends at the bottom of the garden, while plucking up the courage to ask for his autograph, which I eventually did although it was on the back of a postcard with a naked lady on it, posing like a chair (I got it from the Tate Modern, honest guvna). Many of my dreams were born in that place so it only seemed fitting that my dream of a book launch should also be realized there. Not only that, but I have been working in the theatre part time for the past two years.

There was a fantastic turnout, which caused a delay as many people wanted to take their wine into the theatre space (you can’t do that people, it’s a theatre, not a café, as my boss keeps telling me), but it went ahead as planned with almost a full house. Events like this you would think inspire me to write, or feel proud, as though I had achieved something, but I don’t. I don’t know whether this is just me or whether it is a condition of all poets in Wales. The experience of publishing again – like it has done many times in the past – has left me feeling flat.

The book is a fantastically edited collection, it has a beautiful and classy cover. Many people came to both our official launches and our various unofficial ones, but for some reason I feel as though I have achieved nothing. My dream of what it would be like is vastly different to reality. It takes a great deal of effort and quite a few rejections to be published, and the world of publishing and literature are more cut-throat and demanding, both mentally and emotionally, than the banking sector I once worked in. Once published, your work gets read by maybe a thousand people if you’re lucky, then disappears into the ether, unless it gets reviewed by Richard and Judy, and pigs might fly by the time that happens. When I began looking to publish years ago I dreamt of writing poems that would infiltrate the masses, grow wings and fly off to the four corners of the world. My poet comrade, Welsh-born New York poet Zoë Brigley, who has enjoyed a hundred times the success I have, tells me I have a somewhat romantic view of things. I think she may be right; however, I think my romanticized view shouldn’t be abandoned just yet.

You see, right now, I am back home in Siberia. Just last week while flicking through TV channels, lazily enjoying the summer heat at the Dacha, I came across a programme in which the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was presenting his latest work. The audience literally couldn’t get enough. Although he is a poet, he is one of the most celebrated men in Russia. Perhaps this is due to cultural differences. Every other Russian here claims to have written poetry, so I suppose it’s only natural that a man who has published forty-six volumes should get to air his latest work on television.

This leads me to conclude that although in Wales we like to think of ourselves as the world capital of poetry, we are in fact nowhere near. Our poets are not celebrated, and their work not spread like wildfire by word of mouth as it is here in Siberia. Perhaps this is why I have currently stopped writing poetry. I have begun to question it’s use and purpose in the modern world. Or perhaps this is all a question of vanity, and I am simply questioning my own place in the world and as a poet. Perhaps I am looking for some kind of recognition, when really I should be happy that I have released my poems and they can go off to live their own lives. Like the character from my poem ‘Don’t mention Rosie’, I feel little purpose or sense of identity now my babes have flown the nest. I enjoyed writing them, I enjoyed watching them grow; and now they are gone I am faced with beginning again, a little older, a little wiser, perhaps slightly less of a poet now than I ever was.

Bright Young Things: Ten of The Best launch 9th June 2011 Blogg 18/06/11

Last Thursday at the Dylan Thomas Centre in my old semi-stomping ground of Swansea, Parthian’s Bright Young Things Series launched it’s outstanding new poetry collection, Ten of The Best (@Tenofthebest or hashtagged #TotB on twitter).  This is my first proper blog so I’m just going to do it in one flow cause poetry is my thing and I ain’t too clever with prose.

Some of the five poets in Ten of The Best, I had previously been published with before in Nu: Fiction and stuff.  Two years ago, almost to the day, the poet Mao and the relentlessly literary Susie Wild, travelled up to the Hay festival a week after the launch of the anthology to discuss our work on Radio5live’s Up All Night with Dotun Adebayo, Lemn Sissay, poet in residence at the Southbank Centre and Peter Florence, Hay’s main Honcho.  Exciting as it was, it was broadcast at 2 in the morning, for the niche demographic of the literary inclined insomniac long distance lorry driver.  Since then Susie and three others from the Nu,Tyler Keevil, J P Smythe & Will Gritten, have published their own novels, short story collections and autobiographical memoirs.

Now it’s the poet’s turn.

We met in the Queens pub around the corner where we swiftly became enamored with fresh copies of our new book.

I have to say that initially I was not totally convinced with the cover. I had only seen a rough Facebook profile shot of it and I found that the cover wasn’t very Parthian. Usually cutting edge and typically wrapped in modern Welsh artists, this 200×200 jpeg looked to me bland and old fashioned.  But in my hand and upon closer inspection I saw the cleverly disguised Bright Young Things logo winking at the reader in miniature.  As I held the book for the first time I remembered what Lemn Sissey said to me in Hay, “your first book will always be your favourite, even if you don’t think it at the time, the rest are never as special”. It did feel special. Good start.

It was also the first time all of the five poets from the book had met in one place. Alan Kellermann, Mao Oliver and I had originally met at the launch for Nu at the Hay festival in May 2009.  I’d see Alan at many a poetry event after this; The Crunch, 24 hour poetry marathon and Poems & Pints in Carmarthen.  The last time we met at the Poets & Pints night we discovered a shared interest in American Football as well as Alan’s new found love of rugby, particularly the Ospreys, and since my team – The Celtic Warriors – were cruelly and unnecessarily abandoned, leaving us valley supporters in the hotbed of developing players with no regional team to support, we had an interesting discussion on allegiances and how Swansea would remain far closer to home than Cardiff would ever be for a Rhondda boy.

Mao and I keep regular correspondence. Along with sofa hopping and IOU’s, we’ve both shared the bottom of a glass, bottle & carafe many a time and the launch was no exception. Excited, inebriated and fresh from a scene in a John le Carré novel after a suspicious phone call, we swiftly sank a few to ward off any ill demons or monitoring chips in our teeth that may affect the launch.

Although it was the first time for Mab and I to be published together, she needed no introduction.  Any, if not every, poetry event I had attended, performed at or heard of East of Port Talbot, Mab had been the catalyst, tireless advertiser and compere.  She may be billed as beating the Poet Laureate of Wales Gillian Clarke in a competition, but she’s giving Peter Lawrence a run for his money in South Wales.

This was the first time that I had met Anna Lewis, although a lady in the audience described to me that we had been duelling competitors before. In 2008, the first competition I entered after leaving Trinity college, Carmarthen (main stomping ground) was the Robin Reeves Young Welsh Writers Award.  The very nice lady in the audience had been a judge on the panel of that competition.  She spoke of how she had decided to come to the launch in hope that I would read ‘Chips are wrapped in yesterday’s news’, since that was the poem for which the panel, after two days of debate, decided to award me the runner-up prize in the competition.  She then went on to say that the winner of the competition – with a wonderful series of poems – was … Anna Lewis. So she was very pleased to see that we had become literary bedfellows, following this unknown sparring match between our words a few years ago. In my blurb I still claim that accolade, whereas Anna has gone on to win a number of competitions since. After reading her work I’m proud to stand alongside her between these pages.

I may have been naïve to the wider popularity of poetry in Wales but the amount of people that attended the launch was much greater than I had anticipated.  After attending a packed Mozart’s for The Crunch in Uplands a few times, I knew the poetry scene in Swansea was impressive but to share similar numbers as the Bright Young Things prose lot pleased me greatly.  Unlike the “paragraphers” though, poetry buffs love their wine just as much as a good couplet and I’m glad we nabbed a bottle for the stage before the job lot had gone.

Confession time. I actually stumbled across Parthian for the first time at Trinity College in November 2004. There was a book launch in the student union where I saw a table of books, posh sandwiches & wine.  Being out of pocket, I took a tray of food and a bottle of red and sat in the corner.  Pleased at my find, I enjoyed a meal and free wine along with my first ever undergraduate night of culture before my lecturer noticed I was sitting there, “absorbing the atmosphere” and introduced me to Richard Lewis, Parthian’s founder.  After this, I went to every book launch, reading and poetry event right up till I threw my mortar board.  My love of these events was an accidental bi-product of my “freebie” obsessed student lifestyle. No regrets.

I may have been an unwitting admirer of poetry from the bottom of a glass that night seven years ago but I have no doubt in my mind that the good people that turned up at the Dylan Tomas Centre last week were there due to Parthian’s unwavering ability to spot and nurture great writing talent (sic). I also believe it’s because they heard there was a collection of poems coming out that was going to blow Wales’ knickers off before stomping over the bridge to show the ridiculously terrific writing that’s blossoming from under the seemingly sleeping dragon of Welsh writing in English.  Mao may have sparked debate in the Q&A session with his depiction of Wales as a tumour, but I prefer to see it as the slow-thumping heart. This book is the adrenalin shot to shake off the cobwebs and kick the poetry world in the bollocks enough to make it stand and take notice!

So rock on Ten of The Best!  Follow us on facebook, twitter & in the streets (except for Mao. It may make him paranoid) & we look forward to the second launch at Chapter Art Centre in Cardiff on the 13th of July.

Tidy

Siôn

I am a performance poet. As such, I don’t really chase publication – I go after gigs. So when Parthian told me they had chosen my work, not just for inclusion in Nu2 (which is what I sent my poems in to be considered for), but also for the Ten of the Best anthology, I wasn’t just pleased – I was delighted. My face was as smug as the Cheshire Cat’s, I wondered if I had fallen down some kind of rabbit hole, and all the wine bottles in the kitchen were yelling drink me! (Which I did, a bit, later on.)

Maybe the stage and the page aren’t as far apart as I used to think… Or maybe my writing style has changed. I know that the work I did on the comedy circuit, in 2007 when I first started writing/performing, is very different to the work I do now, on the spoken word circuit. I still do the odd comedy club, and the more-than-the-odd burlesque revue (where I wear a corset and crack a whip – ha!), but there isn’t the pressure to be consistently comical (or risque) at a performance poetry event. My most recent poems work just as well on a page, it seems – as the acceptance and publication by Parthian (thank yoooou!) has shown.

So, what am I doing at the moment? Well, as usual, I have gigs coming up. After recentperformances with Apples & Snakes, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and at the Laugharne Weekend, I am looking forward to Bang Said the Gun (London, 28th April), performing with the brilliant Elvis McGonoghall (London, 13th May), compering at an Acoustic Night in the Norweigian Church (Cardiff, 24th May), at the Big Little City event in the Old Library (Cardiff), at the Exeter Fringe Festival…

Thanks to a commission, awarded by the Humber Mouth Literary Festival, I am also working on a 1-hour show examining silence/speech – more specifically, looking at Selective Mutism, an anxiety-related ‘challenge’ that affects one’s ability to verbally express oneself. I suffered from this between the ages of 16 and 24… Which is a bit of a surprise, to most people, considering what I now do for a living (am chatterbox. You Have Been Warned!).

I’ve also just found out that a spoken word version of Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida I am working on has been accepted into the first round of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages competition, and I am attempting to conquer NaPoWriMo – the poem-a-day challenge that is part of National Poetry Writing Month. One of these poems was recently featured on the National Botanic Garden of Wales website, so that was a very happy result!

So, it’s all business and buzziness, here! I really hope you can make it to one of these events, anyway; to the launches of Ten of the Best and Nu2; and if you’d like to follow me via my website/blog/twitter/facebook, I’d be even happier than I already am, and with an even wider, moon-size smile

Cheers!

M x

@mabjones

http://www.mabjones.com/
http://www.mabjones.blogspot.com/
http://www.jambones.webs.com/

The most successful poem I know is Jean Lánselmes ‘poem number 1515’. Written in the earlier part of the 20th Century this poem was a standing joke in the school playground not only in the 50’s and 60’s, but in 1985 when I was in school. I even have a copy of it from my banking days. It was being circulated as one of those chain email jokes. Nobody in the office knew it was actually a poem. It’s that kind of poem I’ve been looking to achieve. One that transcends the boundaries of poetry, a poem so funny and so relevant to people’s everyday lives that it takes on a life of its own and goes global. This, of course, will never make me any money. I might still have to work menial office jobs for the rest of my life. But it isn’t about money, it’s more about being in the service of literature and demonstrating that poetry isn’t just that boring stuff you were forced to study when you were a kid.

Ten of the Best is by far the best opportunity I’ve ever had and will be my largest publication to date. I do feel the pressure and worry about how everyone in the world is going to view it. I have no doubt that people who love classic poetry and who obey all the rules will not look at my poetry favourably. Some might even say it isn’t poetry at all. But I can’t think about these things for too long. Poetry has to be whatever you want it to be. People/writers cannot write within a framework or a template forever without eventually going completely insane. I have to feel free when I’m writing and thankfully Parthian, unlike many other publishers I have spoken to, welcome styles that are very far removed from what is normally classified as ‘poetry’.

I’m writing all of this from my wife’s apartment in Siberia, Russia. Only 3 weeks ago I had the pleasure of having tea with Eugeny Nikitin, the curator of the famous Moscow Poetry Club, and now also the editor of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. After an hour of comparing the state of modern poetry in Wales to that of Russia, Nikitin said ‘the world isn’t really interested in what we’re doing anymore. Interest in poetry everywhere, it seems, is in decline, and it’s going to get worse. People are more interested in television and pop stars. But if we stop writing, people like us will have no entertainment’.

Shortly after tea, Nikitin took me to a small back-street book store, the type that sells all the modern poetry you can’t find in the big book stores. The militsia tried to close it down once and it was mysteriously burned shortly afterwards; it has, however, been re-built. Modern poetry is still something that people want and need. I can’t help thinking that if poetry reading is in decline and poets are not so damn relevant anymore, why would the militsia try to shut down the shop?

This is a million miles away from the poetry scene in Wales, where shops are not invaded by the police or suffer terrible fires. We are not ever likely to experience the same kind of censorship or suppression. This alone is worth celebrating. So even if you don’t really care for poetry, have never bought a poetry book, or you’re a poet who tends to lean towards the classics, please come to our launch on June 9th at The Dylan Thomas Centre, if for nothing else but to celebrate our right to free speech and self expression.

The short story is having something of a resurgence of late. I am not complaining, having written a book of them, and I am sure Tyler isn’t either, as Parthian are publishing his short story collection sometime in the future. Anyway, as such there are all sorts of fab celebrations of the short story form going on this month and next.

This week is National Short Story Week. There are events across the country, and short stories to read for free on the website including my story Aquatic Life. I’ve also taken part in the short story challenge and contribute 150 words or so to the collaborative short story Consequences. I will be guest editing the site for a month in 2011.

I am going to be writing a Mslexia blog on why I love short form and my fave short story writers soon, possibly this afternoon. Sophie has written a very informative one about events and resources for short story readers and writers too.

In other news it is Short Story Day on the shortest day of the year. I am reading with Rachel Trezise and friends at the Cardiff event on 21 December 2010. Come along.

I also feel I should tell you that I just spent a lovely morning interviewing Caroline Bird, Eleanor Catton and co. from the Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist in front of the fire in Dylan Thomas’ old house. I’ll be writing up for a few people, so shall post links to it all soon.

LETTING GO

Wil Gritten (Parthian)

Letting Go is the autobiographical tale of Wil Gritten’s travels through South America and his attempts to find himself en-route. With promise of so much deep soul-searching to be done and the initial insights into political South America it is more than a little disappointing when Wil succumbs to whinging about complicated relationships. Wil entangles himself with a number of women whom he meets along the dusty, oxygen deprived roads of his journey and consequently wanders from place to place on a path of self destruction with many events and places lost in a cloud of substance abuse. The writing however is brilliant. I felt hugely endeared to Wil and found it easy to sympathise with most of his troubles. I shouted at him for the majority of the novel but you can’t help but dance with joy when he finally straightens himself out. Letting Go isn’t at all forced or fake and it has a fantastic comic element. A deftly human, truthful, adventurous, insightful piece of writing.’ [EP]

Susie and Tyler model the Bright Young Things goodie bags at BayLit festival. Hawlfraint / Copyright: Academi / John Briggs

Having Wil as a fellow BYT must have rubbed off, look at Tyler and I doing our catalogue model pose above. A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. Yes, Saturday saw the end of the BYT tour SOB SOB. We were appearing as part of BayLit Shock of the New festival because we are shocking and we are new. Only 50% of the BYTs were on stage but it was still an ace event. The busy Havannah Bar audience were treated to a double helping of readings from both Tyler and myself, a BYT quiz, and a kazillion chances to win prizes. We missed Wil and James though, and both read little bits of their book to the audience to make up for their absence.

A couple of pals who have been to more than one of the BYT events said they still weren’t bored as each one had been so different, and they’d noticed our confidence growing along the way so that the last event was the most insightful. Awwwwwwwww, bless their cotton socks. It was a different kind of event, I even read from the novella ‘Arrivals’ which is rare… but then I’ve had SOME NEWS about the novella. It is going to be released as a Kindle Single in the very near future. I’ll announce in the blog when you can actually get your hands on it. Exciting!

In other news, I’m writing a novel, like, actually writing it. Tyler is teaching and working on his short story collection for Parthian. The two of us are both open to offers from agents. James is extending his Harper Collins books by many thousand words at their request. Wil is dressing up as a bunny.

Mil Millington (left) and Bugged co-editor David Calcutt.

Ah, the Bugged launch was fun. After a packed coach journey, I spent a day strolling along canals and reading books in pleasant places, I had food with one of my good girl pals, a Brum resident, before heading down to the Ikon Gallery for the Bugged launch.

There waas a fantastic turnout including Dennis-The-Menace jumpered novelist and columnist Mil Millington. I am a big fan of his column (and book) Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About, and we were also in opposing teams in a sexual health charity quiz many years ago, back when I had a proper day job. We didn’t argue about the following things:

1. The failings of blue hair dye.

2. The awkwardness of the pornographic poses of the Ikon’s current exhibition.

3. The fact his girlfriend would like my sparkling bling ring.

4. How ace my poem in the Bugged book is.

You can see all the photos from the launch here: http://s1128.photobucket.com/albums/m482/birminghambookfestival/Bugged%20Launch%20Oct%2021st/

I am looking forward to the Birmingham launch of the Bugged book tomorrow. The event takes place at the wonderful Ikon Gallery as part of Birmingham Book Festival. I’ll be reading my Bugged poem and shmoozing about. It also offers me chance to catch up with a friend I just don’t see enough of, and return a book I borrowed aeons ago.

Here is the Bugged blurb:

‘Bugged brings together well-known names like Stuart Maconie with new and emerging writers like Jenn Ashworth and Susie Wild. The idea was simple: on a single summer day, writers all over the UK joined in a mass eavesdropping experiment – and wrote from what they heard. The results were funny, touching, sinister or uplifting. This is a brilliant new anthology of the best in British writing.’

You can buy it from CompletelyNovel

Hurrah