Magma Poetry Competition

The Magma poetry competition is open for entries. There's very sound advice here from the judge Dalgit Nagra about this competition but on entering competitions in general. Read it.

Deadline: 19 January 2016

Daljit Nagra is the Judge for the Judge’s Prize for poems of 11 to 50 lines.
First prize £1,000, second prize £300 and third prize £150.

Magma’s Editors’ Prize is also open over the same period for poems of up to ten lines:
First prize £1,000, second prize £300 and 10 special mentions £15.

In addition to receiving attractive cash prizes, winners will be invited to read at Magma’s prize-giving event in Spring 2015. The five prize winning entries will be published in the magazine.

The entry fees are £5 for the first poem, £4 for the second and £3.50 for the third and each subsequent poem. Magma magazine subscribers benefit from reduced fees: £4 for the first poem, £3 for the second, and £2.50 for the third and each subsequent poem.

More info here

Interview with poet Jane Clarke

Hi Jane and welcome to emergingwriter. How did you first get into poetry?

I was always interested in literature and studied English at college but it was when I was training as a psychotherapist in my 30's that I came to poetry as a source of pleasure and meaning in my day-to-day life. I remember the first time I read "The Art of Losing" by Elizabeth Bishop and being so moved by her denial of the impact of her losses right up to the shattering power of that final line. 

As a child I had dreamt of becoming a writer but it wasn’t until ten years ago that I wrote my first poem. I was doing a distance-learning course with the Open College of the Arts with a view to writing short stories but the second assignment was to write four poems.  My tutor, the poet Kate Scott, gave me encouraging feedback on these first poems and I began writing more and more as well as immersing myself in contemporary poetry. I loved how the distilled language of poetry could express the complexity of our lives with such constraint and containment. I found myself enthralled by the process of making an object with words, an object that then went on to have a life of its own.

What poets or poems would you recommend to read when starting to write poetry?

There is such a wealth of poetry but I think what is most important is to read poems that speak to you, that touch you, that make a difference to you, as if you’re walking through a huge garden and are drawn to particular plants and flowers for their colour, shape or scent, how they stand tall or how they huddle into a corner. I found the Bloodaxe anthologies a wonderful introduction to poems and poets. I also dipped in and out of Sources, edited by Marie Heaney and the Lifelines anthologies edited by Niall McMonagle. 

Gradually I moved from reading individual poems to reading collections by poets that appealed to me, including Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Longley, Robert Frost, Gillian Clarke, Paula Meehan, Kerry Hardie, Mark Roper, Moya Cannon, R.S. Thomas. I found and still find that reading other poets makes me want to write and often it’s a poem by someone else that sets off a poem for me, with just a word or a rhythm, a memory or a question. Then I stop reading and start writing. 

What I have also found very helpful and enjoyable is a poetry-reading group, which my friend, the poet, Shirley McClure and I set up almost seven years ago. Five of us have been meeting once every month or so to read and discuss individual collections and some anthologies. We have read some of the all-time greats, such as Yeats, Auden, Akhmatova, Rich, Eliot, Hopkins, Dickenson, Donne, Milosz, and also lots of contemporary poets, such as Kay Ryan, Sinead Morrissey, Ruth Stone, Jane Hirshfield, Naomi Shihab Nye, Eavan Boland, Mimi Khalvati. Also Harry Clifton runs a regular poetry reading class in the Irish Writers Centre, introducing poets in their historical and literary context with lots of anecdotes and insights.

What do you get from going to a poetry reading?

I go to readings for the pleasure of hearing poets read their own work and to experience poetry as an aural art.  I like listening out for the tonal quality the poet gives a poem, where they pause, where they put their emphasis, where they slow down and where they pick up speed. I’ve often heard a poem differently at a reading to how I read it on the page and sometimes a poem stands out which I had overlooked in a collection. I’m interested to get a sense of the context of the work through the poet’s introductions, as well as a sense of the poet as a person, which can provide a whole other dimension to their work.

I think festivals and readings are invaluable for introducing us to new poets and for giving us the opportunity to hear and see poets we’ve loved and admired from afar. They’re important too for bringing people to poetry; highlighting or reminding people of what poetry has to offer. There may be relatively little attention for a collection despite years of work in the making and a reading may be one of the few places where the poems are celebrated and acknowledged publicly. I also think readings are important for the community of poets and it’s good to meet other poets, friends and colleagues there.

How do you know where to stop a poem and where to start?

Well, with the first draft I don’t really have a choice. It’s a matter of picking up on that initial spark or idea or rhythm or phrase and following until it comes to its own end. It’s like unraveling a thread or running along the platform to catch a train that is just about to leave the station.

It’s when I begin to redraft that I work with the questions of where to start and where to stop. I read the poem aloud over and over to hear the music as I take out or put in words, work with the imagery, change the lineation. I like creating a sense with the first line of coming in on something that has already begun and with the final line I try to avoid tying it up with a neat bow. At the end of the poem I try to create a sense of openness or surprise or paradox or an emotional undertow – something that will stay in the mind and the heart and might send the reader back to the beginning again. But most of the time I’m not thinking about this consciously because I’m caught up with how to make this particular poem sing.

It is easier to see where someone else’s poem should begin and end and I find being in a workshop group invaluable for honing my editing skills. When I get the poem as ready as I can, the next step is to take it to my monthly writing group. They will tell me if I should have started further into the poem, if I’ve gone on too long or if the ending needs to be stronger. I think that over time we develop a kind of sixth sense for what is working or not and we find ourselves applying that to our work as we are redrafting. However I couldn’t do without the critique and suggestions of my workshop group. 

All the advice is to put the poem away for at least a few months and then to look at it again. I find this hard to do but I think that time away from the poem helps us separate from it and therefore gives us perspective so that we can better see what the poem needs. It’s exciting to come back to a poem and find that I see it differently and so can work with it more freely than I could have months or years before. That’s when I might make the first line the title of the poem or begin at the second stanza or leave out the ending I have crafted so carefully. Mimi Khalvati says that the mind instinctively makes connections and that includes the reader’s mind. She suggests we can be bolder and wilder than we think.

Tell me how your poetry collection came about?

About four years after I began writing I started to think about drawing together a collection. I had won a few prizes and had a number of poems published which I took as encouragement. I started the distance learning MPhil in Writing at the University of South Wales and brought my collection to the residential week at the end of the first year in June 2010. The staff and my peers told me that it wasn’t ready yet and advised me to take more time with it. I was disappointed and disheartened but they were quite right and it was pivotal advice for me. It pushed me to slow down, to read more, to write more, to redraft poems, to set higher standards for my work and for my collection. It also gave me time to get more poems published. I worked with Gillian Clarke as my tutor for two years on the MPhil, which was a privilege. My writing developed with the help of her feedback, as well as that of Philip Gross, the Welsh Tony Curtis and Stephen Knight.

It was another two years, September 2013, before I felt I had a collection I could stand over. I sent twelve poems to Bloodaxe Books in October and Neil Astley asked me to send the full collection in April 2014. It was accepted for publication at the end of July 2014 and published the following May 2015. Along the way I showed drafts to Grace Wells, Geraldine Mitchell, Shirley McClure and Yvonne O’Connor, all of whom gave me invaluable feedback on individual poems as well as the overall structure of the collection. Putting together a collection takes time and I think the poet is working with the questions of the overall arc of the collection and the placing of individual poems unconsciously as well as consciously during that time. I found it to be like the process of writing a poem in many ways, except probably more difficult. I was moving poems in and out and around, looking for a sequencing that felt right to me. I was looking for resonances between poems as well as variety and movement in the collection as a whole.

Then there was all the thinking about the title. One of my first ideas for the title was Where the river deepens so the river was there from the start. Somewhere along the way I realized I wanted it to be The River, to reflect what I saw as the strongest poem in the collection and also to reflect the themes of change and loss and what nature offers us.

I didn’t have any idea for the cover image when I sent the collection to Bloodaxe Books, except a slight preference for a photograph. When Neil Astley emailed to tell me he was going to publish the collection he had already found this image of the heron, reflecting the lines from A River at Dawn –

A Heron flies up
from the callows, leads river and rowersinto the day, lean in, catch, pull back, release.

If you had to choose one poem from it for people to remember which would it be and why?

It would be the title poem, “The River”, which is also the last poem. It is probably my favourite poem in the collection and it is also the one that evokes the most response from others. At readings people tell me that it has meant a lot to them and I’ve also had texts, emails, even letters about this poem. It is a kind of meditation on the nature of loss and this is something everyone understands. I wrote my first draft of “The River” in May 2005 but I came back to it again and again over the years and finally finished it six years later.

Was the MPhil solely around writing poetry?

  

The MPhil in Writing in the University of South Wales is for any kind of creative writing but I chose to concentrate on poetry. 

How much of the MPhil was residential?

I would go over on a Thursday night and stay in a hotel two nights and get a flight back on Saturday evening. It was Friday lunchtime to Saturday at about 5. Check the website to see how many weekends there are now – it could be six weekends per year for two years and one residential week in between. There was only one residential week at the end of year one. The big advantage is that I didn't have to give up work to do it.

What are you working on now? Anything coming up?

My poetry work has changed considerably since my book came out. I had a lot of launches, readings and interviews over the summer and they’ll continue right into November. I believe in people having access to and pleasure from poetry, similar to how music is a part of people’s everyday lives; so I value opportunities to read my work, to meet readers and to perform alongside other artists, particularly musicians. All my readings are listed on the homepage of my website (www.janeclarkepoetry.ie). I’ll be reading at Clifton Arts Week and in the Courthouse Arts Centre, Wicklow.

I am also working on new poems. I hardly dare say I’m working on the next collection because it’s early days. In some ways it’s like starting all over again, building up a body of work, sending poems out for publication. What’s most important is that I am writing. It’s wonderful to have my book out, it’s wonderful that it has had such a good response but still what is most important, is to be writing, to be responding intensely to the world around me and to be translating that response into poems.  

Where do you write?

I write in all kinds of places - on the train, in coffee shops, in the kitchen , the living room, the office.

Do you write in form?

Most of my writing is free verse though I love writing variations on the sonnet form and I sometimes experiment with villanelles and pantoums. I do think trying to work within the restrictions of a fixed form can be very productive. Sometimes I have tried to write in a particular form, for example terza rima, and it has got a poem going for me (that I might not have found otherwise) but at the editing stage I’ve changed it into free verse. On the other hand, “Who owns the Field?”, one of the poems in The River only took off for me when I tried it as a villanelle. I have lots more to learn about writing in form, which I think would be beneficial for my poetry regardless of whether I use it directly or not.

Apart from putting away a poem for a while to let it cook, what other advice would you have for writers starting out?

I’m thinking of what was helpful for me –

• Immerse yourself in poetry. Read poetry every day. Read widely to find the poetry you love and that will inspire your own work.
• Make space for writing in your life. Let it be important.
• Join a workshop group or set one up.
• Go to poetry courses, e.g. in The Irish Writers’ Centre or at literary festivals like Listowel Writers’ Week, West Cork Literary Festival, Cork Spring Poetry Festival. I learned so much on the courses I attended and I got encouragement to keep writing. The poet facilitators introduced me to a wide range of poetry and helped me develop my own work. I also met many of my poetry friends on these courses.
• Take every opportunity that comes your way to read your work in public because that will help your confidence. Or set up opportunities by taking it in turns with a group of friends to host an evening of readings, singing, music.
• Join or set up a poetry book club.
• Go to poetry readings.
• Get six poems as ready as you can get them and send them out to a magazine or journal. Then get another six ready and keep going. Expect rejection and celebrate the occasional acceptance. When they are returned see if you can make them stronger and if not try sending them out again. Different editors have different taste.
• Last but not least – keep writing and keep redrafting until you have it as close as possible to a good poem.

I’m reading a fabulous book at the moment; The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher McGowan. Williams gives the younger poet, Levertov, the following advice. 

“Cut and cut again whatever you write – while you leave by your art no trace of your cutting – and the final utterance will remain packed by what you have to say.” 

He also says, 

“Practice, practice, practice, must be the practice of the artist.”

Thanks Jane for sharing your story and some great advice. Jane Clarke's debut poetry collection is available in bookshops and from Bloodaxe.

Skylight Journal submissions

Quick one: Deadline 1 October

Skylight 47 is seeking submissions for its next issue.

Skylight 47 is a poetry magazine in newspaper format, and is published twice a year. The next issue will be launched in Autumn/Winter 2015. They are looking for poems and original artwork from Ireland and abroad.

Please send up to four poems, along with a short biographical note (max 60 words), to skylightpoets47@gmail.com.
Send your poems both as a single attachment (.doc, .docx, .txt or .rtf) and in the body of the email.

Works should be previously unpublished.
Poems to be no longer than 40 lines.

Web: http://Skylight47poetry.wordpress.com
Facebook: Skylight Poets
Twitter: @Skylight47Poems
 

The 17th Francis Ledwidge International Poetry Award

Do yourself a favour and read some of the poems by Francis Ledwidge.

Here's the annual poetry competition in his honour.

Deadline: 5th November 

The first prize is the Ledwidge plaque inscribed with the winner's name and a cash prize as well. Cash prizes and books for second and third places with merit certificates for all finalists. The certificates are always beautifully done and well worth having. The first three poems will be entered in the Forward Prize UK and in addition the winner will be invited to read at the annual Francis Ledwidge Commemoration at the National War Memorial Gardens in July 2016.

The poems must be the competitor's own work and not previously published or broadcast and must not exceed 40 lines of type with a max of six poems entered. 

The entry fees are €4 per poem or three for €10 and six will cost you €20. Put your name and address on a separate sheet and send your entries to:

The Francis Ledwidge International Poetry Award 2015,

C/o 20, Emmet Crescent, Inchicore, Dublin 8.

Winners will be notified and results announced at the annual awards night.

Facebook page: Inchicore Ledwidge Society. 

Interview with writer David Butler

Hi David and welcome to emergingwriter. How did you first get into writing?

I think I always felt the compulsion to write. When I was in 4th and 5th class in St Brigid’s, Castleknock, a few stories I wrote were read out to the whole school. Later, like many teenagers, I had the hormone that spontaneously produces bad poetry, though one or two did find their way into print. Pretty derivative stuff, really, all Plath and Hughes with a dash of Leonard Cohen. In my twenties, the poetry hormone morphed into the one that leads to over-written prose, very stylised, very self-conscious.  Only in my late thirties did I finally manage to tame these sufficiently to produce publishable work.

Can you remember your first "proper" adult published writing? What was it?

My first proper adult publications were undoubtedly the poem 'Swallows', published in Poetry Ireland Review in 2000 which went on to win their Ted McNulty Award; and the story 'Dubliner', which featured in issue 9 of the Stinging Fly in 2001.

How do you move between forms? I mean how do you know if an idea you have or a note in your notebook or an overheard scrap of conversation will end up in a poem or a play or whatever? Or do they sometimes show up in more than one. Or move?

I've usually no idea how or where such scraps and ideas and thoughts will wind up. That said, as a modus operandi, I’ve found that having something on the go in different genres has often got me out of jail in terms of the dreaded writer’s block. I wrote my first published novel, The Last European (2005) while supposedly doing my PhD in Trinity, and whenever the novel got jammed, I worked certain passages into poems which eventually led to the Via Crucis collection. Likewise, a large chunk of my current work in progress, Under the Sign of the Goat, has evolved into a one-act play, Blue Love. My reading would be just as various, jumping from poem to play to story...my mother always used to say I've a grasshopper brain!

Can you give me some examples of the mix of things you've been reading recently and which you would recommend?

One great thing about drama is that where a novel might take 10 to 20 hours, you can read most plays in under two. Over the last few weeks I've reread Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, Tom Murphy's House, David Mamet's American Buffalo and, in the run up to seeing it, Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats. The last novel I read is John William's wonderfully restrained song of despair, Stoner, and I've now entered the haunting world of Orhan Pamuk's Snow. I've been dipping in and out of the collected short stories of Eudora Welty and the new Young Islanders anthology. Oh, and my favourite living poet is Carol Ann Duffy...

I read Stoner. The writing was terrific but really, I didn't enjoy it. Plus he was rubbish at writing believable, rounded women, which always disappoints me. Not a fan of Orham Pamuk either, My Name is Red is one of those few books I stopped reading part way through. But Carol Ann, now you're talking!

I wonder how long a drama takes to write compared to a novel? I haven't read a play for a long time.

Writing good drama is supremely difficult. People often confuse it with writing good dialogue. Even at their peak, some of the top playwrights take two to five years to hone each new play.

Have you written a full length play? Would you say it would take about the same amount of time to write as your novels did?

I had a full length play shortlisted for the Eamon Keane Award in Listowel in 2011. More correctly, I'd call it a full length draft. To give an idea, I've a 10 minute play called Forwards just published in the latest Incubator Review in Belfast. This evolved over several years, at least 12 drafts, and was much tightened over its various performances. Only now would I call it finished.

And how long does a novel take? Mine seem to require a minimum of three drafts with gaps in between (often of several years).

What is your approach to writing? Where do you write? 

My desk overlooks the sea. It’s a magnificent arena to face down the silence of the keyboard. That said, the majority of my new writing (as opposed to compulsive rewriting, which is probably 9/10 of what I actually do each day), is composed while out walking, or while listening to the voices and phrases that haunt my insomnia. Luckily, I've a decent memory.

I've a shockingly bad memory. It's an advantage when I come back to something I've written recently and I can't remember writing  it at all. I can read it with a remote eye.

Any tips for new writers?

Perhaps my first tip for new writers: Don't be in a hurry. Don't be satisfied with 'pretty good' or (worse) 'mostly good, except for...' A huge problem is differentiating what's in your head from what's on the page. I think you need to allow enough time to 'forget', which in my case means (a) months on end and (b) writing other projects in between. It's a good practice to hear your work read out by someone else, someone who hasn't been primed in advance with 'what I'm trying to do is...' Related to this tip, don't be defensive...

The other tip: READ! Then read more. Read widely, but also deeply (as in re-read good stuff again & again). Also re-read your own stuff, aloud if it helps.

Oh, and don't give up. I've yet to meet someone who gave up who was subsequently published!

Thanks David, that's terrific advice.

Have your plays had staged readings? Do you know the backstory behind your characters even if it's not used in the play/novel?

All three of my one-acts which have received awards to date were indeed workshopped and received staged readings and/or performances, which I put on a dictaphone (it's amazing how much redundancy, repetition and clumsiness comes to light by listening several times). Being a member of several amateur dramatic groups is a big help here, but other routes include the Cork Arts Theatre, which staged Blue Love in February, Theatre Upstairs (Lanigan's) which did a staged reading of Sweet Little Lies last September, and the Scottish Community Drama Award, responsible for staging ‘Twas the Night Before Xmas in 2013 and Sweet Little Lies this coming November.

By the way, acting is also a terrific help in non-dramatic writing. To act convincingly rather than simply playing a caricature, you need to believe in your character (Believe they exist but also buy into their world view, however twisted). To WRITE a convincing character, you have to do the same...And in answer to your question, yes, I think you need to know far more about your character than is actually shown, whether acting or writing. The real skill is to orchestrate convincing, vivid encounters which bring out those aspects and facets you want shown in such a way that the audience/reader intuits the solid mass behind them.

What about your non-play writing?  Is that generally workshopped?  Are you in a writers group or do you have a reader?

My other half, Tanya Farrelly, is also a writer, so she regularly gets works-in-progress inflicted upon her!
I've also been part of a writers group that has been meeting up fortnightly over the last year. Typically, you get to submit a piece of about 2000 to 3000 words without commentary every second month. It's then helpful to listen in on the discussion that follows, as is hearing your work read out...

Your publishers are a mix of UK and Irish. Do you think there is an advantage being an Irish writer?

One advantage to being an emerging Irish writer is that you can approach the publishers here directly, also the many high quality literary journals like The Stinging Fly, Gorse, The Moth, The Incubator etc. In contrast, the bigger UK publishers require the intermediary of a literary agent, and securing an agent can be extremely difficult, since (in round figures) their 10% of the author’s 10% of sales needs to make it worth their while. With five books in print, getting an energetic, pro-active agent would be high on my wish-list for the coming year.

Good luck with that David and thanks for your time.

Bio:

David Butler has been writing full-time since 2010. His novels are The Last European (Wynkin de Worde, 2005), The Judas Kiss, (New Island, 2012), and City of Dis, (New Island, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2015. A poetry collection, Via Crucis, was published by Doghouse in 2011, while a short-story collection, No Greater Love was brought out by London publisher Ward Wood in 2013. His one-act plays, Twas the Night Before Xmas and Blue Love won the 2013 Scottish Community Drama Award and 2015 Cork Arts Theatre Writers’ Award respectively.

South Dublin Readers Day

Join renowned writers for a relaxed and intimate day of readings and public conversations chaired by Dermot Bolger. This year’s line-up features award winning authors Jennifer Johnston, Mary Costello, Martina Devlin, Michael O’Loughlin, Joe Duffy, Carlo Gébler and Hugo Hamilton.

This is always a good day

When: Saturday 17th October 10:15am - 4pm
Where: Civic Theatre Tallaght

Admission: €10

Booking as part of the Red Line Festival

ISLA Literary Festival

ISLA Literary Festival returns this October with a programme packed with activities. This year the theme of memory is the background for a series of conversations, film screenings, workshops and literary walks.  Enjoy three days of events featuring 20 authors from Spain, Latin America and Ireland. 

The stories we tell define our memory and our memory, in turn, defines our identity. There is no story without fictional elements because there is no memory immune to the corroding effects of oblivion. We can just remember what we have somehow begun to forget. We can only be who we are when, without noticing, we have stopped being who we were.

These are the themes the Festival will address during three days. Our guests will guide us in drafting, once again, our past from that place, sometimes in the margins, called literature. We will read our memory, full of images to remember and we will look back to travel, once more, with them that path between reality and fiction that struggles for ever to keep us from oblivion.

Link here and programme here