Hello, I’m Your Editor
Hello, I’m Your Editor |
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I’m a keen gardener (here’s a photo Ruth Bidgood sent me, of her garden).And this is my son, trying on a Russian space suit during a trip to the Russian space centre.
Like the majority of you, I write poems when I am moved to do so and send them out to magazines from time to time; get them back quite often, but sometimes have something accepted. I’ve had two books published, one a long poem, Millennial, which people either like very much or can’t get the hang of, and another book, Looking for Scotland, which I liked very much but was, I felt, less understood because it was discursive. As in fiction, I think discursiveness is a feminine trait that can be very good and should not always be bred out of poets. A hobby of mine at present is putting together another book of poems from a number I have written mostly in the last five years.
Editors are more likely to print shorter poems. For exmple, Lesley Duncan of the Herald has only a very little space in the newspaper. But when the herald’s editor wanted to cut her Daily Poem feature, a great postbag of letters from ordinary readers arrived, asking to have the poems continued. To me, that’s a triumph for poetry editing.
I’ve come to like the more ‘focussed’ type of poem during the time I’ve been editing Poetry Scotland, which incidentally is the greatest privilege ever to come my way – outside of stuff like bringing up kids. I think you’ll find every type of good poem in Poetry Scotland, because I like a great range of types and indeed I myself write in various styles. My favourite poets are Keats, Stevie Smith, Hopkins, Pindar, Virgil, Longfellow, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Sorley MacLean and Sylvia Plath. I agree with Alvarez that Sylvia was the most terrible loss to English language poetry.
Ian W King and I are personal and business partners. Here we are, dining in Callander when we were just setting up the shop:
We altered that ghastly wooden door as soon as we saw this photo! Ian produces the current diehard books by hand in the bindery at Callander, and here are reminders of some other of Ian’s contributions to culture. He is certainly my ticket to Scottishness. He hails from Dunfermline where he still has family. I have lived here for 22 years. I’m from the Cardiff/London connection (hency my surname) and I spent much of my formative time in the north of England.
Ian King and I met at a poetry reading in the Christopher North House Hotel in Edinburgh. (The Christopher North readings, which I organised for a year or two, were the model for the poetry reading sequence in Millennial). We opened Grindle’s Bookshop in 1987 and got married in the shop in October 1988. There were customers browsing among the champagne corks, and we made a profit of £80.
Callander is peopled with Scots, also incomers from Tyneside, Yorkshire, Wales etc, and visitors passing through from all over the world. Despite my work in cities I’m a country person and Callander suits us very well.