towards editorial harmony
Summary
Blogger: NiiRole: Senior Editor
Area: Fiction & Poetry
Original Career: Scientist
Editor of the main poetry imprints until 2007, now focussing on fiction. Editor since 2001 » »
Books
As Editor:14-2: twenty eight love poems
Dance the Guns to Silence (with Kadija Sesay)
x-24: unclassified (with Tash Aw) mouthmark series
waterways poetry
lubin & kleyner
As Author:
eyes of a boy, lips of a man (1999)
As Hannibal from the A-Team used to say, I love it when a plan comes together! What am I talking about? Well, for a while now, two very talented poets – Niall O’Sullivan and Jacob Sam-La Rose – have been helping me with my editiorial work, reducing my workload in poetry and allowing flipped eye to diversify into fiction. Of course, no two people read a poem in the same way so it’s natural to be nervous about the identity of a publishing operation when new editors join. What we decided to do was run a kind of two-pronged training scheme – formal and informal – and imagine how I felt when I went to one of the informal sessions last week and saw Niall in action, working with young poets, cutting poems to their bones. OK, leave the ‘feeling’ for now.
The first thing I noticed was that he used very different language to communicate his feelings about a poem, was very humourous in his analogies and – of course – had very unique body language. But when it came down to it and I looked over the poems with his edits, he had edited them almost exactly the way I would, with the exception of the odd comma, full stop and ‘and’. I had a very similar experience with Jacob when we worked on a project last year, so I concluded it was no coincidence. That’s when I realised that our many years of sharing poetry – reading, discussing and critiquing – meant that we already have a kind of editiorial harmony going on; like a trio in a barbershop, cutting and trimming while making beautiful music. I can delegate with an easy heart – I love it when a plan comes together! »»
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