Bottle of Life – The People’s Book Prize
Current Haps- Bottle of Life – Truth Thomas & The People’s Book Prize
Truth Thomas – photo by Melanie Henderson
The People’s Book Prize
http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/book.php?id=573
Review
Truth Thomas’ Bottle of Life makes us face up to the gun barrel pointed at our head on Bodymore’s mean streets, yet an ocean away,poems like “Holy War” make us try to figure who is really the holy one–the dead Palestinian or dead Israeli lost to violence. The literary canon is referenced in this collection, and equated to a cabbie, driving by as if blinded by the color of a black man’s skin. Also, there are love poems to lesbians in this book, being appreciated from head to toe as a real people. Bottle of Life is worth imbibing for it is life blood–so fragile and precious. It is the poetic draught that keeps us running, and Truth Thomas knows that well. –Mike Clark, Little Patuxent Review
flipped eye publishing bookstore
http://www.flippedeye.net/store/product_info.php?products_id=75&osCsid=2d23gmc74rmn5ofho8ff6huaf6
My Running Credentials
Now, I don’t want anyone to get excited. I am not in line for mayor, major, senator, sanitary agent, vice president or head of taste; I am just planning on running. After fourteen years of not really doing any distance running, I am returning to the roads, hills, paths, streams and hillocks to raise money towards the Venture Award, which we (at flipped eye) officially launch this week. Why running? I hear you ask. Well, I’ve done it before and it gives tangible targets, people can come and check on me if they wish etc. etc. plus most conventional funders don’t like to fund competitions. At a time when getting funding is challenging we didn’t want to wait for someone else’s signature before launching what we feel is an essential award. To prove that I can actually run and to give me some targets to work towards, I’m posting below the splits from my Rotterdam Marathon outing in 1997 – no joke! I’m close to 40 now so those are some tight figures to try to go for – even though I’m only starting with short distances for now (beginning with the Clapham Common 5K on Sunday July 3, 2011)
Now for the serious business. I have set up a page for all of you dying to sponsor me at: http://www.kapipal.com/runningforventure – and, of course, if you want to run and direct people to sponsor the award too you’re very welcome…
There’s a widget below that shows you how terrible I am at raising funds. Have pity for I can be quite pithy and surely that counts for something!
Funding and its discontents
In the interest of economics, this will be a short blog. It’s now been a few weeks since the Arts Council decisions on its cuts came through and – understandably – there is a lot of reaction still churning in the ether. I have been very close to much of the talk because, primarily, of the roles I play as board member/trustee of the Poetry Book Society and the Arvon Foundation. I also run flipped eye publishing and we have relied on funding in the past – and probably will require funding again in the future. Regardless, I have to say that I feel a lot of the talk about cut funding misses the point; just because an organisation is cut from the regularly funded organisation (RFO) list does not mean that it will not be funded if it makes an application and can justify its need for funding based on the impact of its projected activities. Being cut from the RFO list, to my mind, is simply a way for the Arts Council nudge organisations into rethinking and reevaluating the roles they play in contributing to the wealth of arts the public can enjoy; what real benefits they offer.
Our own approach at flipped eye (and also with the African Writers’ Evening, which I also coordinate) is to remove the notion of funding from our planning in times of uncertaintly and try to think of how we might be able to sustain ourselves without funding. In line with that, we didn’t apply for funding; instead, we have begun to convert our existing titles to digital formats (something we should have started a while ago), further streamlined our production process to cut costs, and all our fine editors (including me) are working for free while we develop the next generation of extraordinary writers. It’s a huge cut, but we did it ourselves, we expected it and therefore we can live with it. Later, when the dust has settled, we can go back to the Arts Council and perhaps other funders and show them the very real progress we’ve made and how much more just a little investment in our projects can yield. If they say no, we will continue to work in our small way; we will not be in danger of closure because our whole future is based on the hope that funding will come.
Funding’s discontents, or rather non-RFO’s discontents have largely come to see funding as their right and that is no way to run an organisation. You have to work for funding; if you are funded and wish to remain so, you have to be at the very least more dynamic than non-funded organisations, and in truth you should be pushing the boundaries continually to seek more ways in which to enrich the public’s experience of the arts. I can’t say that for many of the RFOs – both those that survived (some organisations survived in spite of being ‘static’ simply because they have become to big to cut. What sweet irony!) and those that were cut – from the Arts Council’s portfolio, so I fully understand and sympathise with the position the Arts Council is in.
So, what am I saying? Nobody deserves funding; it’s something you have to prove yourself/ your organisation worthy of. As PBS board member, I believe that dialogue is the right direction as the PBS can not fulfil its potential with no funding; as a new board member, I intend to play my part by working from within to make the PBS the impactful, dynamic, indeed revolutionary body that it can be. Speaking from the flipped eye headquarters (which is now my living room) I say to all the organisations that fell on the knife, don’t just moan about being cut, start a revolution in your organisation and apply for funding annually or per-project like us – the normal folk.
A way to read a poem
Adapted from an essay on teaching poetry on Nii’s website:
What we run on when we run about poeting
The original essay was delivered as a lecture for Writers Centre Norwich
“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” — James Baldwin (from Nobody Knows My Name)
I introduce this short lit-byte with James Baldwin’s quote because I believe that if we read a good poem openly, it always changes us – unfortunately, we often don’t open ourselves to the experience of a poem if we can’t immediately make sense of it, or it doesn’t fit in with our conception of ‘traditional’ poetry. To my mind, when reading a poem, we must remember that poetry works in tandem with its environment and that environment includes you – the reader. Just as the sensation of running is strongly linked to the world around the runner (the temperature, humidity etc. affect how the run feels), so the experience of a poem is linked to the world around the reader. Words are triggers and carry meanings well beyond the scope of the dictionary. A reader or listener who has lost someone close to them whose favourite word was ‘blossom’ will react very differently to an encounter with the word in a poem than someone who does not have that personal history. This indefinable human element is one of the key reasons why one has to let oneself and others develop their own relationship with a poem before imposing opinions. Beyond text there is sound, and the internet offers us a unique opportunity to bring poems alive by playing videos of poets reading their own work – allowing comparisons between performance and representation on the page. More importantly, it is another way to experience poetry, to engage with the feelings that poetry evokes.
Watching a child learn language is probably the best instruction of what engaging with poetry should be like; it may take ages for the meaning to become clear to us, but it should not stop us enjoying it. Children begin to use words that they like the sound of long before the meanings become clear to them, and they create beautiful juxtapositions by doing so. It also means that we can engage them with what seems like nonsense poetry and they will make their own sense of it, whereas an adult might seek to draw a specific meaning from the work. This search for meaning is what our educational systems teach us to do, so in a way I guess I am suggesting that the reading of poetry must be, to some degree, counter to what we’ve been taught; it must deviate from the obsession with logic and fact. Indeed, one of our leading contemporary poets, Don Paterson remarked on this in a recent article in the Guardian discussing his re-reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He makes a distinction between a ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ (the analytical kind we tend to do in school) reading of poetry, saying:
“a primary reading doesn’t have to articulate its findings. It engages with the poem directly, as a piece of trustworthy human discourse – which doesn’t sound too revolutionary, but the truth is that many readers don’t feel like that about poetry any more, and often start with: “But what does it all mean?” on the assumption that “that’s how you read poetry”.
Essentially, simple appreciation of the beauty of ideas and language is often lost.
I often think that the moment we stop running in corridors is the moment we need to make a conscious effort not to be too analytical when we first encounter a poem. There is something about that abandon, the possibility of bumping into someone, the acute alertness that aids us if we have to swerve or stop suddenly, that contains all the breathless quests that poetry emerges from. The human and the environment, the traveller and the land, the lover and the terrain of sentiment, the child and the family tree – we must run through it all with no harness, no fear. Poetry is an act of faith.
FridayFours
We’ve been asked a few times what our #FridayFours tag on twitter is so I’m just putting this post up to provide a readily accessible reference. : #FridayFours is simply the selection of a book to sell for £4 on a Friday (post included); it’s our way of saying thanks to our current readers and – of course – a way to encourage people who haven’t read one of our books to try one at a low price point. While we have started the trend, we believe every publisher can afford to and should do something similar. In my recent article for Wasafiri, I spoke of my admiration for Allen Lane of Penguin, stating:
I wanted to build a company that put effort into pricing books as low as possible so that a greater percentage of disposable income brackets could access them. Not surprisingly, I am a great admirer of Allen Lane, the originator of the Penguin paperbacks initiative in the 1930s who believed that there was a ‘vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price’ and priced the books the same as a pack of cigarettes. Using that price benchmark, it is easy to see why so many publishers have been struggling to sell books in recent years. A pack of twenty cigarettes costs £5.85; the average paperback costs £7.99–8.99.
#FridayFours falls in with my keenness to get books to readers for as low a price as possible. So, in the words of Rakim, now you know who to put your money on go out there and grab a #FridayFours book…
