The amount of times you read poems in the course of getting a book ready for publication is underestimated in the public imagination. You think you have finished writing them, having worked on them for anything between, oh, 20 minutes and 15 years, and edited, revised, sorted, revised a multitude of times, and then you have to proof read the book.
Now, I am a self-confessed terrible prof-roader. When I published the last issue of Scratch, the magazine I edited between 1989 and 1997, I put the name as SCARTCH on the cover as a deliberate homage/penance to all the fine writers that had suffered at my hands/eyes. (Matthew Sweeney told me he thought it was probably a better name, and he was probably right.) I put it down to being a Grauniad reader for too long.
Of course, even proof-reading throws up further corrections and amendments. We also had to decide how to handle the poems with longer lines - indents, shortening the lines even, bigger pages. (Smokestack's format is relatively small, which I rather like as it makes the pocket-sized, in comparision with my last publisher Flambard, who went for larger than normal which meant line-length wasn't an issue.) In the end we went for a combination of indents, 'stepping' one poem a la WC Williams, and one or two tight margins. That seemed to draw less attention than an unusually shaped book, as I don;t consider myself a 'long-lined poet', like CK Williams for instance.
After all that proof-reading I needed a break from these poems, but have just spent some time recording some for some 'podcast'-style 15-20 minute readings you can listen to or download here. This means listening to me reading them a lot, in the edit. So I am a little tired of the sound of my own voice right now. But hopefully you won't be.
You can find the first podcast - poems from the title sequence of How I Learned To Sing here. or just go to the new podcast page of the site. More to come.
By the way, you can now order the book direct from Smokestack - they pay all their taxes so far a I know, and if they offshore anything it'll probably be in Greece or Albania or somewhere that needs the help. (That was a joke if HMRC are reading.) It'll be ready any day now - which is very exciting.
