It's a weird and unsettling thing seeing yourself described by others to others, in a way that hopefully makes them a little bit more interested in stocking your book. That's what an Advanced Information Sheet does. You can see mine here.
I am used to describing what I do and who I am in multiple ways to multiple people. That means using different kinds of language, which I'm fine with, and finding the truth in all of them. It would be possible to feel 'inauthentic' in describing my consultancy or coaching offer, just as it would in creating interest in booksellers, but I have so far avoided feeling that. The biographical notes I use for my Thinking Practice work, and how I describe myself as a poet, or simply to someone new I meet, are consistent, although not necessarily in the details they choose. Some feel more natural than others, none feel wrong.
Finding that unity, and exploring the plurality and instability within it, is one of the themes that runs through How I Learned To Sing, particularly the title sequence, but it is also there in the older poems. So I was interested to read the Advanced Information Sheet for How I Learned to Sing, and see what it focussed on. I had helped Andy Croft, my publisher at Smokestack, with the blurb, but from then it was very much up to Andy and the people at Inpress to develop it - they after all know how to get things into shops. (Even when I used to published poetry through Scratch, that wasn't something we majored on.)
This was a little similar to the feeling I had when someone pointed out that LinkedIn endorsements - those weird, rather pointless-seeming traffic-generators introduced recently - gave a sense of how you are seen. I am, apparently, arts admin and fundraising guy, which is not really how I would describe myself at all. (I administer myself fine, but that's where the 'offer' stops, and I try and avoid fundraising and rightly so given my recent track-record.)
So this AI sheet says - he used to be big in the Arts Council so might have some profile there, he's from the North East and good enough to get in the same anthology as people from there you've actually heard of (which we also supply), and some of the poems can be seen in the context of cultural transformation, that thing you read was under threat recently. (I've always wanted to be of 'current affairs interest', so that's a plus.)
Does this feel like anything to do with the poems, to me? Well, in the first instance, not really, although I recognise there are lots (relatively!) of people who know me through my arts work. It feels increasingly distant, but I know why it's a hook, and it does explain why I've not published a book for such a long time. The second bullet point is by the by, much as I admire those writers, but I guess is a kind of 'benchmarking'. If I'd ever won a prize I guess that would go there, but hey ho. And thirdly, yes, that is very much part of the book, in The Dunno Elegies particularly, but also in other poems. The poems from Bringing Down The Government, from Half A Mind, and Gaps Between Hills describe the same places in different ways too.
I'll be using this blog to unpack some of the themes of the book - and to promote it, to be honest - and the processes that have gone with it, and to share some of the poems. So consider this Advance Information.
