publishing – Page 5 – Robert Garnham

Thoughts on my collection ‘Nice’

It’s been a few months now since my first collection came out, so I thought I’d write a blog post about just what it means and how it feels.
Every time I see the book, I get a strange little feeling inside of me of pride mixed with a weird sense of justification. The book represents an acceptance, of sorts, that I’ve been acknowledged at least of being worthy of publication. And I suppose I could go back to my degree in literature and the essays I used to write about publication, ‘the cannon’, and the curatorial act of editing and publishing a book.
‘Nice’ exists, it’s out there. It’s mixing with the big boys, and with company that’s in a different league. It lives on shelves in people’s houses, next to books by much better writers and poets, more respected titles, with my name beaming out from its spine. And this is the scariest part. Because it looks just like a normal book!
These are probably emotions which every writer or poet feels. When we read a book, we see these people at their best. We don’t see them on a day to day basis, stumbling over words while buying a train ticket, or walking into the door of Superdrug because they thought it was automatic. I live in my own head and I’m wrapped up in the usual doubts and frustrations of being Robert Garnham the human being, whose a very different creature to Robert Garnham the performance poet / spoken word artist. This morning I spelled yoghurt all over the kitchen counter, and then accidentally missed the bowl when I added granola. It’s everywhere right now, because I haven’t had time to clear it up.
But the book, it goes out there. It’s filled with my best stuff, poems I’m really pleased with and a cover which I love because I based it on a very clear image which I had in my mind, a very clear representation of myself which I wanted the world to see. And every now and then, when I’m swimming or walking, or when I have time to relax, I tell myself, just for a second or so, ‘Hey, you’re a published writer’.
‘You have a book out!’
When I was a kid, it was all I ever wanted. I’d write, and I would write and write, and I would carry on writing, at break time at school, at weekends, every evening, writing, writing, writing. And when I became an adult and got a job, I’d write at lunch hour. I wrote novel after novel and I’d send them off, and nothing would ever happen.
Five years ago I discovered performance poetry.
So the fact that ‘Nice’ exists, with its deliberately understated title, means more than you will ever know! Because it’s out there right now, representing a Robert Garnham of the imagination, and it’s doing a damn fine job!

In case you didn’t know, I’ve got a new book out! : Thoughts on ‘Nice’.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve got a book out. Indeed, it is my first published book, my first proper collection from a real publisher, Burning Eye Books, rather than a self published effort. I can’t begin to describe how great it feels! Ever since I was a kid I wanted to be a published writer. While other kids would daydream and talk about winning some football match or scoring a winning goal, I would dream about there being a book out there with my name on the cover. I would repeat, over and over to myself on those long suburban sultry nights, the image of opening a box from the publishers and seeing all the books there inside, ready to go out into the world.

It’s taken a while!

Burning Eye are the most dynamic and wonderful company I can imagine. They’ve published all my favourite names in the spoken word community, such as Megan Beech, Vanessa Kisuule, Rob Auton, Salena Godden. I have devoured every volume over the years, and when the chance came up to send them some material, I didn’t hesitate. I heard nothing for a while and I thought, well, on to the next thing, then.

Then last year, while staying in Bristol and supporting Vanessa Kisuule at the Hammer and Tongue event, I received an email from Clive Birnie inviting me to send in a manuscript, because he’d chosen me to be published! I was so happy, but I didn’t want to jinx it by telling anyone. The only person I told was Vanessa, and then I carried the secret around for months!

I cannot stress how incredibly professional Burning Eye have been. I’ve worked with editors and proofreaders, going through the poems and clarifying every last mark of punctuation or dodgy example of bad grammar. (Like this sentence). Hours spent enchanting emails about the rules on brackets and semicolons, hyphens, and the fact that one poem had to change its content in order not to be sued by a large film company which has a mouse shaped logo! Burning Eye were brilliant, it felt so good to be a part of their system.

So, what is Nice?

First of all, the title. I’ve always hated the word ‘nice’, because it’s so floppy and undescriptive, and it can be used sarcastically. But I wanted the book to be positive, to contain only funny or life affirming poems, and I needed a one word title that was positive in itself. The original title was ‘Nice One’, then I went with ‘Responsible’, and then back to ‘Nice’. I was also going to call it ‘Poems’.

So, Nice is a collection of fantastic upbeat silly funny poems which don’t tax the brain and make no claims to literary excellence, but they are the ones that I enjoy performing the most and the ones that the audiences like. There are also one or two brand new pieces in there which I’ve not yet performed, such as a rap about fuchsias originally written for my music group Croydon Tourist Office, and another about, ahem, weird sexual fetishes. Indeed, a first read of the manuscript shocked me at the amount of sex mentioned in the book, although there was nothing exactly graphic. I did wonder what a psychologist might think!

The cover is deliberately bright and clean. It’s based on the sort of design that you might see on a 1980s album cover, I wanted to create something simple and iconic, easy to replicate, and easy to put on posters. I think it looks clean and fresh, and the motif is repeated on the back. The colouring also could represent the rainbow flag, though this is not explicit and I only thought of it after I’d designed the cover!

On the whole, Nice represents the last two or three years of my performances, and now it’s out there in the open for the whole world to enjoy, and I can go on to the next thing.

I’m hugely proud of the book and the reception so far has been great. I’ve been working on it for a year and it still hasn’t lost its magic with me, so I hoping that this remains the case for the reader, too. The next step is a couple of events to help launch it, such as a book signing in Paignton in December, and a mini book tour taking in Torquay, Exeter, Bovey Tracey and Woking.

You can buy the book here http://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/nice-by-robert-garnham

An Interview with Richard Thomas

I’ve know Richard Thomas for as long as I have been performing. Indeed, he was almost certainly one of the performers at the very first gig I went to as an audience member. He very quickly drew me in to his world of imagery and humour, strange juxtapositions and asides, in a manner which I found most compelling.

We both did the same literature course with the Open University, and it was through this that I discovered we both admired the poetry of Frank O’Hara and the music of British Sea Power. Because of this, I have always followed his career with interest.
His first published book, The Strangest Thankyou, came out almost two years ago now. It contained some wonderful poems including the delightful ‘Flamingo’ as well as more serious pieces, and others written after trips to Rome. I read the book twice over the course of two days, and then my mother borrowed it too. I was jealous that the cover was orange, because Frank O’Hara’s book Lunch Poems also has an orange cover!
One of the things I really admire in Richard is that he is so very different to almost any other performer both in his style of reciting, and in his subject matter. To watch or read Richard is to visit a strange new world, only to realize at the last moment that it’s a world you’ve always known.

I’ve known you for almost six years now. You were one of the first poet performers I remember seeing. How did you get in to writing poetry?

I had written lyrics here and there for various bands I had been in. The more I wrote, the more I realised I enjoyed playing with language, so I started to keep a notebook and would just write very stream of conciousness type stuff in it. Eventually, and mainly through the Open University course you mentioned, I learnt how to shape those ramblings in to actual poems, and it went from there.

How important is the performance aspect of your poems?

For me, when I write poetry, performance is the last thing on my mind, bar perhaps a couple of poems I have written. I think this is probably because I got in to poetry originally from a page-poet’s perspective, and I wasn’t aware of any performance opportunities in my area at the time. When I moved to Totnes, that changed: I did my first open mic and got hooked on the buzz it gave me. It still very much felt important to me, though, to keep writing primarily for the page, as seeing my poems in print was the dream. So I continue to do that, and then when I am performing, I will pick out the poems that translate on to the stage best. Half of my poems I have never read live. I quite like the idea of doing a live set of poems I would never usually perform, to see what happens, but I am yet to muster up the confidence.

Your book The Strangest Thankyou was one of the reading highlights of my year when it came out. How would you describe the new book?

Thanks, Robert. I remember you telling me your mum enjoyed it, too. Three of my friend’s mums have read it. And I think just one of those three friends has read it themselves (yourself). It’s good to know your audience. Perhaps that is why my new book is a collection – a pamphlet – of poems about babies. A subconscious effort to satisfy my target market. But seriously, it’s a little more than about babies, though it is that. Zygote Poems is about a young man’s journey in to the unfamiliar realms of fatherhood with the effects of anxiety. It uses phonetic language to both convey that effect, and at the same time mimic ‘baby talk’. There are some other fun techniques employed, but I guess I shouldn’t give too much away. Selling poetry books is hard enough. I think, though, this new pamphlet is my most focussed poetry so far.

Can you describe the writing process for it?

I wanted these poems to be as candid as possible, and given the subject, they were all personal. So to start with, it was a case of writing down every significant thing I could think of as I looked back over my journey up to that point. As I originally wrote it for my degree dissertation, I had to write a certain number of pages. So I worked out what kind of balance I wanted in terms of the content – what moods I wanted to give – and I drew up a table, dropping each significant event in to a particular mood box until I had filled the table with an equal amount of each. And then I went about working my way through the table, writing each poem that needed to be written. It got very mathematical, but it was a pretty interesting way to go about writing a collection of poems, and felt right for the to get the result I wanted. The hardest part was to write as candidly as possible. My mind often told me to censor stuff, so it took some redrafting to get all the poems as honest as possible, without them becoming unreadable.

How would you describe the content of your poems? Are there recurring themes?

The new pamphlet is all specifically themed, but I guess my poems do generally repeat certain themes, often without me realising. This is probably to do with the fact that I usually write whatever is on my mind at the moment of holding the pen. The Strangest Thankyou was a lot of love, lust, loneliness and confusion – even the surreal impersonal poems abour Flamingos, dancing butchers and dogs eating figs conveyed a sense of trying to understand the world and its obscurity. I think that had to do with the mindset of being in my early twenties, and I guess certain subjects tend to occupy the mind more than others at different ages. I like that idea: that my poetry up to this point could be read as being written by someone in their twenties, purely by the themes most covered, and that my thirties, forties, etc, will bring about their own re-occuring themes. I think this also helps me deal with the idea of ageing – being intrigued as to what poems the world might draw from me as time goes on – I look forward to poems more than I do birthdays. That wasn’t meant to sound as melancholic as it did…

Is humor important to you?

Definitely. I think humour is important to any art form to some extent, whether you’re Charlie Chaplin or Marina Abramovic. And even Beethoven was a prankster. There’s that story about him, as a kid, putting a whoopee cushion on Mozart’s piano stool, isn’t there. There’s no whoopee cushions in my poetry, but I like to think there is humour. Not in all my poems, but where it lacks, I try to make up for it with a sense of absurdity. I think humour can help a generally serious poem breathe, and lift it from the page. It helps the poem transcend from writer to reader.

You’re obviously a big fan of the beat poets. You even had a beard at one time. And it was a nice beard, too. How influential is Ginsberg both in your writing, and also modern poetry?

I have had two significant beards in my life so far. I think you saw the first. The second was a much better effort. That is a benefit of ageing. That beard was going places until I chopped it off. I have yet to properly grieve the loss of it. Who handed me that pair of scissors? Ginsberg had a great beard, and was a great poet, and I think I owe a lot to him for both of those things. Kerouac, Corso, di Prima and the others have been a great influence too. I discovered them at about twenty two, and really felt my poetry take a change of pace when I did. I remember the first time I read those lot – it felt like I had never read poetry before. I felt a different level of excitement for poetry, and it was around that time that I started to write ‘proper’ poems and do readings. Ginsberg was a huge influence on poetry, both then and now. I really believe him and his friends were game-changers, and had a significant effect in moulding the shape of poetry to come. Even for those who dislike him or the other beat poets – a negative influence is an influence nonetheless. But I think Ginsberg in particular proved that you could really say and do whatever you want with poetry, and it needn’t conform to certain ideals or standards. Amongst young poets today, I think this has particular resonance, knowing that there aren’t boundaries, and that poetry can say anything you want it to say.

Who are your favorite poets, both dead and alive?

Well, those that I have mentioned are favourites, for sure. I am still yet to read anything that gets me on the same level as Gregory Corso. I also love Sylvia Plath, Shelley, the Surrealist Poets, Leonard Cohen, and as you mentioned, Frank O’Hara. I have recently been getting in to Arthur Rimbaud and Ronald Duncan. The latter of which I found by grabbing a load of free poetry books from a box outside a lecturer’s office, and when I started reading, couldn’t understand why I had never come across him before, as his love poems remind me a lot of my own. Especially when he lived fairly local to us, too – North Devon I think.

What are your plans for the next year or so?

I am currently doing my MA in Creative Writing, so that, along with being a father to a toddler, is definitely keeping me busy. I have Zygote Poems coming out in June via Cultured Llama, so I hope to be promoting that as much as I can. I’m also working on various other writing projects: a short film, a children’s story and another poetry collection. Sometimes I wish I could just focus on one thing at a time, because I am sure life would be a lot easier that way, but my head refuses to work in that fashion it seems.

What advice would you give to anyone who’s always wanted to write poetry?

Read every type of poetry you can get your hands on and get started. The bigger the palette, the bigger the picture. Forget about trying to make it good, or what you think your neighbour, or the local baker, might like to read, and just write. Quality will come the more you write, and it’s important to be honest in your writing. The best and most genuine stuff will come when you are just trying to please yourself.

The Strangest Thankyou is available for £8.00 from: http://www.culturedllama.co.uk/books/strangest-thankyou