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ARTEMISpoetryARTEMISpoetry is the bi-annual journal (November and May) of the Second Light Network, published under their Second Light Publications imprint. Members receive a copy as part of their membership benefits. Issues are available to non-members by subscription at £9 p.a. or as a one-off purchase at £5 a copy. Cheque payable to "Second Light" to Dilys Wood at 9 Green Dale Close, London, SE22 8TG. Please include your telephone number with your order in case of query. Or you can now Subscribe online (includes a £1 handling charge; 50p for single issues purchase) |
Submission is open to non-members. We aim to publish new work, so submissions should be unpublished (by ‘published’ we mean: in print, on the internet or by way of media broadcast or on CD), and not ‘out in submission’ elsewhere, whether to magazines or competitions.
Editors for Issue 5 are: General & Artwork – Dilys Wood and Wendy French; Poetry – R V Bailey.
Readers’ Letters are invited. Comments on the journal’s content or anything you would like to see discussed in relation to women’s writing. (max 100 words).
All submissions: submit paper copy initially to Dilys Wood, 9 Green Dale Close, London, SE22 8TG. Please write "ARTEMISpoetry 5" on your envelope.
Contributors whose poetry is accepted will be notified by 31 October 2010.
Poetry Editor: R V Bailey. R V Bailey was born in Northumberland and was a director of undergraduate courses in Humanities at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She is the other voice in poetry recordings by U A Fanthorpe (Awkward Subject, Double Act, Poetry Quartets 5), and has published a pamphlet, Course Work (Culverhay Press, 1997) and a full collection with Peterloo, Marking Time (2004). Her latest collection, jointly with U A Fanthorpe, is From Me to You, Love Poems (Enitharmon Press in association with Peterloo Poets, 2007).
Black/white photographs or line-art, maximum of 4 pieces. We are looking to include a wide range of subject-matter and style … Paper copy to Dilys Wood (as above)
Contributors whose artwork is accepted will be notified by 15 November 2010.
Colour submissions for cover art are invited for consideration for future issues.
to arrive by 30 September 2010, members only: please let us know about your successes, publications, forthcoming events or workshops that you will be running. Max 60 words including contact details. 1 item per category per issue. The 5 categories are: ‘Comps & Calls’, ‘Events, Courses & Workshops’, ‘Publications’, ‘Other News & Successes’, ‘Resources’. Submit Online or paper copy to Anne Stewart, 20 Clovelly Way, Orpington, Kent, BR6 0WD.
Contents:
MY LIFE IN POETRY: Anne Stevenson
U A FANTHORPE, 1929 – 1930: R V Bailey
AMBITIOUS POETRY BY WOMEN (Part I): Myra Schneider & Dilys Wood
Never Accept Dilys’s Hospitality… by Ruth O’Callaghan
REVIEWS OF COLLECTIONS BY: Alison Brackenbury, Elizabeth Burns, Mavis Carter, Caroline Carver, Rose Cook, Barbara Dordi, Wendy French, Daphne Gloag, Marilyn Hacker, Lucy Hamilton, Sarah Jackson, Maria Jastrzębska, Pru Kitchling, Philippa Lawrence, Etelka Marcel, Lyn Moir, Sue Moules, Caroline Natzler, Rosemary Norman, Melanie Penycate, Lesley Quayle, Joan Sheridan Smith, Hylda Sims, Harriet Torr and Lynne Wycherley
and Reviews of Resource Books: Poetry Writing: The Expert Guide (Fiona Sampson) and Writing Your Self (John Killick & Myra Schneider)
POETRY:
FEATURED POET: Katherine Gallagher
WINNERS, Second Light Poetry Competition, 2009: Lynne Wycherley, Margaret Wilmot & Kay Syrad
COMMENDED, Second Light Poetry Competition, 2009: Suzanne Burrows, Anne Cluysenaar, Kate Foley, Clare Holtham, Pippa Little, M R Peacocke, Marion Tracy, Jenny Vuglar
POETRY SELECTED BY Alison Brackenbury: Annemarie Austen, Anne Ballard, Carol Beadle, Maggie Butt, Caroline Carver, Stephanie Conybeare, Rose Cook, June English, Sally Festing, Nicolette Golding, Janet Fisher, Judy Gahagan, Jenny Hamlett, Lynda How, Joy Howard, Helen Jagger, Kaye Lee, Jo Peters, Daphne Schiller, Jill Townsend, Josie Turner, River Wolton
Second Light Poetry Competition, 2009, Shortlisted: Ann Alexander, Dorothy Baird, Anne Boileau, Helen Lovelock-Burke, H Coffey, Margaret Eddershaw, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Mavis Howard, Gill Learner, Sue MacIntyre, Nancy Mattson, Jane McLaughlin, Rosemary McLeish, Caroline Natzler, Elisabeth Rowe, K V Skene, Dorothy Yamamoto
ARTWORK: Elizabeth Bell, Adele Davide, Rosemary Muncie, Janine Pinion; and Images and Lines: Anne Stewart
“I am not a nano-particle being fired through an interferometer;
I’m a living person whose outer and inner selves are intimately connected…”
Where to begin? Well, to be as up-to-date as I can, I’ll start by citing an article that struck me weeks ago, when I was sorting through old copies of The New Scientist. On the front cover of the issue of 15 May, 2004, was a headline, ‘Make me Quantum: How to be in two places at once’. Right away it occurred to me that ‘quantum’ or a ‘quantum feeling’ would be a good way to express the weird sense I’ve had as far back as I can remember of being at the same time myself and not myself, both here and not here. When I turned to the article, I was struck by the first paragraph’s likeness to a poem I’d written in the early ’80s. …
“Anton Zeilinger raps his knuckles on the wooden table in front of him. He thinks the table is there, passively sitting on the floor of his office… But he can’t be sure. ‘Reality seems to be immediate: I can touch this table,’ he says. ‘However, if you think carefully about it, all I have is information getting into my brain.’ ”
(‘Small Philosophical Poem’ follows in article)
… As for being in two places at once, here again I want to call on quantum physics for a metaphor. For although, in a classical sense, my life has proceeded normally from year to year, in a more mysterious way it has oscillated violently, circling around and back on itself between times of insight and creation and times of mental stagnation and misery. The life I have led as a woman, in short, often feels to me the same and yet different from my life as a poet. Like a quantum particle, I can exist in two places at once – though, let me hastily add, I don’t think being conscious of a double state is all that unusual. Nearly everybody dreams. And my ‘quantum’ life, which I think of as my ‘real’ life, certainly has a root in a dreamy state of mind, though I can’t imagine a dream causing me nearly as much hard, conscious labour as the writing of a poem. …
Read whole article Anne Stevenson at Bloodaxe Books
“ … among other things, England and Leicestershire and Richard III and hope, courage and gypsies …”
Many readers will perhaps already know the outline of UA’s life: how she began as a teacher at Cheltenham, later becoming Head of English; and how (much to her mother’s dismay) she gave up this respectable career to become clerk-receptionist in a small neurological hospital. It was in this apparently unpromising ground that the poetry began. And it began – as poetry quite often does – in the collision between expectation and reality.
She’d applied for the job thinking all hospitals were like the Radciffe Infirmary in Oxford, where she’d had to spend three months after a serious accident when she was an undergraduate, and where – once the difficult and painful bit was over – she’d rather enjoyed herself, convalescing along with other cheerfully recovering patients in the orthopaedic ward …
Read whole article
more poems to follow …
Contents:
RUTH O’CALLAGHAN INTERVIEWS MARILYN HACKER
WRITERS ON EXILE: Elke-Hannah Dutton, Gill Fothergill, Katherine Gallagher, Mary Hodgson, Maria Jastrzębska, Etelka Marcel, Sibyl Ruth.
THE BIG BALLADS (part 2): Hylda Sims concludes the case
FIRST WORDS … from crooked letters to the exhilaration of poetry: Anne Ryland
PUTTING A COLLECTION TOGETHER: Myra Schneider
REVIEWS oF COLLECTIONS BY: Gillian Clarke, Anne Cluysenaar, Judy Gahagan, Selima Hill, Emma Jones, Martha Kapos, Lotte Kramer, Ruth O’Callaghan, Ruth Padel, Geraldine Paine, Kate Rhodes and Women’s Work anthology (eds. Eva Salzman & Amy Wack)
POETRY:
FEATURED POET: Penelope Shuttle
POETRY SELECTED BY KATHERINE GALLAGHER: Ann Alexander, C R Barnes, Liz Berry, Nadine Brummer, Elizabeth Burns, Caroline Carver, A C Clarke, Eleanor Cooke, Kay Cotton, Clare Crossman, Margaret Eddershaw, Angela France, Rebecca Gethin, Helen Jayne Gunn, June Hall, Judith Kazantzis, Gill McEvoy, Jane McLaughlin, Denise McSheehy, Cheryl Moskowitz, Rosemary Norman, Linda Rose Parkes, Caroline Price, Sibyl Ruth, Anne Ryland, Daphne Schiller, Margaret Speak, Marion Tracy, Vivienne Tregenza, Catherine Whittaker, Margaret Wilmot
ARTWORK: Elizabeth Bell, Andia J Cooke, Adele Davide, Marylou Grimberg, Judith Kazantzis
MH: (extract from answer in respect of influences)
“When I returned to the United States in 1976, it was to the ebullience of American ‘Second Wave’ feminism, which included an efflorescence of women’s writing and publishing. It was then that I
first read the work of Gwendolyn Brooks and of Muriel Rukeyser in depth, discovered that of Audre Lorde and June Jordan, read Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh for the first time, and learned about
that book’s unlikely influence on Emily Dickinson. It was, in fact, in the context of feminist
‘re-vision’ that I began reading Dickinson in depth (which I do not state to try to politicise her work in any way.)
All at once, women poets were in the majority, not the minority, in my reading – and there were women’s bookshops where a sizeable selection of their work could be found, presses and journals publishing it, publishing literary criticism relative to it. It was more than ‘heady’ to discover that Marianne Moore had been a friend and mentor to Elizabeth Bishop, that HD’s beneficent companion Bryher had financed the publication of Moore’s first book of poems, and of Djuna Barnes’ Ladies’ Almanack – to know that women poets had supported and influenced each other’s work, had not each been an isolated token – information students and readers now take more for granted.”
Read whole interview
Contents:
RUTH O’CALLAGHAN INTERVIEWS U.A. FANTHORPE AND R.V. BAILEY
PAIN INTO POETRY: women who write about the flight from terror
WRITING FROM THE ROUGH: poems about grief
THE BIG BALLADS: Hylda Sims examines their appeal
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A POEM? Myra Schneider offers an example
20plus REVIEWS: Valentine Ackland, Moniza Alvi, Janet Fisher, Rose Flint,
Angela Kirby, Mary Oliver, Pascale Petit, Caroline Price, Carol Rumens,
Isobel Thrilling and more…
SECOND LIGHT POETRY COMPETITION: WINNERS, COMMENDED & SHORTLISTED
POETRY SELECTED BY PENELOPE SHUTTLE:
Sue Aldred, Zeeba Ansari, Elizabeth Burns, Caroline Carver, Christine Coleman, Christine Evans, Ruth Fainlight, Victoria Field, Lara Frankena, Leah Fritz,
Cynthia Fuller, Rebecca Gethin, Maria Jastrzębska, Sue Johnson, Wendy Klein,
Gill McEvoy, Lyn Moir, M.R. Peacocke, Lesley Saunders, Myra Schneider,
Martha Street, Margaret Wilmot
ARTWORK: Elizabeth Bell, Della Chapman, Adele Davide, Judith Kazantzis
NEWS: "FIFTY/FIFTEEN" – Second Light prepares to celebrate their 15th anniversary
Pascale Petit is a far-travelled poet: already by the time her first collection of poems was published in 1998 she’d twice visited the Amazon basin, and this latest collection contains poems from California, Nepal, China, France… but her journeys are inward as well as outward: she is a seasoned traveller of the imagination and has like Orpheus and the Sumerian Goddess Inanna journeyed to the underworld and returned to tell the tale.
This collection confirms her as a major force in current British poetry: both intensely mythical and intensely autobiographical, and now moving out into a wider world carrying the fruits of those inner explorations. In fact I’d see this volume as a transitional one: my guess is that her forthcoming work will continue the outer focus that is begun here.
Read whole review
Contents:
RUTH O’CALLAGHAN INTERVIEWS FIONA SAMPSON
FRIENDS REMEMBER DAPHNE ROCK (1927-2008)
MAY WE TELL YOU WHO WE ARE?: We focus on A Touch of Malice, ed. Joy Howard, and other anthologies of women writing about their own lives
20plus REVIEWS: Annemarie Austin, Alison Brackenbury, Anne Cluysenaar, Kate Foley, Janet Frame, Jorie Graham, M.R. Peacocke, Stephanie Norgate, Myra Schneider, Pauline Stainer, Anne Stevenson and more…
POETRY SELECTED BY MYRA SCHNEIDER:
Anna Adams, Alison Brackenbury, Nadine Brummer, Maggie Butt, Valerie Clarke, Anne Cluysenaar, Kay Cotton, Beata Duncan, June English, Janet Fisher, Kate Foley, Berta Freistadt, Jacqueline Gabbitas, Mo Gallaccio, Katherine Gallagher, Daphne Gloag, Lucy Hamilton, Jenny Hamlett, Alison Hill, Angela Kirby, Lotte Kramer, Gill Learner, Mary MacRae, Gill McEvoy, Rosemary McLeish, Sue Moules, Janine Pinion, Victoria Pugh, Mary Sheepshanks, Kay Syrad, Isobel Thrilling and Merryn Williams
NEWS, POETRY PRIZES 2008: Rose Flint wins the Cardiff International, Sibyl Ruth wins the Mslexia, Anne Stewart wins the Bridport Prize… and many other successes
ARTWORK: Kate Foley, Judith Kazantzis, Janine Pinion
We learn, from the first of the two bracket sections which open and close Kate Foley’s new collection, that the Silver Rembrandt of the title is a mime artist performing outside the Rijksmuseum, clad in silver lycra…
The mime
bows to the kids,
conducts their mood with a shining brush,
paints the gilded air as it streams past,
Rembrandt is also Muse to Lily, the tough yet vulnerable protagonist of this verse novella (which forms the major part of the collection). Lily first encounters the great artist himself when her teacher sends a postcard of his Old Woman Reading back to her class from Amsterdam.
The young Lily is bewitched by the picture and immediately makes an emotional connection between the old woman depicted by Rembrandt reading her bible and Lily’s beloved grandmother –
it is a kind of photo of her gran.
Kate Foley uses a remarkable exactness and yet fluidity of language to depict Lily, whose story is one of damage and determination, brief joy, sorrow, beyond-sorrow; of the hard work of firstly claiming the self, and then mending the self.
Read whole review
