Category: Uncategorized

I’m really rather pleased to (finally) announce the results for our ‘Songs of Lenin & McCarthy’ Competition, but first an apology.

Over the last six months, unfortunately things haven’t exactly run smoothly and  for many reasons this has managed to get in the way of a lot of the things I have been planning and trying to do with the Hedgehog Press.  I don’t really want to make excuses, but in trying to catch-up with other things, one that has taken me an age to get on top of has been this competition. Which is a shame as it is one that I was particularly keen on when I organised it.

Anyway, I just wanted to say sorry to everybody that has entered and had to wait an age for the results, but we got here in the end and there we are.

So long overdue they may be, but I’m really (really) pleased to be able to announce that the shortlisted poets who will have their poem included in the ‘Songs of Lenin & McCarthy’ anthology early next year:

1. Abi Roper

2. AJ Goryn

3. Anne Maguire

4. Belinda Rimmer

5. Carl Griffin

6. Carol Rosalind Smith

7. Ceinwen Haydon

8. Darren Beaney

9. Debjani Chatterjee

10. Denni Turp

11. Gaynor Kane

12. Genya Johnson

13. Geraldine Dudley

14. Isabelle Kenyon

15. Jenna Plewes (Selvas)

16. Karen Mooney

17. Kevan Taplin

18. Martin Malone

19. Patricia Bennett

20. Therese Kieran

The Overall Winner, who will receive a prize of £100, is: Anne Maguire

Additionally, Two Highly Commended Runners-up, Gaynor Kane and Karen Mooney will each receive a Prize of £25

I’d like to thank everybody who entered for their patience and importantly, apologise to the ever tolerant Matt Duggan who was originally scheduled to judge the competition. None of the issues were down to Matt who has been a total gent throughout and I certainly wouldn’t have wanted any blame attached to him for something that was quite simply out of his control. All mistakes are my own, as they say.

All the best

Mark Davidson
editor
The Hedgehog Poetry Press

I’m really rather proud to be able to announce the winners of our second White Label First Collection Competition.

If you remember the aim was to find three, quite brilliant first collections to be published by the Hedgehog Poetry Press.

We were looking for something special and it was a horrible process even to get it down to a short list of six, all of whom could easily have made the final three.

In the end, I’m pleased to say that I decided to blow the budget (as though we had one) and am in fact inviting all of the Six Shortlisted Poets to have their collection published as a pamphlet by the Hedgehog Press.

So congratulations to:

1. Francoise Chouinard
2. Gaynor Kane
3. Leung Rachel Ka Yin
4. Michal Choiński
5. Sue Norton, and
6. Vicky Allen

…who I hope you will enjoy reading in the near future.

I’d like to thank everybody who entered the competition, the standard was, as ever, quite incredible.

We are really proud to announce the results of our ‘Cupid’s Arrow’ competition to find the perfect Love Poem and that the winner is the quite brilliant Eileen Carney Hulme.

The full shortlist, was:

Eileen Carney Hulme
Aimee Hill
Oz Hardwick
Peter Burrows
S.A. Leavesley
Aaron Sheldrake
Mehran Waheed
Dani Salvadori
Ama Bolton
Demi Anter
Tammy Swift-Adams
Renée Ballerini-Sigel
Diana Devlin
Mono Ghose
William Paul Trapani
Missy Reddy
John Maxwell O’Brien
Dawn Bauling
Phil Hawtin
Natalie Crick

This has proven to be the most popular competition yet and I’d like to thank everybody who entered for making my life quite so difficult.

I’m also really pleased to say that we will be publishing the shortlisted poems in a special edition of Stickleback which will be available in April.

 

I’m pleased to say that after much cogitation, I am able to announce that the winner of our Full Fat Collection Competition, as chosen by David Mark Williams, is Oz Hardwick for his collection, The Lithium Codex.

David Mark Williams, who judged it, said,

“As soon as I started reading this collection I sensed I was in the presence of greatness. I had no doubts at all that this was the winner. These prose poems have the authority of a classic. It is not just the inventiveness of the writing but its precision. While each poem gives the impression of being improvised what impresses is how skillfully the effects are realised. It’s been such a privilege to be privy to having discovered this work and to ensure that it is going to be published.”

Oz’ Collection will be published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press during 2019.

The full Short List was:

1. Alastair Hesp
2. Beda Higgins
3. Debjani Chatterjee
4. Oz Hardwick, and
5. Sue Spiers, who David additionally selected for commendation.

I’d like to thank David for the judging and everybody that entered the competition.

 

The Fourth Cult of the Spiny Hog is now open to all. To find out all about it you can read all about it above, or if you prefer download a PDF:

[download id=”2663″]

If you want to join Click HERE

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

One of the real pleasures of the first nine months of the Hedgehog Press has been the fact that we have got to create nine beautiful Sticklebacks filled by brilliant poets. The paper editions of the micro-collections are long gone, but the poetry lives on in our lovely downloadables – and best of all FREE – PDF editions.

So have a lovely New Year, and feel free to help yourself to one or to all HERE

If you like them, it is a tricky time of year for a lot of people and I would love it if you could spare a couple of bob for a foodbank local to you. Sadly they aren’t hard to find these days.

We have been thinking a lot about just how it is that you make a poetry magazine viable. That probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

Obviously a great way is for somebody – an outside force – to pay for everything and leave you alone to do whatever you like. I like that option, but sadly it seems a little unlikely for us as we’re horribly old fashioned and cynical and like to walk on our own legs and anyway, not very good at asking for help at the best of times. If this all is to crash and burn I’d rather it was only our Zeppelin on the line, as it were.

From there the next on the list is to sell subscriptions, so that people stump up for whatever it is you are selling and then you deliver. Hopefully they will like it enough to renew their subscription however long it was for.

Being as we are starting the press with the proceeds from flogging a second-hand guitar, this is where we are going to go. Hobson had a choice too, apparently.

That is all pretty mundane, I’m sure you would agree, but I guess the thing that is taking the brainspace is more, how do you keep it going?

How do you make sure that people keep on subscribing, or as in our case where we will be going for pre-orders for each individual issue rather than an annual subscription, how do we make sure that the reader wants the next issue?

I mean, the obvious way is to make sure that every issue is fabulous and that the reader can’t wait to read some more, and if that doesn’t work, maybe we could have a have a cliffhanger at the end that keeps people coming back.
It is something to think of.
That could work.

Or perhaps, we could put half of a poem in one quarter and the rest the next.
OK, not so good.

I guess for me the answer is to just make it something so cool or interesting that people can’t help but want another dose of Vitamin Arfur.

So basically, we have to try and create a sense of community or addiction, who knows.

I guess where I’m coming to is that any poetry magazine, from Poetry Review down has to create its own tribe, a group of readers that see themselves as part of it. Family, even, and that in truth, it isn’t something you can plan for as if you do it will just be artificial, a flavour of the month and as transient as some kind of advert.

So we need to find a way to create a Tribe Called Hedge if we are going to get past the first issue or two, the only slight tricky thing is to work out just how we do that, isn’t it? I guess you can only be yourself and see what happens next.

We’re all of a flutter here in the land of the spiny Hog today, as we had some fine news and I can’t wait to share it.

I said the other day that we were going to rethink the cover for the first issue of ‘Arfur’ and then I got a call from an artist we have worked with before, offering to paint us a pretty picture that we could use on the cover. He does this sort of painting under the name Kanoe West, which amuses us all, but his other artworks are under a different ‘Brand’ that is far better known. But my lips are sealed on that.

So the vote I promised has disappeared for now, but it is for a good reason.

 

In case you missed it the other day, we finally worked out what it was that we wanted to do as far as reviews go and added our ‘Review Policy’ to the site, somewhere over There.

I won’t rehash that, but one of the things I keep wittering on about is that I feel that poetry journals, due to the rest of the world’s ‘media’ largely ignoring poetry, really must do whatever they can to spread the word. (Assuming that we are part of the media and what a weird idea that is.)  As one of the key ways of doing this is by reviewing as many poetry collections as we can, we are really honour-bound to do just that.

See, I got there in the end. This is all pre-coffee.

Like everything else we do, I really want it to be an open and transparent process, so we’ll be listing any books or pamphlets we receive on the site as we go and linking to the author’s or publisher’s pages. I know that isn’t much, but there we are.

No, I don’t know why I bring it up either. I think maybe that coffee could be a good idea after all.

 

 

One thing we’ve found over the last few weeks since we embarked on SS Arfur is that there is very much a lot of ‘making it up as you go along.’ Not that we hadn’t spent months (and in truth, years) thinking about all of this, but once you are ‘on the ground’ the world looks a lot different from the adrenalin-free blue sky perspective.

The most obvious case of this is probably the one that we had thought was the simplest – how you go about dealing with the problem of Maria submissions?

Now we did worry about this up-front;

Would we get enough?

Would they be any good?

Even,

Would there be too many for us to deal with, as we found ourselves buried in them?

And luckily none of those has been a problem, but we are well aware that despite the fact that we were more than happy for people to submit their work elsewhere whilst we also held on to it, it doesn’t seem fair to hang on to work that maybe isn’t for us.

All of which is a long way around saying that we have started sifting the poems that have already been submitted and that whilst we haven’t definitely chosen any yet (actually that isn’t true, there are a handful that I know will definitely be in the first issue – not least because one of them made me cry) but we are definitely getting to a position where we can start a longlist and then, over time see which poems that subsequently arrive replace those on it.

So, whilst not hearing from us doesn’t mean that you are definitely going to see your work in Arfur#1, there are still some poems we haven’t read at all, we will now be starting to let people know if their work wasn’t for us this time, as it seems the fairest thing to do.

The truth of it is that we are really only looking for 40 poems, or rather forty-ish poetry-filled pages, and from there it is only  matter of taste. And as my reflection in the bathroom mirror regularly asks me,

‘What the hell do I know anyway?’

Submissions are still open – HERE – until the 15th January, and every poem will be read and right up to that deadline we will be comparing and finding which are the ones that talk to us most. So please do submit your work if you fancy what we are trying to be about.