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We are all rather smug today as we had some great news as far as Arfur, our worryingly imminent imaginary magazine is concerned, as it seems that a certain Mr A.P Middleton of somewhere in the frozen North, is joining us.

Which is many kinds of rather good news, as A.P, as he allows himself to be called in the more relaxed portions of social occasions, is the compiler of rather fiendishly tricky crosswords.

Now I’ll be quite honest, I am hopeless at such things, but we do have a rather crossword addicted member of Team ‘Hog, and she is verily excited by this.

As for the crossword itself, the plan is for us to feature one of A.P’s torturous creations in each issue of Arfur (that sounds wrong somehow) and of course there will be a prize of some sort. (Don’t ask me what now, all I do know is that A.P thinks nobody can beat his best, and that we should plan to ‘roll-up’ the prize until somebody flukes it a few years down the line. So there is a challenge.)

More seriously, we are very pleased to have A.P along for the ride, and we are sure that you will be too.

When we first put the ‘Hog web site up, at the last minute we realised that we needed a cover for our magazine, ‘Arfur’, and for the ‘The Road To Clevedon Pier’ anthology.

Being  a little third division on the Photoshop front, we scrambled around, nipped out with the Box Brownie, and managed to put something together in about 27 minutes, with only a quick espresso along the way.

In fact the ‘Pier’ book is perfect and that is destined to be the final look of the published artefact, as it were, but the Arfur one was only ever meant to be an example, a placeholder until we quickly got the proper design together.

Needless to say, at that point we immediately forgot about the whole thing and opened another pack of Hobnobs and that it is only now, all these weeks later when I have suddenly realised that I need to get finished cover files to our delightfilled printer, for some ‘mock-up copies of the magazine we can photograph and generally coo over, that I am inspired to, well, do something.

So by the end of the week I am hoping to have at least three possible cover images, and I would deeply be pleased and chuffed if you good people (assuming anybody is reading this drivel) wouldn’t mind casting your eye over them and voting for the one you like best.

Obviously, I only write this on here to force me to do it.

Thanking you most definitely kindly.

Sometimes, no matter how much you think about things, you still manage to mess them up and so I have to say I was really pleased when the fabulous Sarah Doyle suggested that maybe it would be a good idea to have a rethink about our Anthology competition.

She pointed out that we were charging a fee to enter the competition, but not paying prize money and basically (in a very nice and considered way) she painted a picture that even I could see meant that, well, I’d cocked it up.

Best laid plans and all that, but there we are. I’d gotten it wrong.

I won’t bore you with the angst and gnashing of teeth, but in truth I never mind making mistakes and I’ve always thought/hoped that it is how you deal with them that matters.

So after a night and a bit of thinking it through, we’ve decided to change the prizes, so that rather than the Leather Bound and very posh Journal we were all very impressed with, instead the winner will now receive £150 cash, with two runners-up getting £25 each. All three will also get subscriptions to ‘Arfur’ and all the other bits and bobs we’d already decided on.

If however the winner would prefer the posh book, that is cool too, they will get the choice.

The competition page has been updated Here.

So (really) many thanks to Sarah, it is always good when somebody takes the time to help you along the way, and she was well cool about it. Cheers Sarah :)

Over the last few weeks we’ve spent a lot of time trying to decide what to do about reviews, as far as young Arfur goes.

On one hand, we are really rather keen to have them. In a way you almost feel that poetry magazines have a responsibility to review new collections as let’s face it, the mainstream media aren’t exactly clambering over themselves to help promote them with a few kind words and however many cool magazines there are out there, oodles of books and authors still never get a look in.

So reviews we will have, but how to go about it?

Well, first things first, we need some books and pamphlets to review, so I guess I’ll get in touch with some publishers, that would work.

Again though, I always like to read around things, so if possible it would be nice to at least ask a couple of questions of the poet, to try and see where they were coming from. A review is just an opinion, and however intuitive the reviewer, you can’t beat talking to the poet if you want the real juice. (err, probably should think of a better description for that.)

That sounds like a plan then, why the devil not. I’m nosy if nothing else.

As for who will be writing the reviews, well maybe I’ll put a call out when we have something to review, but until then you are stuck with me, I’m afraid.

The nice thing though is that we’re not obsessive about everything appearing in issue one.

If reviews come later, such is life, it is hardly going to wreck anybody’s daze.

 

It is a month now since we ‘launched’, at least in a vaporific kind of way, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, and it has been a lot of things and we have spoken to a multitude of people, which has been on the whole informative if confusing.

In many ways it has felt like a series of questions or tasks to be answered, which luckily far-too-many-nights playing ‘Twin Kingdom Valley’ on an Acorn Electron back in the ’80s has left me fully prepared to cope with.

Apart from perhaps if I get stuck in ‘Watersmeet’ with no sign of a raft, but that is just  something for my therapist to worry about these days, not thee.

As for the present, the issue on the table today that we are-a-pondering is going under the heading of ‘formats’ and is all about our magazine, ‘Arfur.’

And it is really eBooks that are the issue. On one hand I love the fact that I can walk around with a hundred novels to work my way through on a Kindle, I’ve had one for aeons now and I honestly couldn’t do without it, but however much of a Luddite it makes me, I can’t help but feel that poetry works better on paper. It isn’t just the fact that the format changes on an eBook – I realise PDFs get you past that – but I think it comes down to the fact that I read poetry in a different way to prose. Prose I eat by the pound, poetry is gastro-porn, it needs air and light around it so that it can creep off the page and into your brain like a wiggly worm.

But that is just me, I realise that, and whilst I would be happiest if ‘Arfur’ was only produced on Vegan-Society-approved ersatz calfskin, I realise that some people like paperbacks and others like eBooks and some like hardbacks too. Hardbacks with beautifully finished dust jackets, paisley-printed end-papers, cloth bound books with gold leaf embossed hedgehogs, casebound beauties that line-up perfectly on their shelves with little patterns that you only really notice when you have a good selection to ponder over as a group…

And breathe.

So what to do?

On one hand I know we should ‘keep it simple stoopid.’

A paperback is good enough and a fabulously produced paperback is a wonder of the world, both ancient and modern and if there is an eBook for the gentlest of modern folk, well it is hardly the science of upwards projectile firing.

In fact, I think eBooks should come free with paper ones, but that is something else entirely (apart from it isn’t.) In fact, eBooks to me are convenience food, if I’m buying a book or a magazine, I want to be able to hold the thing, I want to put it on a shelf, or in a pile, leave it in the glovebox of my car or lend it to somebody, or give it away via BookMooch or to a charity shop or leave it on a bus or in a waiting room. I want to put photos between the pages as bookmarks and forget about them until years later when I open the book again and memories flutter out at me, or maybe even the great-grandchildren I’ll never have met, who knows.

So there we are, as clear as mud, but I started writing this in the hope of coming to a conclusive decision, so I’ll do just that. I like to pronounce, pronouncements make you do things.

Therefore, we are pleased to say that:

‘A Restricted View From Under The Hedge’ will be made available both as a printed artefact and as an eBook, and whichever version you buy (or are given if you have your work ‘tween the covers) you will always get the other one free of charge. It will be the same when we publish books too.

There, that wasn’t so hard after all.

I’m not sure whether you can thaw a phoney war, it is probably just me mixing my meta-thingies as usual, but it does feel that over the last few days we have started to see a little movement around here as far as ‘Arfur’ goes.

I think the main reason is that my rather hazy view of what our magazine will be is starting to get a little clearer, and the flurry of letters and emails I’ve sent over the last couple of weeks are starting to get us somewhere.

Because, I really don’t want ‘Arfur’ to just be a collection of poems.

There, I said it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love poems, poems are lovely things, but I have always been interested in reading around a subject and I guess we are betting that I’m not the only one.

So as well as having a glutton’s delight in the poem depot, we are also looking at articles that will make the magazine a right royal read.

To this end then, I’m pleased to say that we shall be talking ‘on-the-record’ to some really quite interesting people.

No names yet, but what I can say is that we will have poets, magazine editors, book publishers and even the odd musician (as I’ve always been interested in the song lyric/poetry crossover and, well, am quite nosey. Plus of course all hedgehogs are friends to the stars, so if you have the contacts you may as well use them.)

If I can find a reviewer or three we will probably have reviews too. Lots of reviews. I like reviews.

There are lots of other ideas too, but more of them later when the mists clear further.

Two nights each week, I sit alone for an hour, often in the dark, in a primary school car park.

There are words I never thought I’d share on the interweb and no, please don’t call the Police, I’m harmless. As I sit there in my car, my daughter is inside the school learning martial arts, I just can’t face sitting on the school benches, trying to make conversation with other parents as our little angels beat each other up.

In a lot of ways it is a good thing. A couple of hours a week to just think without distractions. Phone goes off and I either scribble notes as things occur to me or read something. This week it was a little of both as, being preoccupied with dreaming-up ‘Arfur,’ ( our vaporware magazine, ‘A Restricted View From Under The Hedge’ – you can’t buy it in the shops, or anywhere else, come to that) it was nice to settle down to read somebody else’s debut magazine, as earlier in the day I’d received Issue One of the ‘Eye Flash Poetry Journal.’

But enough of my babble, to the magazine.

From opening the envelope, it is obvious that ‘Eye Flash’ is a beautifully produced, highly controlled poetry journal of the oldest school. Just holding it you instantly recognise the quality of the production.

Produced in pamphlet rather than perfect bound form, it is the simplest of designs throughout, the unlaminated cover feeling beautiful in your hand and the interior pages being of a nice weight and quality too.

Speaking of the cover, the design is classic and the image is of a painting by artist Kitty Cooper which is quite charming, perfectly matching the achingly modern yet classic style of the magazine itself.  I’m not sure if Ms. Cooper will be generally supplying the art for the covers, but looking at her work on Artfinder, if it were me she certainly would be.

Other than my swooning at the artist’s feet, the addition of a line from Daniel Bennet, cleverly taken from his poem ‘The Cormorant’, which appears in the magazine, fits the image perfectly and adds to the suspicion that a lot of thought has gone into the smallest of details with this production. This isn’t a line that would have been obvious as a contender to go with the painting, but works perfectly for entirely that reason.

Inside the covers, the spartan style continues. Poems are given lots of space to breathe on the page, fonts are classic serif and there are no kitchen sinks thrown into elongated editorials (must remember that if nothing else) just a short note from editor Charlotte Begg in which you feel every word has been weighed.

And that is the impression I get throughout the magazine. Charlotte knows exactly what she is doing and is doing it beautifully. Each of the nineteen poems would stand out in a lesser magazine, but there is a commonality of quality here where all of the poems have a certain ‘something’, that you can only wonder how many submissions Ms. Begg had to whittle down to find this many that are so very good. It reminds me of talking to a very good and experienced luthier and asking him how he knew when one of his guitars was ‘really good.’ He looked at me a little strange and told me that they are all ‘really good’ as he puts any where the wood doesn’t sing onto his fire.

As for the poetry itself, I am in love with Joanna Nissel’s magazine opener, ‘Perfect Happiness’, which is beautifully quirky and pulls at the threads of forgotten memories. Sometimes a short poem can say so much more than a long one, and that is the case here. Neil Richards’ ‘The Flood’ caught me too with its line about  Noah ‘Discreetly sewing souls into ants’, as did Jim Zola’s ‘Dusk’ opening with, ‘You become home to your wife’s sadness…’ which resonates horribly.

In truth I could quote from all of the poems, but that really isn’t the aim of this, and more to the point I wouldn’t want you to be distracted from clicking on the ‘Buy Me’ button, because this really is a magazine that you will want to read and to own. I should also say that it doesn’t just work in sodium-lit car parks outside schools (I know, I’ve just read it again a few times) it is a genuinely beautiful production which will happily see you through to the Winter edition quite nicely.

You can find out more and order a copy at the Eye Flash Poetry Web Site.

Links:

Web site   Facebook   Twitter   Instagram

 

It strikes me that starting a poetry magazine is something that, perhaps, a number of people would like to do, and that in doing it, it is a good chance to talk about what is involved. I’m sure we will make plenty many lots of mistakes along the way, but if nothing else making a prat of yourself in public is entertaining for the casual spectator.

Of course we have already decided a few things. The name,  ‘A Restricted View From Under The Hedge’ actually came really early for some reason, and with it a certain perspective on what a poetry magazine is. Ours will have plenty of poems, but we want it to be a little ‘meta’ too, mainly because I’m one of those annoying people who always ask ‘why?’ when the ‘what’ is really what matters.

Other than that, making it a quarterly was an easy decision as, basically,  I am ultimately lazy in my default state. And printed over pixels came down to the fact that I tend to have a pile of poetry books on my bedside table, and I’m always concerned that I’ll get electrocuted if I drop a Kindle in the bath. (I know I won’t, but you never know.)

One thing that I am pondering today, is about how the magazine will look. On the outside we obviously have an idea about design already, and I think matte lamination is the way to go too. But it is on the inside I am going around in circles, and I’m trying to decide whether it should be colour or monochrome.

Now to cover the obvious, there is a cost implication to consider. Colour costs more as you need posher papers and more inks, or something.

Technically speaking.

But in reality, for a book or magazine the size of a poetry magazine it may mean a £1 on the cover price, and if my old Economics ‘O’ level taught me anything, it was that sitting with all the other boys was no way to get a girlfriend.

The other thing, of course, was that when it comes to things like books and music, and maybe even poetry magazines, demand is inelastic in that if people really want it they will pay the price and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter how cheap it is, they wouldn’t spit on it if it were on fire.

I failed the exam, clearly.

So in many ways, the colour or monochrome decision is strictly aesthetic, and you may think that it would be easy – colour all the way, as that is how ‘normal’ magazines work, isn’t it?

But in truth, I really think poetry works better in monochrome, there are no distractions from the work and I can’t help but feel that colour poetry books remind me of those piles of cheap hardbacks you get in motorway services and garden centres, the visitor shop books with curling gold-foil rosettes shouting ‘Three for a Tenner,’ all very  ‘Mary Berry Cooks Dallas’ and ‘Steam Engines From Hackney Wick.’

And yes, we could use beautiful photographs, or have an ‘art’ section, which admittedly I’ve thought about, but would it really add anything to the words?

I don’t think so, and ultimately that is the interesting part, the part we wanted to immerse ourselves in from the start and isn’t it better to avoid distractions?

So I think that is what we will do, and if that seems a little old fashioned, well I can only apologise, and perhaps we’ll keep digging out pretty photos of hedgehogs for the web site by way of an apology.

And yes I realise that it has nothing to do with anything at all, but to celebrate the unlikely event of my making a decision, here is a song from the Monochrome Set.

‘A Slim Volume of One’s Own’

Here at The Hedgehog Press, we very much would like to be a publisher of great single poet collections, and after a lot of discussion have decided that the best way to find the poets and evaluate their work is to run a competition. Not a very original decision we agree, but then we can’t hide from the fact that we are often all standing on the shoulders of some quite big chaps and trying to see what is going on.

Regardless of all that, a competition we have and we are inordinately proud to say that our ‘A Slim Volume Of One’s Own’ competition will see at least one poet end-up with exactly that, the very first individual collection of poetry from The Hedgehog Press.

But to the competition and this really is the most open-minded of open poetry competitions, and whatever your topic, form or motivation, we look forward to reading your work in the form of a collection of up to forty poems.

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This Competition has Closed

Once you have done that, please complete the form below and upload your poems in a single PDF document.

You may enter up to Three collections of your poetry.

These may each contain up to Forty poems each.

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Prizes:

The winning poet will:

a) See a collection of their poetry published in paperback form by The Hedgehog Press.

Beautifully, I might add.

b) Be interviewed for the next issue of our magazine ‘A Restricted View From Under The Hedge’ where we will also publish a ‘Showcase’ selection of their work.

c) Receive a year’s subscription to our magazine ‘A Restricted View From The Hedge’

d) Receive 100 Copies of their finished book. We are big believers in supporting poets and feel that readings are the best way for a poet to sell books and profit from their art.

e) We will enter the collection to any awards/competitions to which it is applicable/we feel likely to do well.

f) Obviously we will send review copies to a selection of poetry journals and national media.

g) The winners collection of poetry will be published during  2018 or by agreement with the poet. We are easy going chaps but would like to see it in print sooner rather than later.

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Rules:

We don’t really like rules, so we will aim to keep it simple:

a) Make sure all of the work is your own.

b) We don’t mind if poems have been published in magazines before, but poems that have previously appeared in book form in earlier collections are sadly excluded.

c) Poems entered below are classed as ‘Pending’ until the appropriate entrance fee has been paid. Until then they will not be included in the judging process.

d) We only accept poems electronically (due to the geographical locations of the judges.) If you would prefer to email your entry or pay via Bank Transfer, please get in touch using the ‘Tell The Hog‘ page.

e) No postal entries or payments by cheque or postal order are possible at the moment, unfortunately.

f) The decision of the judges is final.

g) Deadline for entries is 15th March 2018 at 11:59pm

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To enter please complete the form below and upload your poems using the ‘Add File’ button in PDF format:

Please Note: We ask for poems to be provided as a PDF file as this is the best way for us to see the layout as you intended. We don’t wish this to become a problem for you though, so if you need help please do contact us Here and we will see what we can do (although please don’t leave it until 11:58pm on the deadline day to ask!)

‘The Road To Clevedon Pier’

** THE COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED **

As our first anthology, we wanted to make it as accessible as possible, so in terms of the poetry itself, there really are no preconceptions.

This really is the most open-minded of open poetry competitions, and whatever your topic, form or motivation, we look forward to reading your work.

To enter our first poetry anthology competition, please visit the payment page HERE and pay the appropriate entrance fee.

Once you have done that, please complete the form below and upload your poems in a single PDF document.

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Prizes:

The winning poem/poet will:

a) Receive A Prize of £150. There will additionally be two Runners-up prizes of £25 each

b) See their poem appear as the lead poem in the ‘Road To Clevedon Pier’ Anthology and obviously receive a copy of the anthology.

c) Be interviewed for the next issue of our magazine ‘A Restricted View From Under The Hedge’ where we will also publish their winning entry alongside a ‘Showcase’ of a selection of their poetry (if they so wish.)

d) Receive a year’s subscription to our magazine ‘A Restricted View From The Hedge’

All shortlisted poems will also appear in the ‘Road To Clevedon Pier’ Anthology

All shortlisted poets will of course receive a complimentary copy of the anthology.

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Rules:

We don’t really like rules, so we will aim to keep it simple:

a) Make sure all of the work is your own.

b) We don’t mind if poems have been published in magazines before, but poems that have previously appeared in book form (in collections or anthologies) are sadly excluded. There is nothing worse than buying an anthology and finding that you have read all of the poems before, so give some of your other work a chance!

c) Poems entered below are classed as ‘Pending’ until the appropriate entrance fee has been paid. Until then they will not be included in the judging process.

d) We only accept poems electronically (due to the geographical locations of the judges.) If you would prefer to email your entry or pay via Bank Transfer, please get in touch using the ‘Tell The Hog‘ page.

e) No postal entries or payments by cheque or postal order are possible at the moment, unfortunately.

f) The decision of the judges is final.

g) Deadline for entries is 15th January 2018 at 11:59pm

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‘The Road To Clevedon Pier’ will be published in March 2018, and will contain work from the shortlisted poets from our competition.

To enter please complete the form below and upload your poems using the ‘Add File’ button, uploading a single PDF file.

Please Note: We ask for poems to be provided as a PDF file as this is the best way for us to see the layout as you intended. We don’t wish this to become a problem for you though, so if you need help please do contact us Here and we will see what we can do (although please don’t leave it until 11:58pm on the deadline day to ask!)

** THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED ***