In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson wrote, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"[1]
This, truly, is the lot of all those of us who take on the role of editing other people’s poetry. We receive missives from poets all around the world, each of them torn on the twin peaks of worry, that we’ll be just too busy to pay attention to their work, and an urgent need, to know if what they’ve written is any good (at least in our eyes).
Here at Dithering Chaps, it's maybe not fascicles, sewn together by hand, that we are handling, but we open poets' email attachments with just as much reverence as if they were.
We've been up and running for two years now and have six titles under our belt.
Initially, our ambitions were limited: to give the powerful and talented voices we encounter at our local poetry groups in Dorset a publishing outlet. Then, early last year, we expanded our horizons: our bid to run a poetry competition for the Bournemouth Writing Festival was accepted. The result was 'Lines in the Sand'. Reaching out to writing groups world-wide, we attracted just under a thousand entries and put ourselves firmly on the map: dithering had gone global (in our modest, non-hyperbolic way!) and we produced an anthology of poetry and flash fiction that we were proud to put our name to.
Inspired by this, we launched our next book, Louise Walker's 'From There to Here' - "A lullaby to loss with tender notes that chart the affirmation of a life lived on" - at the Big Smoke's London Welsh Centre.
A further lightbulb moment for us last year was an encounter with 'Ravenser Odd', a poem by Michael Daniels, published by Jenny Lewis' Poet's House Pamphlets, Oxford. The poem is a parable for our times told as an ode to deposition and erosion: how water creates and destroys; how men (and birds) try to plant their feet where tides rip them away; how words are vulnerable too. The copy that we first handled was a palimpsest of scuffings and scratchings into its waxy surface. Form matching content. A wonder.
'Ravenser Odd' helped us to up our game as a publisher, creating a vision of a chapbook whose look and feel in the hand was on an equal footing with the words inside. We have found a young and vibrant local artist to work with - the fabulous Jamie Truscott (jamie@trussy.com) - and their brief going forward is to 'out-Ravenser' future Dithering titles. For our latest, Jamie created a streak of a white-line bird-flight across the page, striking through the absent-eponymous bird in Helen's Kay's title - 'It Was Never About the Kingfisher'. (More of the same, please, Jamie!)
When a cover speaks as strongly as its contents, we tend to come over all Emily Dickinson again! As she put it:
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”[2]
Maybe you have a fascicle of top-of-the-head-exploding poems tucked away in a wardrobe drawer somewhere upstairs. Why not sent it to Dithering Chaps!
We'll be open for submissions throughout 2025...
To
learn more about Dithering Chaps, please visit our website.
[1] Letter 260 to TW Higginson, 15th April, 1862
[2] Letter 342, 16 August 1870
DG Herring's work has appeared in South Poetry Magazine, Consilience, Splonk, New Isles Press Issue 2, Poetry Salzburg Review 4, Stand Magazine and Orbis. David is currently Lead Editor of indie publishing house, Dithering Chaps. His work interrogates identity and deep history, art and iconoclasm, the source and the telos of words.
