Putting together a pamphlet (1)

By Kim Moore

I’m really excited to be judging the International Book and Pamphlet Competition for The Poetry Business this year. What follows is going to be a series of posts with some advice and thoughts about putting a pamphlet or collection together for those of you who may be thinking about doing so - either for this competition or for another reason.

The first thing is to say that you can find all the finer details of what you need to enter the competition at the link above, but essentially, poets are asked to send in twenty poems. The fee is £29 with subscribers to The North, Friends of the Poetry Business, and members of the Poetry Society eligible for the discounted fee of £27. There is also an Entry fee waiver application as well - see the website FAQ’s for details. The closing date is 30th November 2025.

So today’s post is going to be a little trip down memory lane, as we go back to 2011, when I was still working full time as a peripatetic brass teacher for Cumbria Music Service. I’d just finished a day’s teaching in a primary school in Barrow where the whole of Key Stage 2 learnt to play an instrument. All the kids had just left, and I was packing up my trumpet in a state of exhaustion, probably with my ears ringing from the sound of thirty Year 3 children playing the cornet, when I got a phone call from Ann Sansom, one of the editors at The Poetry Business.

At first I thought Ann was a double glazing salesman, but when it became clear that she wasn’t, that she was in fact, ringing to tell me I’d won the pamphlet competition, I don’t remember what I said in reply. y ordinary life, which had become predictable in so many ways with the rhythm of the school year and the repetition of teaching, the starting again each year with a new class - suddenly it was as if a bolt of lightning had shot through all of it and changed everything. As I looked around the classroom, I felt so happy. It was as if everything was bathed in a kind of strange buttery glow, as if that lightning bolt had left a kind of afterimage behind itself.

It was my third time entering the competition, and though I hadn’t got anywhere the previous two times, I’d used each disappointment as learning, and replaced and revised the poems in the pamphlet. The year before, my best friend David Tait had won the competition with his pamphlet Love’s Loose Ends. We sent each other poems constantly during those days. I knew his pamphlet almost as well as I knew mine.

Before David’s pamphlet won the competition, he referred to it by its title. I remember at the time realising that this pamphlet was an object, a real made thing already, that David wasn’t waiting for permission or acceptance. The magic of naming it and calling it by its name had called it into being in the world.

I remember being honest with myself and realising that my pamphlet was not ready and that was why it wasn’t chosen. I wasn’t calling it by name, it was too shimmery, too ghostly in my mind. I resolved to start and went around for another year whilst I worked on it, calling it by name, calling it into existence, as if it was a dog that needed to be trained. It slowly assembled itself in my own mind, and then in the space between me and the people I talked to about it, and that act made it solidify, firstly in my own mind, and then in the minds of those around me who I talked to about it, and then I entered it again into the competition, and this time it won.

So my first piece of advice is to fix on a title for your pamphlet, if you haven’t already done so, and start to call your pamphlet by its name. Let it appear in the world, let it bump into things, let it rub up against your ordinary life and see how it fits alongside everything else.

Aside from allowing your pamphlet or collection to become a body of work, a title also has other jobs of course. It is our first window into what we might expect from what we are about to read. If it is a window, it is a stained glass one, perhaps a small stained-glass porthole that we can peer through and get glimpses of the life going on inside the world of the book.

To leap from one metaphor to the other, I was going to continue and say the title is our first clue - but I don’t think that’s quite right, because it assumes there is something to be solved, something to be worked out. Perhaps the title more accurately is a signpost, our first one, a signpost that points us in the right direction along the path of the journey we must take.

My first pamphlet was called If We Could Speak Like Wolves. I wrote the title poem, and shortly after realised it had to be the title of the pamphlet. It was a title that bloomed in my mind, a gift that came fully formed. What does it tell the reader about what they are going to read?

For me the title contains yearning through the use of ‘If’. It is one half of a sentence that yearns to be finished - if it was music it would be one half of a cadenza It wants to be resolved - if we could speak like wolves, then…then what? You’ll have to read the poem to find out. It also tells the reader that wolves will be important in the pamphlet, and wolves continue to shift in and out of my poems, refusing to be pinned down by such pedestrian things as meaning. It tells the reader that relationships will be central to these poems - it is not if I could speak like a wolf, it is if we could speak like wolves. It contains failure within its premise, but also the hope of things changing as well.

A title poem has to carry a lot of weight on its shoulders. An alternative is to use a line from a poem - this draws less attention to the poem. David Tait’s Love’s Loose Ends does exactly this, using a line from a poem called “In Thread”, a beautifully skilful villanelle, four poems from the end of the pamphlet.

On its own, the title tells me that I can expect to read about love, but perhaps not conventional love poems or straightforward ones. In fact, this may not be a pamphlet of love poems at all. The title hints that it is the idea of love that we will be exploring, and that love is not a tidy, tucked in thing. It is not something that ends neatly or resolves satisfactorily. The poem reads

Miles ahead
our love's loose ends, blurred
to cigarettes, an unmade bed. 

I often think of you in thread. 

The whole poem advocates for the idea that we remember the people we love or once loved in images, in glimpses of things - worn clothing, suitcases of shirts, jet trails in the sky.

When I got out my copy of the pamphlet to read again for this post, and opened it to the first page, I find a quote from Jon Stallworthy:

               my poems all
are woven out of love's loose ends

and realise that David’s title has not come from the poem “In Thread”, but from a poem by Stallworthy. David must have read the Stallworthy poem, then written the “In Thread” poem in response, and then used the Stallworthy line as a title. And this tells us something else about the pamphlet and about the writer we will encounter between the pages, that these poems are in conversation with other writers. The Stallworthy quote tells us something about a certain approach to writing, a sensibility, a commitment to weaving poems from life.

In the next post which will be for paid subscribers, I’ll be thinking specifically about first poems and how to choose a poem to start your pamphlet.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know what you think in the comments below around titles, and choosing titles. And please feel free to suggest other topics that might be useful in terms of putting together a pamphlet.