Unpicking knots and hour-glass figure poems

Last week I went on an Arvon course at The Hurst in Shropshire with the wonderful Daljit Nagra and Julie Copus – the week was quite wonderful and I’m sure I’ll mention it again in later posts. One immediate effect that last week has had is to encourage me to interrogate my own poetry far more than I have before. I’m finding myself going back to poems that I knew weren’t quite right but had something going for them and I’m tugging them apart line by line, word by word, stitching new bits in here and there in the hope that I’ll eventually come up with a new set of Emperor’s clothes….

Looking at your own work is (for me at least) the hardest thing to do because even after weeks of ‘resting’ a piece I still know the story and what I wanted to say and I can’t see past that to see what the poem needs to say. I had a conversation with Julia about this and she said that I was rather like someone listening to a great piece of music through headphones and singing along – I could hear the entire orchestra but all the audience got was my a capella version – she did kindly add that she was sure I had a lovely voice. I’ve always suspected I’m a little tone deaf.

So what’s the best way to deal with this problem? How do we make our work convey exactly what we want them to say? I truly wish I had a quick answer to this one, I wish I could say, “Well, it’s easy, just do X, Y, Z and then Bob’s your uncle and a deal for your first collection will be yours for the taking!” But I can’t. So far my remedy for redrafting is as follows – and this holds true for any type of creative writing whether it’s a novel, short story or poetry and even for writing non-fiction too.

Don’t censor yourself in the first draft

Try to train yourself to write freely or practice ‘automatic’ writing. Stephen King recommends this in his brilliant book, ‘On Writing’. Set yourself a time limit each day when you will not be disturbed by anything. Then write whatever comes out of your fingers. Last week I put myself under pressure at one point – I’d poured cold coffee over myself, wasted my break by waiting next to an empty loo I thought was occupied and had to write something, anything within ten minutes – here’s the start of it

“I’m harassed, panicking, I don’t like being pushed this is not how I work. I like plans, preparation, being ready, not hurried. I come prepared, I don’t just throw things together. I plan, prepare. I admit I’m anal and like order and I’ve not even begun to say what I wanted to say because I’m panicking, unprepared. I don’t like this. I feel boxed in, cornered – a rabbit in headlights except rabbits don’t do that deer do but rabbits just ignore the headlights and go squish under the wheels of a 4x4…..”

And from then on a poem suddenly appeared. It was a piece all about people who come to the countryside with very different expectations of their life to those who have always lived there. I admit it, it was a bit of a rant but one I hadn’t intended to write until I was put under that bit of pressure and also because I tend to write a great deal without thinking - ‘automatic’ writing.

So that’s fine, you’ve now got something down on paper. Great. Now what?

 

Put it away for a few weeks

Honestly, it helps. If you can put it away for more than a few weeks that’s great – with any luck you’ll have forgotten writing it and you’ll be able to see what the piece is really about. Distance – that’s the thing. Finding distance with your work is so important – you need to see the writing as something away from you, not part of you. Objectivity is what I’m getting at here and when you’ve just written something it’s hard to be objective and see things like weak line endings, bad meter, poor images and so on. After a few weeks those things should (hopefully) become a little clearer.

Now you’re at the stage that I was a few weeks ago – loads of stuff written, redrafted after a few weeks and then I’d even submitted pieces here and there. Some of the poems have been successful and some haven’t – that’s not always because they’ve been poor poems (I tell myself) but sometimes the editors have been looking for different types of work or perhaps just recently found something similar that they preferred. Well, at least that is what I was telling myself, but now – after last week’s many conversations – I’m beginning to see that some of what I’ve written isn’t yet fully formed. My background has been very much story based – I’ve always been a voracious reader of fiction, I wrote a novella for my Masters, I wrote opinion pieces for a magazine – all stories of a type. Yet my poetry has tended towards lots of abstract and rather nebulous ideas…apart from those that have made it into print…guess what? They’ve been rather like tiny stories.

So, my next piece of advice…

Apply the same rules of writing to fiction AND poetry

When you want to create a really rounded and fully formed character in a story you consider how you describe them with all the senses, how they speak, how they move, what others think about them, what others say about them, what motivates them and so on. So apply that to a character in your poem – think about what they’d say, what motivates them and so on. Even apply it to your poem – what is motivating it? What’s it really about? Pull it apart, work out if each and every line, each and every word works with your poem and with what you want it to say. Try writing out your poem in longhand if you normally use a PC or laptop. Try writing out your poem into prose, change the line endings, add words, take them away, keep slowly chipping away at it until it looks exactly as you want it to.

This last bit is the hardest part of all and I’m still grappling with them – so expect some further posts in the future attempting to make this part of the process somewhat clearer!

At the moment I’ve pulled one old piece apart and I know it’s saying something – originally it was an observational piece about two elderly women on the bus – I watched them and they interested me. Now I know from what I’ve written and rewritten that it’s a piece about being in the mother-daughter relationship and being overshadowed. The poem still doesn’t work yet, in fact it’s got rather an hour-glass figure – a great beginning, a strong end but nothing in the middle. I know that just like prose fiction I need to give it an event, something to hang it all around, something to give it tension but right now I can’t see what that might be. So this poem will stay in my Drafts folder for a while longer and that’s irritating because I like things finished….which is why I probably rush stuff and submit it before it’s really ready.

On rejections and dealing with them

I spent a large part of July worrying about having a job in September - budget cuts and so on - and part of that worrying pushed me to write lots of poetry and send out everything I have to magazines and journals. On one hand this is a Good Thing as it gave me something to focus upon and it's what I should be doing anyway. On the other hand the downside is that I've received three rejections so far and heard nothing from the others.

There are two voices in my head holding a conversation about this state of affairs; one is the sensible calm voice who knows that rejections are a necessary part of writing, that more poetry is written than read today, that maybe some of the poems were not really ready, that they didn't fit what the editor is currently looking for and that I haven't had them all rejected yet. The other voice is... well, more of a shout, a tantrum with a stamped foot if you like.

Writing is a solitary pursuit; we write firstly for ourselves, to ourselves in order to understand the world, to make sense of our feelings. For some people their writing ends there - they write diaries which explore their inner world but never see the light of the outer world. The rest of us write because we want to share something with all of you out there we want to connect, 'only connect' as E.M.Forster said. So we spend our days watching, listening and collecting bits of life which we then transcribe and transform onto the page, making sense of it, giving it a new life, making it fresh. The transcribing and transforming is the alchemy - the bit we do almost in secret, tucked away literally for some in their writing sheds, offices, attics and garrets and metaphorically for others writing in cafes and libraries who hide in plain sight. When we finally return our work to the world we, I am often so blinkered that it is like my first born child - perfect in every way.

This is getting terribly poetic here - I'll just take a moment out to translate...

I love my writing therefore I expect everyone else to do so too. I'm shocked and hurt (with dramatic flounces) when others do not feel the same way.

So that's where all the foot stamping came from and it should last approximately 12 hours if you're lucky but don't allow yourself to continue the tantrum for over 24 hours if at all possible. Why? The short answer is (and this hurts) no one cares. The long answer is what the sensible voice in my head has been saying throughout all of this.....

Rejections are a necessary part of writing -
Your writing may simply not be good enough just yet and even with rejections there is a hierarchy (at least in my head...) - no reply whatsoever means the poem either got lost or really stank, a standard form rejection means it was poor but the editor is polite, a note asking you to submit again in the future means it was still poor but you show some promise, a note explaining why they didn't accept your poem means that you're close and the poem isn't bad.
All writers even the megastars like Stephen King have been rejected - I regularly recommend his book 'On Writing' to new writers. If you didn't ever receive rejections you (I) would begin to doubt the worth of doing this...to me if something is worth doing not only should it be done well but also it shouldn't be easy. Rejections are good for the soul and good for building humility - a very necessary trait in writing so you can continue to learn and develop.

More poetry is written than read today -
Sad but true. If each of us who claims to love poetry actually bought collections from new poets or subscribed to the very same magazines we wish to be published by then there would be a bigger market for poetry. It's the chicken and the egg all over again - the chicken is the reader that gives birth to the egg, the writer...or maybe the chicken is the writer....Either way, if you want to write poetry then read it. On that note I'll briefly get on my soapbox - make sure you're reading contemporary poetry as much or more than the classics. You live now, so find out what people are writing now. You need to know what has gone before but not to the exclusion of what is happening now. For example, rock stars, pop bands, musicians generally have an awareness of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Blues, Jazz and so on, some even use pieces of classical music reworked...which reminds me - listen to Pachelbel's 'Canon' first, then listen to The Farm's 'All Together Now'.



Back to the poetry...

Maybe some of the poems were not really ready -
Did I actually put this poem away for a few weeks before I sent it out? Sometimes I can get so impressed with myself (I know I need to learn a little more humility but it's a fine balance between that and having self-confidence!) that I send out new work before it's ready. When the rejection arrives you need to look again at the poem - does it still work for you? Perhaps it needs some further revisions - now is the time to do it before you send it out again.

It didn't fit what the editor is currently looking for -
Poetry does go in trends and fashions and different journals and magazines look for different types of work. I know this is obvious but when you receive the rejection you need to remind yourself of this. Poetry tastes are different, it's all subjective and the editor you sent your precious piece to may simply not like poems about kittens (actually no one apart from small children likes poems about kittens - as much as we love the furry beasts we don't want to read soppy poems about them). Just like when you broke up with that guy who smelled odd - it's them, not you.

I haven't had them all rejected yet -

Yet.

So the short sensible answer to rejection is to 'man up' and revise, redraft and resubmit elsewhere. Keep reading, keep writing and hopefully keep improving.

I'm now going to take some of my own excellent advice and look at the latest batch of rejections.


Oh, and by the way, the job did re-materialise so I won't be entirely penniless by Christmas.

The Job of Writing Poetry

I'm mother to twin boys, I do a bit of teaching at a local university in the English department and this coming academic year the Art department too. I'm hoping to start studying for a PhD soon on the links between art and poetry. I also do a bit of freelance writing for magazines and I write poetry, some of which gets published.

In short, I'm a busy person, especially if you factor in my Twitter/Facebook/b3ta habit, reading approximately one novel a week, cooking and gardening too.

I find that I do most of my writing - the poetry and the occasional short story/half written novel - during the university vacations when I have no other demands upon my time except family ones. My children know that during the school holidays they can stay up a little later and they can laze around in bed until 10am if they fancy because I'll be writing until about lunchtime and then the afternoon and evenings are theirs.

So all of this means that writing poetry in particular tends to be done in these splurges and because of all the rest of the stuff I need to get done I have to be organised about redrafting and submitting work otherwise it would all simply sit in the virtual dusty drawer of my Documents folder on my laptop. How I organise this may be of some help to you...if you're not organised properly for writing you're not treating it like the job that it is!
Here's how I do it....

First Drafts and 'The Muse'

I don't believe in this notion of 'The Muse' and waiting for it to strike, some people (even some published writers) that I know do go along with the idea that they'll only write poetry when they get the feeling that it's about to strike. They're the lucky ones - that doesn't happen for me and if it did I have a feeling my Muse would strike at 3.00am and I hate having a broken night's sleep.
I try to write to a routine. I aim at sitting down every day Monday to Friday from about 9.00am until at least lunchtime and writing/editing/submitting - doing all the stuff that's involved in my job - the job of being a writer/academic/mother/dogsbody! Some days and some weeks I write every day, other times I might spend a week or two sorting out lecture plans, magazine submissions, job applications or even - and this is a guilty secret - watching YouTube and reading junk online - I feel bad about those days even though those are the times when my subconscious is probably working really hard at a new poem....okay, I don't really believe that either, but hey, I'm human.

I also go out and write because then I don't get distracted by the internet, newspapers, the internet, gardening, the internet, cats and the internet. Cafes work best for me because I can watch the world go by wrapped up in my cocoon of caffeine and there's something very special about writing longhand in a nice notebook.

So, what do I do once I've got all these First Drafts?

The Redrafting Filing System

Everything I write gets typed up either straight into Word, or more recently I've been using Evernote - it's free and you can save your work both on a laptop/pc and online and synchronise the two together to keep it all up to date. It also takes screen clippings from sites so you can keep all your research together too.
I then put this first draft into a folder marked redraft for two months time e.g. REDRAFT OCTOBER 2009 - everything I write this month, August, will go into that folder and I won't look at it again until October. I always like to leave at least six weeks to two months before revisiting a piece because I will have almost forgotten it and that gives me some distance and I'm more able to be subjective about it - I won't feel bad about cutting out all of my 'darlings'.

I've redrafted the poem, what next?

Where to submit poetry

The best thing any writer can do before beginning to write, let alone submit work, is to READ. If you want to write poetry then read poetry - I read somewhere that there are huge numbers of people writing poetry in the UK and the rest of the world but there aren't huge numbers of people reading poetry...strange...That's a bit like a rock band saying they never listened to music.
Once you're reading lots of poetry you'll have some idea of where you'd like your work to end up that's because you'll want to know more about your favourite poet and you'll Google them or find them on Poem Hunter (I'm on there!) and soon discover which magazines published their work. In addition to that you can look at the excellent lists at the Poetry Library's site or sign up to a writers' newsletter like Writer's Relief which will send you a list of calls for submission every month along with hints and tips for writers.

These are just a few ways you can find out where to place your work. Don't forget that it is easy to get work published online with plenty of obscure websites - anyone can set up a site and put whatever they like on there, that's the beauty of the internet - but if you want to build a good reputation for yourself and to be taken seriously as a professional then you have to keep to the professional sites. That's not to say that a new online poetry magazine isn't worth submitting to, but just make sure that it's the sort of place you'll be proud to be a part of in the future.
Don't ever pay to have your work read - if it's good enough for a reputable magazine to accept then they will not charge you a reading fee. Most magazines sadly won't be able to pay you for your submission - if you want to make money from writing you'd be far better off going into journalism. Magazines will often send you a free copy of the edition in which you've appeared. The only time you're likely to spend more than just the postage fee is if you're entering a competition - that's how most poetry competitions are run - the winner(s) get a cash prize or published copies of their work.

You've selected some likely magazines, what now?

First of all read the submission guidelines - you won't even make it to the long list if you've formatted your work incorrectly, emailed it as an attachment when they've asked for work to be in the body, sent it to the wrong person, sent free verse to a sonnet magazine and so on.
Secondly read the submission guidelines again and make sure you've complied with all their demands - this is very important.
Then write your covering letter - make it simple and to the point, remember to be polite because good manners cost nothing and you never know when you might meet this person in the flesh at a literary festival, book launch, writers' workshop or even in the pub.
If you're sending something via snailmail then make sure you include a stamped self-addressed envelope so they can either return your work, send you a rejection letter or even an acceptance letter! Remember though that you'll probably send out at least ten to twenty submissions for every single acceptance, if you're lucky.

How to keep track of all your submissions

This is the bit that I really wanted to write about - the whole reason for this post! Most poetry magazines accept and encourage simultaneous submissions - this is where you have a poem that you send to four or five magazines at the same time. If one magazine accepts it you then contact the others and ask for it to be withdrawn from you submission explaining why. Magazines do not encourage multiple submissions - this is where you send one or more poems every week without fail - that's the work of a stalker not a poet. Bundle up your submissions and send one containing up to five or six poems (depending on the magazine guidelines) and if they are all rejected or accepted you still wait a reasonable amount of time before submitting again - this is also usually mentioned in the magazine guidelines.

Once I've received a rejection or acceptance from a magazine I do two things: first I re-read the rejected poems and see if I think it needs rewriting, tightening up or 'rested' (in the dustbin), secondly, if I think it's still a piece that works, I get it straight out to another magazine.
I use an Excel spreadsheet for listing all my poetry ready for submission and all the magazines where they've been submitted.
Each poem submitted gets a date - month and year when it was sent off and where, once I get a reply the date is either changed to red - rejection, or moved onto another spreadsheet. I keep a separate spreadsheet for all the successful pieces as once they've been published they can't be sent off to another magazine generally. The screenshot above is for my current poems awaiting acceptance - I've taken out the titles of both poems and journals. I also put in a hyperlink from Excel straight to the journal website and also to the document folder where the poem is saved.

This works for me and gives me something practical to do once I receive a rejection. Of course I spend a bit of time moaning about it and feeling down but if you want to be in print you have to be like a cowboy - grow a thick skin - it comes in handy for all those times you have to get back up on the horse!

My First Poetry Review

I've been talking about including reviews and other such stuff for some time to friends and in my continual dialogue that goes on in my head between me and myself and I - that makes it a trilogue I suppose. Anyway, I'm digressing, the point is I'm finally getting around to doing a review of some poetry I read recently by Maria McCarthy, also known as Medway Maria. She comes with a great poetry pedigree as she studied under both Sarah Wardle and Susan Wicks.

I've known Maria for a few years now and have had the great pleasure of reading some of her short stories. Maria's work tends to be concerned with Irish immigrant family life - much of her work is based upon memoir but also in the grand tradition of Irish writers her work is often playful, truthful, heartbreaking fiction. This time, however, I'm looking at one of her poems, 'Story'.

Story by Maria McCarthy
I know this story.
It’s one of nuns and Christian brothers;
of drawing water from the well; of delivering
a sister when the midwife couldn’t come;
of finding a man in the barn, hanging;
of sailing to England with one suitcase,
bearing two of everything, of sending money home;
of working like a navvy; of cinemas
and dancehalls and clinging to your own;
of meeting my father at a dance
above the Gas Showrooms; of the wedding
in the blue suit, three months gone,
on a day you had the flu, of letting you go
home while he stayed and drank; of his mother
who said he didn’t have to marry you;
of sharing her house till she complained
about a mark made by the baby’s arm
on the bedroom wallpaper; of going homeless,
in a hostel, where the men could only visit;
of how he did nothing to find you somewhere to live;
of travelling to Ireland with my brother;
of the man who would have taken you on,
baby and all, married or not, and of the other man
in England, who you knew before my father,
who took you to a show, Chu Chin Chow on ice,
but was too nice, too old, too caring,
who came walking his dog past your house
every day until he died, the house that the council
gave you once you had five, where my father
led you a hell of a life with the drink and the babies
and the miscarriage when the hospital doctor
accused you of doing it yourself;
of hiding from the rent man; of holding
your head up in the street with us all turned
out nicely, so the neighbours wouldn’t know;
of how you did it for us, stayed with a man
who was home when the pubs were shut,
or when the horses had run the wrong way.
I know this story. It’s yours, not mine.
I’ve stopped listening.




This poem is just like the suitcases that the woman takes with her to England, yet instead of holding ‘two of everything’ it’s stuffed full of her life, her story. That’s what this poem is about – one woman’s story that is rolled out again and again in all its gritty misery only to fall upon the deaf ears of her own daughter who’s heard it all before. We’ve all heard the stories from our own parents or grandparents about how we don’t know we’re born, we didn’t have to walk twenty miles to school like they did in a blizzard without shoes or have a night out on five shillings and sixpence (a night out? That fortune would last us all year!). This poem is for all the daughters and granddaughters who have listened to their mothers and grandmothers trotting out their tales of woe.

It would have been a cheap and easy shot for Maria McCarthy to just poetically roll her eyes and ignore the stories of a hard life. Likewise there are plenty of nasty histories that just become Misery Memoir and set the reader up as the voyeur. She’s avoided this by giving us line after line of clipped story – just what you’d hear at a family party; have you heard about the time when.... We’re transported at first to a world that’s almost Biblical in its simplicity – water drawn from a well, populated by nuns, Christian brothers, missing midwives and hanged men. Already in the first five lines there’s enough plot for a novel.

As the poem unfolds we hear the common tale of a woman trapped in a marriage out of religious duty, living the hard life of an immigrant and it’s this that makes this poem more than just a story of one Irish woman’s life, it’s the story repeated all across the world whether the religion is Roman Catholicism or Islam; arrive with one suitcase, work hard, send money home and cling to your own.

As I was reading ‘Story’ I was reminded of the Galway poet, Rita Ann Higgins and her wonderful poem, ‘Some People’ which deals with similar territory of poverty, Catholicism, motherhood and hiding from a rent man.

The thing that made me come back to this poem again and again though was the bitter last line - 'I've stopped listening' it makes me want to go back to the beginning and pick through all the stories there - what was it that made the daughter turn away from the mother? Was it the promise of a better life with the man who would have taken her on baby and all? Or was it the constant repetition of all the stories, all the stories that are the mother's, not the daughter's - a distancing, a marking out of territory, of independence - you've told your story, you've lived your life, now let me live mine.

And I for one want to keep hearing the stories of these Irish women.

A week in North Wales

Just back from a lovely week in North Wales. We went to Llanberis - the Mecca of mountain biking, hiking and rock climbing. We spent a day at Coed Y Brenin mountain biking - I did the Cyflym Coch route and then spent a couple of hours with my feet up lazing in the grass reading Popco by Scarlett Thomas while P went off on another two trails. I got the best deal, undoubtedly.

We also spent a day hiking up Snowdon - we took the Pyg Trail up and the Miners Trail down - in hindsight this was a mistake and next time I'd go up Miners and down Pyg - Miners is a far gentler pathway up and Pyg is apparently the hardest. The strangest thing of all was that my hands began to swell up on the ascent and didn't finally return to normal until late in the day well after we'd got back to town. A quick Google search tells me just what I'd suspected - the warm weather combined with walking and swinging my arms while wearing a heavy back pack all combined to stop the blood flow from my hands travelling back to my heart. Added to which I was drinking plenty of water which would have diluted the electrolytes in my blood.
Science!

The best bit of the holiday was without doubt the climbing of Flying Buttress which is a Very Difficult (or VDiff) route on the Dinas Cromlech crag in the Llanberis Pass. It was my first outdoor climb of the year and P's first ever outdoor climb and his first multi-pitch too. The sun was shining, the air was warm and the climb was wonderfully easy, apart from the final pitch with the nasty polished chimney which resulted in me making rather a lot of odd noises and swearing quite a bit too. The worst bit of the entire day was the walk/scramble up to the crag and back again. I hate scrambling. I know you're supposed to stay upright and walk but I always seem to end up sliding down on my backside and moving very, very slowly. Just stick a rope on me and let me abseil down!

Anyway, back now and onto more mundane things - exams to mark and poetry to submit, read, write and review.

I promise to write a long review of a wonderful poem written by Maria McCarthy (Medway Maria) which is long overdue.

I also promise to write about the poetry collections I've been reading and buying lately.

Later.

Posting and waiting for feedback

I've just posted a sonnet I wrote a little while ago on a poetry workshop website. I'm waiting for feedback and almost biting my nails down to the knuckle...well, I would if I bit my nails, but you get the idea.
It's ridiculous because I've had poetry published, I've had articles published - I had a regular column in a magazine for goodness sake! Yet still I'm worried about how this piece will fare in amongst potentially hostile waters....and it's quite a challenging piece as it includes text speak and references to Facebook, the Poetry World, if there is such a place, may not like that.

That's tough.

I like the poem and I think it's got potential. When it gets published somewhere I'll post it here. Most recently I had a poem called India, March 1992 published on Angelic Dynamo. The only problem is that there are a couple of rogue commas in there and every time I see it they make me cringe!

I guess that's always a problem for writers - tinkering.

On having a crisis of faith

I’m currently having a creative crisis of faith – not any religious faith you understand, although I suppose that would be rather useful for me right now – faith in my writing and its (my?) abilities. It’s the nature of writing to be rejected at every turn until at last it finds some receptacle – be that a journal, magazine, publisher, or wastepaper bin. I know that writers have to be thick skinned, believe in their work, keep refining their writing, keep reading, keep networking and all those other worthy pursuits. I realise that the readership for new poetry is tiny and by my reading more and publicising more other new writers I’ll increase my own slice of the literary pie – or at the very least there’ll be a few more crumbs to go around.

It’s hard work keeping the faith and getting out there, it just is. I feel like a petulant child – I want to be taken notice of but equally if someone did make a big deal about my work I’d be suspicious mainly because I’m not sure I’ve paid my dues or have enough knowledge yet. I think that’s the biggest obstacle for any new writer – looking at what’s gone before and realising that you probably can’t match up to most of it and you probably never will. It’s the Socratic idea of knowing that you know nothing – how bloody depressing.

Indepence and getting out there

I bought some books online last night - buying books is a huge weakness of mine. Where most people have a vice like eating too much chocolate (I have that too), or smoking, or drinking, I can't walk past a bookshop without just popping in and leaving with two or three potential hours of escape.

These books were slightly different though, they weren't my usual fare of novels but rather these were poetry books. Not well known anthologies containing Elliot, Keats, Byron and Hughes but contemporary poetry written by poets who have to fund their writing through working in bars, bookshops, the Post Office, teaching. In fact all the 'normal' jobs that the rest of the population does. Yet these few souls also have the drive, the necessity of spirit to make time to write. The same could be said of many artists - they pull pints or teach sullen teenagers just so they have the money to create their real work.

And I'm looking at a card I bought in a bookshop a couple of months ago, it has a quote from Goethe printed upon it,

"Whatever you can do,
Or dream you can,
BEGIN IT!
Boldness has genius,
Power and magic in it."

So if you're one of those people who has always dreamt of writing a novel or climbing Everest, begin it now. Make plans now.

And if you want poetry published then start to read what's already out there, what's being written now, today by your postman or your neighbour. A good place to start is at either of these websites -

Blackheath Books - they're also on MySpace
and
Fortune Teller Press



That all feels like an advert or a motivational speech! But I suppose I'm feeling very fired up by all of this at the moment - I think it's because it's the beginning of the year - new year's resolutions and all that, and because the sun is shining and I always feel like achieving something when the weather is good.

Okay, sermon over.

ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death....

These are the opening lines to Keats' poem, 'The Eve of St.Agnes', published in 1820. It's one of my favourite Romantic poems but it's particularly fitting at the moment because the Eve of St.Agnes is on the 20th of January, so only a couple of weeks away. These lines completely sum up how cold and bleak it is right now with snow on the ground and that grinding bitter chill that the wind has in January. Snow always brings a silence and draws in the world as sound no longer carries over the soft white blanket.

I was looking for a photograph which exists in my head - a snow covered field with a broken down fence picked out in black charcoal lines against the white canvas of the sky and to the left in the distance stands a solitary hare, the only sign of life in a wintry scene.

Very poetic.

However, no one appears to have taken this photograph or painted this image yet, so after a brief search on DeviantArt I found this rather beautiful one by Polaroid Dragon, it's called Dying Daylight.

And now after thinking about the cold I'm off out to a yoga class.

The Prose Poem

As promised, here's the link to the prose poem that I had accepted by Shadow Train.

The Seahorse

It's a prose poem which many of you may be unfamiliar with. Poets.org explain a little about prose poetry but I guess the simplest way is for you to read some prose poems.
Largely speaking they are published in a rectangular form - yes, I know, explaining how they look on the page seems a little strange, but it does mark them out as different from normal poetry. There are no hanging line breaks as you see in traditional poetry but in common with other forms of poetry they use rhythm, imagery, metaphor and symbolism.

I suppose I'd say that for any poem to have real resonance and therefore be any good in my opinion, it should stay with you - something about it should continue to haunt you for a while. Recently I bought a copy of Poems for the Retired Nihilist, Volume Two and one poem in particular has continued to sit in the corner of my mind rather like a fat angry moggy waiting for its lunch and watching my every move just in case I should drop a morsel of food which it can pounce on. The poem is Turquoise and it was written by Mark Hartenbach, I can't find it online but he has a blog full of his work - please go and look at it because it's not about flowers or fluffy animals but because it's about living now and that's the most that any poem can do - tell us what it's like to live now, here and this way.

And being accepted

Yesterday I wrote about having work rejected and how hard I often find it to actually do the work to start with.

Last night I received some bad news - the magazine that I normally write for has decided to have a shake up in its normal columnists and as I've been with them with the same format for three years it's time for me to go. Bad news for me but not really unexpected news - many magazines would have had me out after six months or a year at the most. So I've been very lucky and had a great opportunity to get my words out there to a fairly wide audience in the UK - you can even buy the magazine in WHSmiths and Tesco - it is a reasonably well known one. However as we all know, nothing lasts forever, not even the good things.

So that left me feeling even more rejected!

This morning I felt like crap but I knew I had to get back up on that literary horse and write the pages.

I'd also received an email late yesterday (the same time I got the email telling me my column was cancelled) rejecting some poetry of mine but telling me that perhaps another journal would be more suitable and giving me the name of the editor....

Climbing up into the saddle I emailed off the same four poems to the suggested publication.

An hour or so later I received a reply.

I can't say I wanted to open the reply - I didn't need to see yet another kind 'thanks but no thanks' message.

But I guess you already know what was there....

They want to use one of my poems in their next issue.

Now while it may not provide me with any money unlike the magazine job, it has got a certain cachet - the other contributors all appear to have been in print in very worthy publications and many have collections in print too.

And how do I fit into all this?

Well like just about any other writer I'm beginning to wonder when they'll discover that I'm a fraud and not really very good at this lark.

It has managed to kick start me into writing more poetry though and I can assure any concerned readers of this blog that I don't write terrible doggerel about animals.

But what do I write?

Once this poem is online with the magazine I'll post the link.

Meanwhile it's back to writing for me, now with the renewed expectation of possible acceptance!

On Writing

How is it that I can see in other's writing where they have gone wrong? Yet in my own I am entirely blind? This isn't particularly the case for writing prose - that's a little simpler for me to see, but poetry…poetry is almost impossible. I can happily teach my students to magnify one moment, one important fact, keep it tight, tell the audience in detail about that one precious thing. Don't distill your ideas by having too many of them in one poem. All these little nuggets of advice, yet can I apply them for myself? No. I suspect I'm still too close to the poems I have written - I need to let them wallow for a little longer - to ripen off. But I want to start to submit poetry to various places, I need to get stuff out there…but I feel as if I have nothing right now, nothing at all.

The simple answer to that is to write more. Write anything. Just write. And perhaps it would be a good idea to go back through the things I have sitting in my virtual drawers - folders and documents within my laptop where old stories sit mouldering away. Revise, redraft, rewrite. Resubmit.

Work.

I could quite happily spend many, many hours reading advice on how to write, how to redraft, where to submit things. But how will this get me to write any more? Truly I am the queen of procrastination.

I think maybe I have to set myself a target of writing at least 1000 words a day. Every day. 1000 words of anything. Anything at all. Just write.

I'll see how that goes…expect regular updates as I shall count writing in my blog as part of that 1000 words.

High Culture!

I'm currently working on a new short story and thinking about how it could relate to or indeed actually become an exhibition piece - Art. I don't mean that my writing is so sublime that it has become elevated to Art (ha! ) but rather that the ideas I have would work well if placed in a gallery space.

Now I could go on about intertextuality , juxtapositions, and other such poncy terms….which I have to admit to loving just because they sound so elitist. However, it would be truer to say that I'm really drawn to the idea of telling a story to people with pictures - both created in their heads and also accompanying - possibly photographs, but not illustrations.

I'm rambling now about Work…

I do find myself so often in two camps - that of Artist and Academic - with all the juxtapositions and other such high falutin language. And also that of the ordinary 'punter' - despite having studied Fine Art for a number of years I can honestly say that sometimes I'll go into a museum or gallery and be totally at a loss, not able to understand or even grasp what it was the artist intended to communicate. Sometimes it does appear that contemporary art is the Emperor's New Clothes.

But….

I guess we could say that about poetry too - sometimes poems can be impenetrable until we return to them again and again and their meaning trickles through. In the same way some art work can be like that - one glance doesn't give the viewer the whole story.

On the subject of poetry…at the moment my favourite is a Ted Hughes poem - The Full Moon and Little Frieda - simply because it makes me think of cryptic crossword puzzles. I'm utterly useless at cryptic clues, but this poem seems to work in the same way - the hints are all there…it's devilishly clever.

Ted Hughes

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket --

And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming -- mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath --
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

-- Ted Hughes

Pasted from <http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/723.html>

Can also be found in Staying Alive p.231

As I spend much of my time writing...I also spend a fair amount of time reading...Always have done...Today I came across a bit of poetry that I had saved...I'm not generally a poetry lover...Byron and most of the War poets I love...but generally...it's just too dense and flowery for me...

But not this...this just sums up perfectly how you feel when you get a little obsessive about someone...I love that feeling...anyway, here's the poem, it's by Margaret Atwood - she wrote The Handmaid's Tale (which was also made into a film)

Variations on the word Sleep

By Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.