Monthly Archives: October 2023

Early Morning Blood Test

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After writing the post on rejection last night I wrote another post ready for today and then wrote two haibun. I still have the completed post ready to go, but am going to write this first as  I’m up early and I’m alert.

This was due to having a 7.00 blood test appointment. To get ready for that I drank two lots of water and did a couple of dozen squats to get the blood moving. The form was not good, and I had to hang on to the furniture to do them but when the needle went in I bled for Britain. There was so much blood it was actually filling the tube and there was extra running down my arm. I was so alert by that time that I booked myself in for a shingles vaccination in a couple of weeks. I could have had it next week but two weeks allows me to get a Wednesday appointment and  will probably synchronise with my next blood test.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to write about blood tests or vaccinations, I was intending to write about rejections. I have, as you know, been rejected twice by haiku magazines. One short-listed three, so I used the remaining seven as the basis for my next submission. With the second return I and another rejection of five others, I have about 20 haiku hanging about.

Now, there are two ways to write haibun. One, which I normally do, is to write the prose then write one or two haiku to fit. It can be tricky but I find it natural and never even realised there was another way until I read an article  The other way, recommended by some very good writers, is to write the haiku first then write the prose to suit. Last night, using three of the returned haiku, I wrote two haibun. It didn’t feel quite right but I’m sure I could get used to it. The big advantage is that by the time you get to the end of the prose you know you already have the haiku ready and the poem is finished. Doing it my normal way it can take me a month to write the haiku and complete the piece. And the best bit – I have a use for many of my returned haiku!

When you have lemons, as they say, make lemonade.

My Orange Parker Pen

More Rejection

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I had another rejection this morning. That’s two this month, though as it was a month of pushing the boundaries it’s not a surprise. I had four earlier in the year (three of which were actually competition entries). Over the years I have not had much luck with competitions – I’ve been commended twice, which is better than  nothing, but not great when you consider the cost of entry fees. As I said before, I have learned to cope with rejection over the years. I’m still no farter on with my thinking about the direction to take and the effort to put in.

I know I should be concentrating on writing haiku until I get better at them but I have two problems here. One is that I don’t actually know what “better” is. A lot of haiku I read don’t seem any better than mine, and in many cases feature things which, according to the various “guidelines” shouldn’t be in haiku (remember they very small poems with very large mounts of rules.) An editor i was in correspondence with recently told me that when they started writing haiku they decided which rules they were going to adopt and just kept plugging away. I might do that. Or I might just relegate haiku to something I do to fill in time on a slow month.

The other problem is that I like being published (though it’s not the driving force it used to be) and I’m lazy. I may as well write what I enjoy and what I’m good at. If I were being paid for poetry that’s definitely what I would do.

However, I don’t need to make a decision yet.

This morning I printed out four poems which I am sending to a magazine that sticks to the old-fashioned ways, including submissions by post. After printing and before sending off, I looked at them and realised the top one was a long way from “finished”. The second one was so bad it immediately provoked me into making notes on it. I didn’t follow up, as I had to get to work, but it was an interesting lesson. I suspect that reading words printed on paper, instead of on a screen,  triggers a new set of critical thoughts. Tomorrow I will set to revising. I may have to start printing everything out in future.

Now it’s time to get some work done and go to bed. I have a blood test at 7am so I need to get some sleep.

My Orange Parker Pen

My Shrinking Life

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Time for some speed writing. It’s quiz night on TV and there are only 14 minutes until Mastermind begins. I’m going to have to be quick to do 250 words in 14 minutes, quicker still if I want to get the links done.

Has your world got smaller since Covid? Mine has. We hardly go anywhere. I feel older, more vulnerable and less inclined to mingle. So we don’t go out. Our shopping is ordered on the inherent. We even get takeaways delivered. As a result I have very little to write poetry about. I know staying in didn’t do Emily Dickinson any harm, but I don’t want to be Emily Dickinson.

It’s not just psychological, there are good health reasons for staying in. I take ten pills a week and give myself an injection once a fortnight to supress my immune system. It pays to stay in, particularly when there’s Covid about. Of course, when your wife picks it up at work and brings it home, all plans grind to a halt.

However, when you look at the blog, it has also shrunk in scope. I used to talk about all sorts of thing, but now there’s some moaning, some poetry and, once in a while, some soup. It’s definitely much reduced from the days of compost, bread and guinea fowl.

I watched a magpie yesterday. It was trying to find water in the gutters. I couldn’t be bothered to photograph it or blog about it. It really was quite acrobatic and deserved better coverage. This is what has happened to me.

Ah well – 260 words and two minutes to spare.

Magpie

Study Number 1 - The Idiot

2nd Post Sunday

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The last post was one that came to mind this afternoon while I was making soup. It was fitted in between jobs and I have posted it in a break in my vegetable roasting schedule. I’m going to see how far I get with this one. I have ten minutes to go before I take the pan out of the oven, check it and then make the gravy. “Make the gravy” in this instance, means pour boiling water onto granules. I rarely make proper gravy these days.

Covid continues to grip, even though I am no longer ill or infectious. I am still very tired, and I am still coughing. The coughing can be painful and dry or, as they say in cough mixture adverts “productive”. I don’t mind that, as at least it’s doing something. The dry hacking is merely painful, and has been going on so long that it hurts the bones in my face and skull. I hope it’s that, anyway. If it isn’t it’s a whole new development in my arthritis and I don’t think I’d like that.

At least the runny nose seems to have stopped. I’ve never known anything like it. A couple of days ago I had to type with a towel worn as a scarf/bib, to collect the nasal discharge. I won’t discuss it further, but it’s the worst I’ve ever had and it took place several days after I became negative for Covid. I remember that the cough persisted last time, but this time I’ve had more symptoms hanging on. That’s the trouble with Covid – it doesn’t know when to quit. At least I don’t seem to have any lingering mental dullness this time.

That reminds me –

  1. Book Covid vaccination
  2.  Book flu vaccination
  3. Check on shingles vaccination

No wonder old people retire – it must be impossible to hold down a job with all the blood tests, vaccinations and other stuff.

Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

Thoughts on Haiku, Haibun, Tanka and Poems

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The haiku that had been short-listed have now all been turned down. It wasn’t really a surprise as my haiku don’t generally find favour with editors, and certainly not the magazine that had shortlisted these. Simply being short-listed was ana advance on previous attempts.

In a way I feel guilty that I don’t feel worse about it. I haven’t been turned down since April and it should be a shock and a disappointment. Fortunately I have become hardened to such things. This is, I suspect, both good and bad.

It’s good because I no longer feel demotivated by rejection. In this case it’s been modified by being short-listed and by having some helpful comments from one of the editors.

On the other hand, if I am to make progress I really should care about rejection and use it to spur me on to something better.

This part of another train of thought too. I spend time on haiku because I want to write better haiku as it will mean I am writing better haibun. On the other hand, in the time I take to write 10 haiku, knowing that I will generally have them rejected, I can write ten tanka or a haibun/tanka prose. The chances are that I will get at least two out of ten tanka published and one or two out of every batch of three haibun I write will be published too.

Should I concentrate on what is successful? Or should I concentrate on what I find difficult?

Then we have the free verse. It takes me longer to write and it’s quite competitive. I’ve just been told I’ve been longlisted by a magazine that had 2,079 submissions and will be publishing around 24-25 poems. That sort of thing is about average. Several magazines tell you they only publish between 1 and 10% of the submissions they receive. So far I’m not downhearted. I’ve done it before and there’s a chance I can do it again.

Positive thinking.

I started with a descending scale of fruit. Figs are a poetic fruit. Blackberries are a useful shorthand for autumn. And plums are dangerously close to innuendo.