REsettling the plough

As it turned out, yesterday’s grand plan ground to a halt. With just sixteen days until the end of the month I need to start looking at haibun and tanka prose. I have, as usual, plenty of prose sections, but finding the right words for the haiku and tanka can be tricky. I have just about got enough for four submissions but |I need to get on with it as the final few short lines can end up taking a long time.

Just as I thought it was all coming back the hard facts indicate that I don’t have enough poems, and the ones I have, aren’t far enough advanced. There was a time when I used to have all my submissions queued up at the end of a month, waiting like caged greyhounds to hit the ground running as the new month  My theory was that if I was borderline but got in first, the later poems would have to be better than me to displace me and just being equally good would not be enough. Better, I thought, to be the first poem about getting old than the second, third or fourth. Poets are notorious for churning over the same few subjects, so if you can’t be original, or best, try being first.

Detail of the mouse

Now, as my energy declines, I find it hard enough just to scrape a few poems together by the end of the month. There is an advantage to this – the decisions seem to be faster and you have the rejects back in time to use them again in a timely manner. Using this system I have sometimes had a decision within hours, and the poems have been out again in a similar time span. I once had a poem that was rejected, submitted elsewhere and accepted within a space of days.

However, as things stand, I need twelve poems of usable quality. Time moves on, and those twelve are now my priority. The great recycling project will have to wait. editors often remark on the number of submissions they receive, but it’s also true that there are more editors out there than I can submit to. I just can’t write fast enough. October is a month with no haibun submissions planned, so the recycling can start then, as can the production of the next batch of haibun.

Two sizes of wheatsheaf loaf

Pictures are from September 2016 this time.