Category Archives: haibun

A Lost Week!

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Golden key (actually silver-gilt, used by Sir Arthur Blake KBE at the opening of the Nottingham savings Bank branch on St Ann’s Well Road, Nottingham, November 23, 1926

I just looked at the date on my last post and received a shock. I knew it had been a while, but was amazed to find it was a whole seven days. So, what have I been doing?

Not much.

From the point of view of colour rendition this shows I stll have a lot to learn. Taken only seconds apart under the same light

I have become addicted to writing articles about junk. I have now done four for the research page of the Peterborough Military History Group, a couple more for the newsletter and nineteen posts for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire Facebook page. I’m never sure if these really count as “acceptances” as they are short and they are submitted to people I know.  On the other hand, poems are short too. I became obsessed with “The Golden Key” as I started writing it. I’ve had it about 30 years and never really got on with it, so it was about time. I can’t set a link directly to it but it’s currently at the top if yo use the link above.

Even better if you can leave a “Like”. It’s part of my crusade to strike back against traditional coins. There’s a place for kings and stuff in numismatics, but for every King there are thousands of commoners and they all have stories too.

Sir Arthur Blake KBE JP – a photograph taken later in life – courtesy of the national portrait gallery.

Talking about acceptances – I had a rejection this morning. It means that my record for April is 100% rejections. Not one single acceptance. It’s a strange month, as there was only one journal open for submissions, and that was only open until 15th April, which is why I can tell you, by the 24th, that I have a 100% rejection record. I’m sure I’ll get over it.

That’s it for now. I will have some cracking photos for you over the next few days as we have been going through some old boxes. However, for now,

 

An Old Poem is Found, Repeated and Recalculated

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Stone on the Floor – warning of poetry ahead

I’ve just spent much of the last two days sorting out files on my computer. Things had become so chaotic that when I wanted to start making submissions at the end of last month, I couldn’t actually find a lot of things I needed. Clearly something needed doing, and I have therefore done something.  It’s not quite fixed the problem but it has made it more manageable. Everything is now contained in a dozen files, and each file has a title that reflects the contents and isn’t confusingly close to the title of any other file. Of course, below that level, chaos still reigns, but it is slightly more orderly than it was, and I’m in with a fighting chance of getting on top of it.

The thing that really strikes home about the poem, apart from the obvious fact that it could be improved, is the fact that only seven years ago you could develop a thought and report a mental journey. You didn’t need all the drama and excitement a lot of editors seem to be seeking these days.

Thirdly, it strikes me that this was published 225 weeks ago. I no longer have the 999 weeks of which I wrote (given average longevity and a following wind). I now have 775 weeks, and that doesn’t sound anything like as good.

Snowy Detail

Seven Thousand Mornings

I knew today wasn’t a morning I was going to enjoy because the tip of my nose was cold and there was a sliver of grey showing round the edge of the curtains. Summer had ended.

This thought made me pause, and in that pause I let my mind run free. I had been watching a TV programme on life expectancies the night before and it suddenly struck me that if I took my current age from my life expectancy and multiplied it by 365 I would know roughly how long I was going to live.

It wasn’t until I finished that I realised I didn’t really want to know.

It’s about 7,000 days.

That’s approximate. I forgot the exact life expectancy, and I multiplied by 360 because it’s easier. I also like all the wrong sorts of food and avoid exercise, which is the wrong way ’round for longevity.

This makes the calculation even less exact.

If it is 7,000 days that’s only a thousand weeks.

Next week it will only be 999 weeks.

I might have to think about getting up earlier and working harder in the time I have left.

Or, I might just give up mental arithmetic.

in the rustling leaves
squirrels seek acorns
two paths diverge

First published Haibun Today 12.4 (December 2018)

Squirrel at Rufford

 

Cutting It Fine

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It is done. After another mad struggle I finally submitted my last of my ten submissions for the month. A while ago I was happy with my position, then it all slipped away. I lost my focus and my ability to write and it took the prospect of failure to kick-start my brains again.

This morning, having submitted only three lots, I ws seriously thinking about giving up. Then something took over. I got everything done, apart from two submissions to a magazine that hasn’t accepted anything from me since a change of editor  Then I had tea and watched the quizzes on TV. That left me with a couple of hours. So I watched The Yorkshire Auction House for a while.

Then I sang a song to myself and started again.

Every bursted bubble has a glory!
Each abysmal failure makes a point!
Every glowing path that goes astray,
Shows you how to find a better way.
So every time you stumble never grumble.
Next time you’ll bumble even less!
For up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses!
Grow the roses of success!

Yes, it’s the song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It seemed to work, because I managed to write 10 passable haiku, edit a couple of haibun and get it all sent off with four minutes to spare.

Next month I have only one submission in the plan, but will look for some more places to send stuff to. I my also have to start counting those other submissions I make. I know I’m not really competing for publication, and it would have to be pretty bad to get rejected, but it all takes time.

Photos from Julia.

 

 

End of the Month Again

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Julia’s manipulated image

The end of the month is looming. I have quite a lot left to write. I’ve been doing things for the Numismatic Society Facebook page, the military history newsletter and website, and similar things. in the last two months I have done 12 articles. They probably only come up to 6,000 words or so, but they all need research and photos and, in some cases I have to source illustrations from the net.

I’m now in a spot where I have to produce a number of poetry submissions and am finding that after two days grinding away on the laptop I am struggling. Time, I think, for a change of pace. Unfortunately, with five days until the end of the month, there isn’t a lot of room for wriggling.

This all seems very familiar, and I’m sure I said much the same last month. Yes, I checked, and I did.

As a daisy conservation measure we haven’t started cutting the grass yet

Sorry about that. I really must get a grip. I probably said that as well, didn’t I? Now that I’m retired and have lots of time, I really should be doing better with my productivity but it doesn’t seem to be working like that. I am going to have to start working more intelligently, rather than just spending all my time throwing words at a computer screen. I’m also going to have to prioritise writing for magazines that pay for contributions. That way I can pay for my subs to WP, Ancestry and the newspaper archive. It’s alright doing things for free, but let’s spend a minute looking at things.

Spring has finally arrived

I’m doing one article a week for the Numismatic Society on FB. It can seem to take forever while I’m doing it, and a number of the things have taken ages, as I’ve gradually uncovered detail then had to condense it to size. The idea was that I’d do a few hundred words (about the size of my average blog post) with a couple of photographs. What I didn’t allow for was the time it takes to research, check the facts and maybe source an illustration. Eventually, I thought, I would be able to drop it back to one a fortnight, as other people followed my example (or were worn down by my nagging) and started to contribute. But no, there are still just the two of us.

Julia, meanwhile, has been applying a cleevr digital whatnot to one of her photographs so it looks like something Turner might have done. She has also taken pictures of flowwers, so I used them to cheer my miserable, meandering, moaning blog post up a bit.

Trees and flowers

 

Shakespeare’s Monkey

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Little Egret

An answer I made to Tootlepedal in the comments about writing a lot and letting blind chance sift through it for the good bits reminded me of this poem.

As I was about to press the Publish button, it struck me that I may have posted it before as it seemed familiar. The trouble is that a lot of them seem familiar because they spent so much time inside my head.

Anyway, it seems I did post it before. Sorry if it seems repetitious. I note from reading the version in the other post that it has a different haiku in each place. The one in the other post was the one it was originally written with, the one here is how I sent it. Sometimes I make last minute alterations, and sometimes I don’t make sure all the versions are consistent.

I now think that the unused haiku is better than the one I eventually submitted. At the time, I obviously thought that the other version was an improvement. It was published, so it must have done the job.

Shakespeare’s Monkey
Another rejection. My words have, again, forked no lightning. This is driven home by the fact that I borrow the words of Dylan Thomas to describe my situation. However, I am convinced that if I write enough, I will eventually produce a sonnet of enduring excellence or a haibun that brings tears to the eyes of an editor. Tears of joy, that is. They like you to be clear about such things.

new poems—
the favourites I have not
yet read

First published Blithe Spirit November 2022

Little Egret at Aldeburgh

The pictures are Egrets because they are quite poetic birds, and I have no pictures of monkeys.

It is Done

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The Magpie, Little Stonham, Suffolk

I stuck to the rules and I have three new poems to show for it. I felt like I’d had enough after two, but three is the target. Either three revised or three composed. Being inflexible, and having started to write, I carried on writing, even if the rules would have allowed me to write two and revise one.

Silly as it may sound (I am, after all, talking about writing poetry, not cleaning out a hen house) I am now in need of a rest. This blog post is a rest. Just a change of pace.

Yesterday I deviated from the rules, and things went wrong. The gardeners arrived and did their job. I went out to avoid the first three hours then returned, made cups of tea for us all and got to work. I couldn’t think of poetry so I got stuck into an article I am writing – fact checking and constructing a biography from snippets. It’s coming together slowly. Very slowly.  However, it did fill the day so although I veered off track, I did at least spend several hours in useful pursuits.

Norfolk Flint Wall

Flexibility, as TP just remarked, is key. The rules and targets are to make me work with more focus. If I can fill a few hours with effort instead of frittering my time away all day, it is time well spent and proof that a few rules and targets can help.

I have set targets before, for junior sports clubs and for writing and in all cases I have achieved much more when I plan and write it down. The trick is to make sure you sit down and write something out. I’ve let things drift for the last three years and although some good things have happened, I have to say that more would have happened if I had planned.

I use the SMART model – that’s Specific, Measurable,, Something, Something and Time-bound or Timely (they struggle a bit with that last one). I always have to look it up because I can’t remember the middle bit.  It’s Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Doesn’t really nee a title does it?

I will end up with a table that has magazine names with times and targets in boxes. It fits quite well. The names are Specific, the targets are Measurable because they are numbers of poems, the targets are Achievable, but I don’t actually need a column for that, Relevant is the type of poetry (they don’t all take the same sort of thing) and Time-bound is a good column for the submission windows, though I generally rely on my submissions calendar for that. There’s a lot more admin in writing poetry than the lives of Lord Byron or Dylan Thomas would suggest.

Pictures are from September 2018, a trip round East Anglia.

The contents of the bag

New Rules

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I have given considerable thought to my lack of poetic output recently.

Yes, some of it is due to illness, recovery and natural cycles of productivity. Some of it, illogical as it seems, is because of the worry, which makes me less relaxed and creative. That’s the downward spiral that posh people  call writers’ block. However, after much thought I have to admit that I’m doing more writing about collectables, and I enjoy that more than poetry. It’s easier and does not involve so much dredging through painful memories.  The best of my poetry is a greater pleasure than my best writing on coins or medallions, but on average the article on collectables are easier and involve fewer bad memories.

Recently I have written ten pieces for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire Facebook page. I have also researched and written a slideshow, which took ages. It can take a day just to put the story of one man together. Despite having done a lot of the work previously, the first draft always reveals extra work that needs doing Sometimes, when it’s a new story, it can take the best part of a day.  There were 20 stories in the presentation, plus the general pages on the history and the nut and bolts of collecting. I’m also putting afew articles for magazines together, as some of them actually pay and I’d like to think I can make some of my subscriptions (WP and Ancestry specifically) pay for themselves.

Being naturally idle and disorganised, it is easy to start something new, but not so easy to find enough time. So I have several new rules, which should sort a few things out.

Number One, I am going to do nothing until I have worked on at least three poems. Today I actually did the washing up first, but I couldn’t concentrate with a stack of dirty plates needing to be done. Then I worked on three poems – tightening them up and getting them ready for submissions later this month. After that it was emails, WP comments and, finally, this post.

Next it will be lunch.

After that it will be an article I am working on, followed by planning. My best years as an administrator in junior rugby were always the ones where i planned properly. After a couple of years writing haibun I spent a couple of evenings planning things out properly, which was when I started to be published a lot more. It wasn’t talent. It wasn’t even hard work. It was searching out places I could submit to, and setting targets for how many submissions I was going to make. I need to get back to that. It’s too easy to tell yourself you are ill and you can’t be blamed for your slump, but it’s surprising how much more productive you are when you have a target.

So that’s the two new rules – 3 Poems before other work, and a plan with targets. Simple enough, the complication lies in making myself do it.

I thought the Alf Tupper pictures were well suited to today’s subject.

My Theory of Timing Submissions

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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.

The Great Poetry Recycling Plan

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Apple Pressing Equipment – scratter mounted on top of the press

I’ve already discovered a snag. Some of the poems have been out three or four times, which isn’t  great problem, but the magazines I intended to send them to to have, in many cases, already seen them. I need a bigger list and some new poems.

So far this year I have had my work cut out just coping with haibun and tanka prose submissions. Talking of which, I also need to get them sorted for the end of the month, which is approaching fast.

The second snag is that on re-reading after six months, some of the poems are not very good. And that’s being kind. Depressing, self-indulgent and cliched might be  better way of putting it. However, some aren’t bad and some can be dismantled and used in other poems. It’s just a case of finding the time.  A lot of my time sinks without trace as I sit down with Julia on her return from work and spend the next three hours chatting, watching TV and cooking. There are worse ways to spend time. Unfortunately, by the time I see her I have already had a busy day of procrastination, displacement activity and false starts.

 

Apple Juice

There is also the question of research and manners. You should, I feel, always buy a magazine for research and to help their finances along. Editors often say that if everyone who submitted poetry also bought an issue, financing wouldn’t be an issue. It’s a strange model to work to – toiling away to produce poetry then buying a copy of the magazine you have helped to fill. On the other hand, vanity has a price, and as I am vain enough to crave publication I must pay the price. It’s not a snag, but all these magazines need paying for. Then I have to explain to Julia why I need an even higher stack of magazines . . .

To be honest, I wish they’d go online so I could avoid building up such a stack of glossy paper. It seems a waste. I’m going to see if our local dojo wants to broaden its view on Japanese aesthetics, but I suspect they will end up in an unappreciative charity shop, and from there to a skip.

So, it started with one plan to recycle, moved on to self-awareness and ended up back on a different sort of recycling. If I’m not careful people will start to think I’m planning these posts instead of what actually happens – type word 1, type word 2, repeat 250+ times and chuck some photos in.

The photos are from September 2015 when my life was much more interesting.

Plum jam

An Answer to a Haibun Question

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For Paol Soren, who asked, and for anyone else who wants to know.

This is an explanation of Haibun.

This is someone else’s explanation of a Haibun.

And this is an example.

Pigs and cornflowers

The Thoughtful Pig

When I tell the pig that my latest scan is clear, it grunts and stretches out a bit more neck
for me to scratch.

My wife, when I gave her the same news, said: “What does that mean?”

How do I know? I’m not medically qualified. I assume it means they can’t find anything of
concern, and apart from regular monitoring, don’t intend doing anything else. When I point
this out, she tells me that being sarcastic, alongside being passive-aggressive, is one of my
major faults. When I point out that this is two faults, she adds pedantry to the list.

It isn’t difficult to kill someone, particularly when you have access to the internet, though
the advice you get is often qualified with reference to the trickiness of modern forensics,
and they all agree that a major difficulty is disposing of the body. Fortunately, I have pigs
and they will eat almost anything.

“One day,” I say, scratching dried flakes of mud from behind the listening ear, “one day . . .”

cornflower
blowing in the breeze
clouds gather overhead

That one was published in drifting sands last month.

This one is a tanka prose. It doesn’t have a Japanese name. It’s a tanka (five line poem) added to a prose section instead of a haiku. This one was published in Contemporary Haibun Online earlier in the year.

Angel with Spear, 1860s. By N H J Westlake or J M Allen. St Michael’s and All Angels, Derby

The Next Funeral

Amazon reviews indicate I am not the only person to have searched for a black tie with next day delivery. I could have sworn it was in the car’s glove compartment, neatly folded from the last time I wore it. My one white shirt hangs, ghostlike, from the bedroom picture rail and my timeless drab tweed jacket hangs next to it. The tie, I suddenly remember, is in my jacket pocket.

Tomorrow, as I nod to cousins, we will remark that we really must try to meet without someone dying. My uncle, who has just turned ninety, tells his brother in law to wrap up warm or he’ll be next. One day, I suppose, I will realise there is no obvious candidate to be next . . .

in church the sun
shines through an angel’s robe
bubbles trapped in blue glass
I wonder whose breath is
captured forever

St Joseph and the Angel c 1920 by Wilhelmina Geddes.