Category Archives: poetry

A Nomination is Announced

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Leaves and frost – Wilford, Nottingham

I’ve just had a newsletter through from the Tanka Society of America, and in it they have a list of the people they have put through as nominees for the Pushcart Prize. Those of you who think I am called Quercus (which was a name I go by the accident of working for Quercus Community when I started the blog) will wonder why I’m bothering to tell you this. Those of you who know my real name will note that it appears on the list, and all will become clear.

Although I am quite pleased with it, it’s important to remember that it’s only a nomination. I have won nothing.  On the other hand, an editor (or in this case two editors) have picked me out as being the writer of one of the six best things they have published this year. Pleasing as that is, there’s a big difference between a nomination and winning a prize. However, like the Oscars, people do note in their biographical notes that they are nominees. This is handy, as I’ve never yet won anything for writing. In fact I’ve never been a runner-up either – just “highly commended”. Twice in twenty years. You will not find me mentioned anywhere as an overnight success.

Heron at Clumber Park

I did get into the Red Moon Anthology a couple of times, I also slipped out again, as you are only as good as your last poem.  The first year I was in, I worried about never making it again. The next time, I worried less, but it wasn’t a great year and I didn’t write anything good enough to be chosen. That was depressing, but also made me concentrate a bit more, so I have bounced back. Of course, the trick is making sure I keep the quality coming.

Pushcart Prize Nominations for 2025

November 25, 2025

The Tanka Society of America is pleased to announce the following nominations for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses LI anthology, as selected by Ribbons editors Liz Lanigan and Susan Weaver.

For those of you who are interested, this poem was turned down three times before it was accepted and became my most “successful” poem to date.  I actually think I may have written better poems last year, but that is how it goes. I certainly wrote worse ones!

Robin at Clumber, Nottinghamshire

 

The Dog-Eared Page 

Stumbling, after treading on my trouser cuffs, I fall against the wall. I have grown portly, and my waist has dropped, making my trouser legs too long. It is a hazard of old age I had not anticipated and I, like Prufrock, must wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Balding, sniggered at, ignored by singing sirens, I stagger on a one-way trip through the strange country that is old age. I never thought, when I first read Eliot as a teen, that I was looking at a route map of my life.

the road ahead
is shorter than the one
behind
crowded with regrets
and tests I did not pass

 

Two Acceptances and Plans for Writing and a Conservatory Roof

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Tree cutting on the island.

It happened again. It’s now January 3 and I have only published one post. I am now sitting up in the middle of the night trying not to fall too far behind.

I slept in late as a result of my nocturnal writing last night, allied to a late night for New Year. Then I watched antiques on TV, fell asleep in my chair, woke just before Julia returned from the cafe, did enough typing to make it look like I had been working and stopped for tea and cake, a visit from my sister with tarpaulins for tomorrow and watched quizzes. All in all, I did not distinguish myself with industry. Tomorrow? You are probably asking. Tomorrow we are emptying the conservatory and as long as the snow holds off we should have a new conservatory roof by the end of next week.

Black Headed Gull

Finally, 12 months after taking possession, we should be water-tight and fully repaired. We would be 100% functional if it wasn’t for the fault on the light switches in the hallway that started over Christmas and the back gate which is starting to fall apart. Annoyingly, in the old days, although I never meddled with electrics, I could have built a new gate in a day. Now I will have to pay someone to do it. Is there no end to household repairs?

Meanwhile, back with the writing, I have heard back from one of the editors I submitted to on 30th December. That’s fine service, and two more acceptances to add to my 2025 tally. That takes me to 53 for the year. It’s also means I have a number of rejects to form the basis for my submissions this month. I may well junk my haiku, as I very rarely manage to sneak one in but the returned haibun and tanka will all do for resubmission.

Mandarin drake at Arnot Hill Park, Nottinghamshire

Little and Large!

I have started a couple of new haibun too, having listed my work for the month ahead. It’s on an archaic spreadsheet – or “written on a piece of paper” as we used to call it, and I am feeling more organised. When I feel organised I always seem able to do more work. I won’t list my calculations, but I’m going to need to be organised if I have any chance of improving on last year, particularly as I want to improve my quality and increase my range.

The Heron is back again. Arnot Hill Park

 

 

Reading About Myself in Google

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Robin

I’ve just been checking myself on Google. It’s not a pursuit for the faint-hearted or the modest.

I am, it seems,  a prominent British haibun poet and my work is frequently published in leading haiku and haibun journals where it is a regular fixture in journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, and the Wales Haiku Journal. Another entry records that I am a contemporary writer known for my haibun, often featured in journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, where my works explore everyday observations, life changes, and poignant reflections on subjects like old mills, cormorants, funerals, and war-torn landscapes, showcasing my keen eye for detail and emotional depth within short, evocative pieces. 

It then cites a  Guardian article about me and has a line that says “AI responses may include mistakes”

They are not wrong about that.

Robin

The Simon Wilson in the Guardian is younger than me, better groomed, more successful and, above all, Australian.

There are many Simon Wilsons spread around the place, including several who are poets or journalists, so there is plenty of room for confusion. However, much of what they say is factually accurate even though it has been fashioned into something capable of giving a misleading picture of me and my work. “Prominent” and “fixture” are both pushing the boundaries of accuracy, to be fair, and some of the other stuff is rather flattering too. However it’s nice to see AI in action. I am now aware that it has been programmed to add a veneer of sophistication and success to our achievements and, as such will definitely be taking over the world. It’s easy to resist an evil genius, but far harder to be cynical about flattery. Who doesn’t like to be described as “prominent” and “a regular fixture”? I can already feel myself beginning to admire AI for its good taste.

Robin in the Garden Centre cafe

 

 

 

A Plan is Born

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Plans for next year include writing more, writing better, managing my time and, most importantly, finding new markets. I’ve done over 80 articles on coins and related subjects but they have all been published in the lower levels of society journals.  I don’t want to be rude about them, but it’s not really a challenge getting into something where you are one of two regular contributors and they are read by about six people.

The situation with the articles is that I am either going to have to up my game or stop writing them and use the time for something else. In my first stint as a poet I wrote for new magazines and those known to be easier to get into. It produced results, but when I restarted a few years ago I aimed for the better quality magazines. It has gone quite well and I feel like I have produced something worth doing.

Next year, instead of producing 85+ articles for society Facebook pages and the like, I want to appear at least 12 times in magazines which pay and the journals of the more serious  kind. I think 12 is realistic, just as 50 (again) is realistic for poetry.  That’s why the target is now set at 60 and 15 – there’s no point in sitting back and feeling complacent. At the same time, I still want to support the societies I’m in but I’m going to reduce my output to around 50. I’ve asked other people to help but they haven’t responded, or have made excuses, and they can’t complain if I do other things.

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

That, of course, is the easy bit. I now have to work out how I’m going to manage my time and actually achieve the targets. That’s the trouble with planning to write more – the first day or two will be taken up with planning. And I just remembered that one of the regular magazines has pulled out.  That will be six fewer slots to aim for.

I will, to be honest, simply send more poetry out and develop a new range of work. I’ve never done a haiga, for instance, which is a photograph with a haiku. Nor have I ever tried any of the linked forms where you put haiku or tanka together to form longer poems. It also feels like time to get back into free verse. And there you go – a plan is born.

Orange Parker Pen

Using the pen pictures reminds me once again that my efforts at product placement have not met with much success. Either that or my complimentary Parker pen has been lost in the post.

Next year I may lower my sights a bit and use pictures of snack food.

 

Thirty! Forty six!

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Something strange happened this afternoon. The day, having started as Friday (I even wrote about it being Friday) but by lunchtime it had become Saturday. I even started planning for “tomorrow” thinking it was Sunday. This has never happened before. I have sometimes struggled with what day it is, and have needed to gather my thoughts, but I do not remember changing days in mid flow.

This would be just another amusing anecdote, but after the cabbage episode I am beginning to have some serious doubts regarding my mental capacity. The advantage is that after having one “Saturday” I am now able to have an extra day at the weekend. The disadvantage is that, being retired, the concepts of “weekend” and “extra day” now have little meaning.

On a more fun note, I tried a pickled egg today. They have been in the fridge for two weeks now, which is the minimum time suggested by the Hairy Bikers in the recipe. They are OK. I will check again in two more weeks, as they did say a month was better. The vinegar is diluted with water in the recipe, and has some sugar in it. Currently, the taste is slightly sweet and the vinegar lacks bite. I will do another lot without water or sugar and see how they go. After that I may need to look at the quality of vinegar. I’m currently using the cheapest, and it may be false economy. However, it does cut the grease effectively when wiping down the hob.

I’ve had two acceptances today, so I’m quite cheerful. One needed a minor edit and a discussion on quotation marks. I was cheery and cooperative and pretended to care about punctuation. This brings the number of acceptances up to 46 for the year and I’m happy that I will probably make it to 50. In artistic terms this doesn’t matter. Forty nine or 51 are much of a muchness, but 60 has a psychological value. Total submissions are 70 so far with another 10 planned. It is significantly short of my  target of 100 submissions. There are several reasons for this, including a patchy work rate, a number of magazines cutting back on publication frequency and the fact that I haven’t written any non-Japanese style poetry this year. I may not make it next year either, as I am doing more numismatic writing. If you take them into consideration I’m on target to do about 70 more, but as they are all for societies there is actually no quality threshold and I have a 100% acceptance rate – that’s not really proper writing.

Finally – food. I made a mushroom biriyani tonight. Well, I used a spice kit for biriyani. The actual ingredients and outcome were non-traditional. However, I used sweet potato, onions, peas, rice and mushrooms, so it was healthy. Of those, the red onions, sweet potato and peas were making their first appearance this week. That makes 30. I have the veg prepared for tomorrow, with swede and cabbage, so look likely to manage 32, possibly more if I eat some nuts.  I am happy with that, and happy I was able to source over 30 plant-based ingredients in the house without doing any special shopping.

And that is that for today. Pictures will be from October 2018. Many are from Clumber park in the days when they weren’t charging fro entry and I could actually walk.

 

Off with the Birds

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A few weeks ago we had a Chaffinch in the garden. They used to be common. We had quite a few on the farm and if you read Tootlepedal’s blog you will see that he still does. For some reason we have not been able to tempt one into the garden until now. We were hoping for another Goldfinch story – once we got them in we often see groups of up to five. It hasn’t happened. We have yet to see another Chaffinch. The same happened with the Greenfinches, though they are quite rare after the disease outbreak. We saw a couple, then nothing.

Carden Warbler, pictured on Wikipedia. This is the British variety, the one in the header is Scandinavian and a little more distinctive.

Two days ago we saw a smallish brown bird  lurking in a shrub. My first thought was Goldcrest because it was quite fluttery and furtive, but it was too big, too brown and didn’t have a gold streak. Then I thought Robin, but there was no red breast. It was just a dull brown bird with pale underparts and no distinguishing features. The Garden Warbler is famous for having no distinguishing features, and that would seem to be what we saw. Apart from being anonymous they are also mis-named, as they don’t often appear in gardens.  They do, however,  like woodland margins, and with the trees only being yards beyond the garden wall, that’s a good description of our habitat.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have had another acceptance.  So, despite a rushed selection of poetry I have managed to get three acceptances and two rejections, and am still waiting to hear from the final one. I am approaching the end of this month in a more relaxed mood, and have most of my submissions done already. They are waiting now. I will let them wait a bit longer, because the best thing you can do is leave them to mature then edit again, and again . . .

That’s always been the part I have been bad at. I’m lazy and badly organised and should write a lot more. If I did I would be able to leave things and polish them properly. That’s where the quality come from. I really should be concentrating on quality rather than quantity.

Chaffinch in the Bird Garden

Would Larkin call it Quiche?

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Swings and Roundabouts, what goes around comes around, as one door closes another door opens . . .

Hot on the heels of my last rejection comes an acceptance. Not only an acceptance, but an acceptance for two tanka prose. Any double acceptance is a red letter day, as I said recently. This one was particularly good, as I had only sent two.

This is when I noticed something strange. The three that had been rejected a couple of days ago, looked poor when they were returned. The two that were accepted looked good when I re-read them. When I sent them off, they all seemed to be much the same level. It looks like I evaluate my work in relation to what happens when it is judged by an editor.

I must guard against this effect when viewing my work.

Here is a haibun that was rejected many times (four, I think) but accepted within hours by the final editor. It changed a few times over its life but the final version was not, as I recall, changed from the version that had been rejected by the previous editor.

Hidden Worlds

He wears a grey gaberdine and rides a bicycle from church to church. In his head he composes poems about sex and tombs. On YouTube he flickers in black and white, like a newsreel from the 1950s. Smiles are clearly still on ration.

Larkin used more bad language than you normally expect from a librarian. This becomes understandable when you find that he started his day with half a bottle of sherry.

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Inspired by the life of Philip Larkin

(Published in Failed Haiku – February 2021)

I added the footnote because I had just been rejected by an editor for being obscure( it was a poem about a visit to Adlestrop). The editor who accepted it, did not use the footnote. You might want to read this, if you aren’t familiar with Larkin. I selected 1963 partly because of the poem and partly because of the sound. It wasn’t an easy decision because the rhyme counts against it in Japanese style poetry.

Meanwhile here are some pictures of my latest quiches, complete with ready made pastry cases. When I was a boy quiches were called flans and my mother used to make “egg and bacon pie”, which has been replaced by Quiche Lorraine. Haven’t we changed over the years? Change and improvement, that old thing.

The top picture is what happened to the leftover egg from the quiches. We just ate it for breakfast. The other pictures are quiches with a definite yellow cast to the photo and a couple of pics of the great biscuit disaster. I only had two cutters – the little man and a glass from the cupboard.

There is a lot of spinach in the flans, though you can’t really see it. We’ve also had it in curry this week. It’s going to mess my INR results up but I ordered a 500g bag with the groceries, which is a lot more spinach than it sounds when you actually have to use it. Green vegetables contain Vitamin K, which is the antidote for Warfarin so if you eat more, the INR goes down. You are supposed to eat the same things each week to stop the INR moving. So the choice is this – die of a blood clot, die of boredom, get scurvy. Discuss.

A Day of Non-Achievement

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Another day and a rejection. It wasn’t unexpected, because I haven’t been struggling for the last few months. Normally I would not have sent much out this month, but having set myself targets for submissions, and needing to show some self-discipline, I wrote and submitted anyway. In some ways it was a bad idea, but based on past experience I can’t afford to let the momentum fade.

Believe it or not, there was a time when I used to have all my submissions ready for the beginning of the month. I seemed to have so much time in those days. The theory was that if I submitted first, all the subsequent submissions had to do two things – one is that they had to be good enough for publication, but the second was that they had to be good enough to replace the submissions I’d already submitted. This works if editors look at submissions as they come in, but it doesn’t if they wait until the end of the submission period before looking.

There used to be a lot of blogs and internet articles about the science of submissions at one time. I couldn’t find any tonight. There were a few about how to submit (spelling, manners, timeliness, stick to the submissions guidelines etc) but none of the sort I wanted – the ones that used to treat it as pseudo-science and work out ways of increasing your chances by trickery and mind control.

Pictures are from Julia and my sister – they went round the Shaun the Sheep exhibition in Peterborough yesterday. More about that tomorrow. I now have a home made quiche to eat and a wife to talk to. She hasn’t seen much of me today as I have been messing about on the keyboard and achieving very little.

Ah well, time to go. I will add a few photos and talk about them in the next post.

The Mystery of Editors and Some Thoughts on Writer’s Block

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

I had my first acceptance from the July submissions on Monday. It was a tanka that had actually been rejected in June, but after a quick check I decided that it was ready to go again.  It was part of a group of nine that had been returned after the tenth was accepted, so I only needed to write one to make the submission up to ten.

It’s one of the age-old questions writers have. I send out ten poems, one is accepted, does that mean the other nine are not good enough?

Sometimes I’ve had an editor ask if they can hold one over for the next edition. I always say yes to that – it saves me work and I assume it saves them work too. If it wasn’t for editors there wouldn’t be any magazines. And if there were no editors and magazines there would be no competition for publication. That’s why I mainly only blog poems that have been published – it means that someone who knows more about it than I do has decided that it merits space.

I’ve also had editors select two or three poems (very, very rarely) and a couple of times they have told me the rest weren’t bad, just not what they wanted for the moment, and I could submit them again at the next submission window. This is very rare – remember we are talking about something in the region of 400 submissions and this sort of thing has happened a handful of times.

Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

It all tends to indicate that several of the ten are publishable, and that they can all be recycled. That’s why I like editors who give quick decisions. If they reject something in the first few weeks, I can use them for another submissions and don’t need to write as much.

This may be a bad attitude, and more akin to the approach of a  worker on a production line than an artist but  this month I’ve just had an article on collectables published in a magazine, plus four Facebook articles for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire and  a couple of longer articles  for the Peterborough Military History Group. If I waited for aesthetics and inspiration to align I’d struggle. Dawn comes, I drag myself from bed, I make tea, then I start writing. I hate mornings. I like tea and I like writing. I have no time for Writer’s Block and curlicues. And I’m more likely to suffer from dehydration than a shortage of words. I have no time for the introspection in the article behind the link. It’s very interesting, and more than slightly familiar, but I can’t afford to let such thoughts take root.

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

 

It’s a Haibun

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Here’s a poem for you. It was first published in The Haibun Journal in April 2025. I could say it’s a comment on art and the people who think that four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence is music. If I had a Masters Degree, as many poets seem to have, I could probably get away with that.

But I don’t. I have a City & Guilds in Poultry Production, so I settled for writing a piece about being desperate for inspiration. I’m told that writing poems about writing poetry is almost guaranteed to get you turned down because editors see so much of it, so I got lucky here. Well, I got lucky the third time I submitted it, which would make a good case study on persistence.

Originally it was a tanka prose but it became a haibun, removing the tanka and using a haiku that I’d previously had rejected when it was sent to a haiku magazine. “Three Minutes Thirty Three” was originally “Six Minutes Sixteen”, I added the bit about alliteration making it poetry and substituted “watching birds” for “watching daytime TV”. Whether those qualify as improvements I’m sure. There are probably a couple of tweaks I would make if I ever get round to that poetry book, but otherwise I’m happy with it, which is not something I say about all my published poems.

Anyway, this is the finished version. For now . . .

Two Hours Twenty Two

An hour and forty eight minutes pass before I dredge inspiration from the depths. I know this because I set a timer to put myself under pressure to produce. If John Cage can do 4′ 33”, I thought, I can do Two Hours Twenty Two. It’s not accurate, but it is alliterative, which makes it poetry. If I’d set off with Cage’s piece in mind, I would have settled for Three Minutes Thirty Three and passed the rest of the morning drinking tea and watching birds feed in the garden.

a blackcap
sings from tangled thorns
—the stalking cat