Category Archives: poetry

Sotheby’s Surrealist Auction Sale

17 Replies

Sorry I’m so late. I wrote some poems, cooked a massive pasta bake, read some poetry, did some research, engaged in small talk with No 1 Son and my sister and generally lost my grip on the day.

So the poetry I mentioned did not get posted and when I go back to yesterday’s post I will have to add a note to say I was late.

Here it is, first published in Quail Eggs Issue 3 December 2025.

If you have a few minutes go and have a look. It is a pleasant, peaceful place. Just in case you are like me – click on he bars o the left of the title and everything opens up. I confess it took me a while to work it out.

Sotheby’s Surrealist Auction Sale

Blue, orange, yellow, red – Warhol’s copy of The Scream. I could do that. Make a copy, steal his inspiration, expending no imagination. Was there a class at art school called Copy Campbells Cans and Make a Mint? The road to Hell is paved with good imitations.

Warhol’s version has an auction estimate of £2 – £3 million. Mine, I expect, would do to line a budgie cage or two. I can see it now, a captive canary – they are easier to paint than budgies – with my copy of The Scream and melting pocket watches draped around the place. Collectors with fortunes bid on a print of a stolen idea. Sensing value in something mere mortals cannot see.

The bidding dies, a new Lot is announced. A porter shows off an empty coat hanger.

“Lot 164,” the auctioneer intones – “The Emperor’s New Clothes . . .”

as a child
I wondered if my blue
was the same as
other people saw
sometimes I still do

Some Thoughts on Poetry and Particularly Tanka

20 Replies

Julia’s latest vase (she gave the last one away as a present) with silk fritilleries.

I’ve just been replying to two emails from editors. One was comparatively simple, a quick note of thanks for an acceptance. I had an automatic reply by return, telling me that they weren’t taking submissions at the moment – an impersonal response to my attempt at being polite. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised – some magazines are like that.

The other was more complicated. It was a rejection with some suggested links to articles which would help me improve. It’s the sort of response that always invites being categorised as condescending.

I read the first one and it told me that most western definitions of haiku were too restrictive. This explains why editors annoy me by publishing haiku that fall outside the published definitions. Maybe they should take down the definitions hey often display, or display a current one. Same goes for the people who are often quoted on the subject – if your definition is outdated, have the courtesy to indicate this or update it.

As for the haibun article, it quoted a number of haibun. One of the haiku wasn’t a haiku by any definition and the rest all reiterated the subject material, which you aren’t supposed to do. I can’t help feeling that if I’d have submitted any of them, they would have been turned down, not used as examples. I just wrote and thanked them for the feedback and said they provided food for thought.

Email is not the forum to exchange views over something like that, as it could be construed as argumentative and although I have issues with things, I don’t want to start an argument with someone who is trying to help.

This is the one she gave away as a present.

That’s the nice thing about tanka – fewer rules, more freedom, and fewer people writing about them.

 

Thoughts on Editors

13 Replies

So far this year I have had 16 acceptances. One came this morning and prompted this post. That’s from 30 submissions, so it’s a touch over 50%. I have done better in past years, but this year, as I have said, I have tried harder and sent submissions to people who habitually turn me down. It’s character forming.

I’ve been scouring the internet looking for more places to submit and have found a few, but run into three problems.

One is that some only accept postal submissions and I no longer like sending them. Paper does actually, as the expression goes, grow on trees, but I feel it’s better to use emails for both convenience and carbon footprint.

Two is that the editors of these harder to find journals can be quite aggressive, which is probably a reason why they are not so well supported. In general I find editors of Japanese style magazines are nicer and more helpful than those of mainstream poetry journals, but if they aren’t, why should I bother with them?

And three – when I relaunched my poetry writing I decided to aim for the best magazines. I did. I got rejected. I am still rejected. But when I did get in it was worth doing and quite exciting to find myself in a journal with people I’d actually heard of. Better to be rejected by a quality journal than be accepted by one of lower quality.  And better to aspire to meet the quality threshold of a better journal.

My Orange Parker Pen

There is another reason, I just remembered. Some magazines want to be paid to include my work. With some, it’s voluntary – I can access a quicker decision by paying, but with one they actually want you to pay for inclusion.

Few magazines have ever paid. I can live with that. I can live with taking out subscriptions for magazines. That seems fair. It’s a hobby and hobbies cost money. But to pay for inclusion? I don’t think I’ll bother tank you.

Poetry – creatively stacked but a touch light on stock

Thinking About Doing Something

12 Replies

Nothing happens, they say, until somebody sells something.

It’s one of those glib one-liners they use in sales training. However, it’s true. Nothing happens until you do something. Whether it’s the glorious poetry career that is waiting, (if you can manage to send off that first submission), or one of those numismatic articles I keep meaning to write, it’s true. Nothing will happen until you do something.

So I wrote a paragraph about doing things.

Then I looked at details of a number of poetry magazines. It started as a list of possible places for submission, and ended with a half-formed rant in my head.

There is so much detail in some of the submission guidelines. Some 10 point, some 12 point and quite a few don’t mind. Some Times New Roman, one I hadn’t heard of and quite a few don’t mind. Several are still only accepting postal submissions. One explains why it is easier for them to read and digest. What they mean, I think, is that it cuts down on submissions. Or they hate trees.

Generally I avoid these as I still don’t have my printer set up. I really should do that, but I would probably still avoid these magazines. One has published me in the past, but email submissions are so much easier.

I realise that poetry editors are unpaid, and that they are snowed under with submissions, but are they missing something good by making their submission procedures overly complex?

One of the coaches at Newark RUFC, an excellent club that Number One Son played for briefly, once expounded a theory of recruitment to me. It was in relation to one of their age-groups, which was led by an ambitious coach who tried to relive his imagined past glories by bossing kids about. He poached players from surrounding teams and then decided to stop signing new players.

How, the other coach asked, did you know that you weren’t turning away the next Dusty Hare?

That’s a good point, Make it difficult and you might put off a nervous genius. Even if you don’t, is it (rugby or poetry) about finding talent, or about helping people be the best they can be?

How to Write a Tanka Prose

15 Replies

Buzzard pursued by crow

This an answer to a query raised in the comments, but it’s something for everyone to read. Have a go, you might like it.

First, read this. Then abandon thoughts of haiku and haibun for a moment.

If I were starting again I would start with tanka prose. These are like haibun in that they contain prose and a poem, but they are more relaxed.

The trouble lies with the poem. A tanka is a small poem (5-7-5-7-7) according to general wisdom. This isn’t true. That syllable count should be the maximum. You can write fewer syllables.

Some editors like to preserve the short-long-short-long-long layout, others don’t mind as long as it has five lines. It’s just a poem and can include poetic effects, though probably not rhyme. As such, it is free from all the baggage that comes with haiku, and all the conflicting views of editors.

Little Egret at Aldeburgh

You can find tanka and tanka prose in Contemporary Haibun Online, Quail Eggs and Cattails. These are all available online. They are also easy to submit to if you want to have a go at being published.

Rather than listen to me, just read tanka and then practice. If I write ten tanka (which can take between twenty minutes and a week) you can be sure that at least one will tail off without being finished, and a couple will clearly be rubbish that can’t be helped by editing. Even after editing it’s likely that only two or three will be good enough to retain. That’s normal. Just keep writing and eventually you will get there. Don’t take notice of your internal editor until you have written a batch, or you will never actually finish a poem.

Eventually you will have enough to send off. Do it. You won’t be published unless you make submissions.

I send out a batch, one is probably accepted, the rest come back. I add another and send them out again. Usually one of the rejects will be picked at this point. I sometimes send things out three four times before I get fed up with them. By that time I usually have replacements written.

Little Egret – Blacktoft Sands

Next – tanka prose. They are like a haibun but with a tanka rather than a haiku. There is some discussion whether a haibun should be in haiku-like language (ie terse and often slightly stilted). You don’t have that with tanka prose, just write what you like. If you can write a blog post you can write a prose section for a tanka prose.

Then write the tanka to go with it. Some people claim to write the haiku/tanka first then write the prose section. I can’t do that. I write the prose and then write a suitable tanka.

Here are some comments I had recently.

“I think the haiku are not nearly as successful as the prose in your haibun.”

“After a careful review of your poem, I regret that I have had to pass it on.”

“Unfortunately, your work did not quite fit the shape that the issue ended up taking.”

“I’m afraid I don’t get this piece. Is it me or is its meaning or intention too obscure?”

The lesson from those comments is that not every submission ends in success and it’s all par of the process.

Heron

So, to summarise – read, write, submit, expect rejection, read, write, submit . . .

Eventually it will work out, but expect some rejections to begin with. At the start the rejections can seem depressing, overpowering and inevitable. Eventually you will get an acceptance, then another, and it will gradually build up . . .

There’s a lot of other stuff tha goes into writing a good tanka prose, and eventually I might learn some of it, but for the moment I find that the best way to work is to write plenty, submit a lot, shrug off rejection and recycle the rejects.

The recycling is key to my writing – it saves effort, and when a reject is accepted it proves that editing is a matter of opinions and rejected work is not always bad work. And above all, it’s about hard work and  persistence rather than that ephemeral thing we call talent

Good luck.

Cormorant, Lowestoft, Suffolk

I Dream of Writing Thunderbolts

8 Replies

I had an answer to the last of February’s submissions yesterday – two poems accepted.  Today, I had the first reply for my March submissions – two poems accepted. That makes 15 so far this year. As a percentage my acceptances are about 50%, but I’m submitting to magazines that have resisted me for years in some cases, so I expect it. It’s all part of the hardening process.

Even the presence of growing queues at filling stations couldn’t bring me down, though it did stop me becoming 100% happy. The world appears to be at war and I can’t do a thing to stop it. I could write a poem, but that probably wouldn’t make the lunatic warlords stop the war, even if I could write a veritable thunderbolt of a poem.

My Orange Parker Pen

And that’s it. I sat up late two nights ago, grappling with last minute submissions. I then got up early to drop Julia at wood turning. Last night I also sat up writing. Then  I got up early(ish) this morning to take Julia to the railway station. I gazed at my screen for a few hours and did some basic tasks, went to the doctor, came back and more or less closed down. Couldn’t concentrate and eventually fell asleep a couple of times. It’s not been one of my finest days.

I have to be off early tomorrow morning too, as I have an appointment with rheumatology a 9.30. OK, not terribly early, but early enough. One of the qualities I had in youth was the ability to bounce back after limited sleep. I seem to have lost that.

The good news is that I only have one submission planned for April. Sometimes it falls like that. I can polish something that has been returned this month and try it again. I already have a piece in mind from the batch that was returned this morning.

In that quiet month I can catch up, regroup and, I hope, write some quality stuff. Maybe that veritable thunderbolt of a poem is waiting to be written next month . . .

Deep down, I want to be Dylan Thomas and write this poem.

 

 

 

 

More Poetry

12 Replies

My Orange Parker Pen

This is a tanka prose that was first published in Blithe Spirit 36.1, the journal of the British Haiku Society, in February this year. It is different from the original version, which was about eggs and lockdown and parents. This is about writing a poem and cooking eggs. It deviates slightly from reality as I mention coffee, where we always have tea for breakfast. Tea doesn’t really smell so I took the lazy way out and said we had coffee so I could add an extra sense to the poem.

But first, a tanka, from the same issue. It is based on the annual culling of the Christmas card list as my circle of cousins decreases.

old Christmas card
displayed again
fading slightly
sent by a man
who will not send another

I thought that’s what it was about, anyway. Julia reads it as a story about the Christmas card I have been sending her since 1988. It’s a good one and the message is still relevant. Why waste money, I ask, on another?

 

Life, seen in a Frying Pan

In lockdown, I decided to make better scrambled eggs and wrote a poem in my head as I stirred and learned. It spilled onto paper, took shape and, like the eggs, looked good. On the first rejection I checked all the words and moved them into better order. On the second I added an anecdote, on the third an allegory. At the fourth attempt I slimmed it down.

After five attempts I wondered if it might be bad, or if editors might dislike poems about scrambled eggs. When you think about it, it isn’t a subject you ever see. Eventually it faded from my mind, as poems like it often do. Recently, stirring eggs and making breakfast for my wife, I breathed in the toast and coffee smells and remembered the first line.

five eggs
two broken yolks
a speck of shell
things which are not perfect
still turn out well

The pen that Julia made at the wood turning group

A Haibun from the Past

17 Replies

Julia on the patio during lockdown

Here’s a haibun from 2021. It had its origins during lockdown as we used to sit outside the back door and dream of freedom.

Across the Valley
From the garden we look down onto a jumble of red tiled roofs and trees and for a moment, I can imagine that we are in the Mediterranean, and not Nottingham. We eat cheese and biscuits, and warm figs, picked straight from the container-grown trees in the front garden. The back garden faces north, which will not do for figs. If I had known we would stay here long enough to become gardeners, I would have bought a different house.


crumbs
on a cracked plate
once I had dreams

First published in Blithe Spirit 31.2 April 2021

Once we were quite good gardeners

Progress . . .

15 Replies

 

My Orange Parker Pen

An hour ago I sat down to write a short blog post. It started by saying that I made good progress yesterday and had high hopes of solving many of my writing problems by he end of today.

Then it became introspective, which is not good. I was unable o break out of the cycle of introspection and successive rewrites put me in mind of something circling round a plughole.

And that is why it has taken me the best part of an hour and around a thousand words to come up with the ninety words I have here. Dull, I admit. Unproductive too. But at least, by cutting them severely I have avoided introspection, self-indulgence and whiney.

That’s all OK as far as it goes, but it leaves me with half a blog to write and needing something interesting to say. That’s only 125 words so that’s not a problem. I can fill that with a few sentences about the ease with which I can fill the space – look, the word count is already up to 176 and I’ve managed to keep you reading without actually saying anything.

Today I intend writing a second post in the evening to detail what I have actually done. Yesterday was quite productive but didn’t come up with many results. By the end of today I want to have made at least three submissions, maybe more.

I have a list of finished items, and a list of almost finished items. I have a list of submissions I want to make. All I need to do is match them up, but at hat point I sar to worry about whether I* am sending the right things to the right people. I got hat wrong lat month and ended up with a rejection that should not have happened.

Writing poetry is only part of the art of getting published.

 

I thought I’d go for pen photos again, as the subject is writing. I’m surprised how few I seem to have.

As part of my ongoing commitment to procrastination I have already added another post when I should have been finishing off submissions.

 

The Glittering Prize

14 Replies

The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords
F E Smith, Lord Birkenhead

I thought I’d quote Smith for the title, but make it plain I had done so. I didn’t want you to think I’d just nicked the title off the telly, though this is probably unlikely as I just looked it up and find it aired in 1976. hardly a current reference.

I needed a title with “prize” in it as I just won a poetry prize. It’s a poem of the issue award from Eucalypt, a tanka magazine. Every issue, they have two, chosen by the winners of the previous issue’s awards. I now have a commentary on my work and my subscription has been extended by an issue. More worryingly for a man with a very lacklustre education, I have select a winner from the next issue and supply a commentary for it. The one supplied for mine was insightful. The one supplied for the other winner was decidedly erudite. The one about mine used the word trochee. It’s something like 53 years since I last used the word trochee. I’m pretty sure I only used it once then.

As I grow in confidence as a poet I no longer worry about imposter syndrome and am sure I will mange to write an acceptable commentary. I can blog, I can write poetry and I can write about coins, how difficult can it be? I’ll need a few quotes to fill up the space but as long as I get down to it promptly I should be OK.

In the meantime, I should get on with my medallion presentation and making lunch ready for Julia’s return. The poem was a about the stripy shed on the MENCAP Gardens – that’s the pictures today.

I now, of course, regret not taking a photo of the whole shed instead of being arty.