Category Archives: poetry

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.

One Door Opens as Another Door Closes

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I’ve just being going through my spam box. I am expecting an email which hasn’t arrived, and was checking it hadn’t been rejected in error. It hadn’t. It’s a depressing place – I have won several prizes in competitions I haven’t entered, have numerous parcels needing to be collected, have to step in to stop various things being cancelled and have had to ignore several requests for sexual favours from women with exotic names.

Julia says they are all actually likely to be from sweaty men working in distant call centres, including the ones from the “women”. It’s a relief  in a way – I really don’t need a car care kit or an electric drill, or a mystery package, and my days of exotic women are definitely in the past. Apart from being married, I’m entering that phase of my life where Pointless and a nice cup of tea hold more attractions than erotic adventures. Anyway, as I may have mentioned, getting my trousers on and off is something of a trial these days.

It’s going to be a tough month. Having done my  submissions I sat back and reflected on the likely success rate as many of them had been out before and some of them were rushed.  One was going to an editor who has never accepted a haibun off me in six years. Derrick asked why I sent things to him. It’s a good question. There are several answers to this. One is that rejection keeps my feet on the ground. I have had some very successful runs of acceptances, but it’s always good to remember that it’s nor assured. A second is that you need constant rejections to stay immune from their demoralising effects. And third is the need to have targets – I’ve set 100 submissions as this year’s target, and I have minor targets like wearing down certain editors who constantly reject me.

I have already had one reply, as I mentioned, asking for a few alterations to one piece. I have now had a second reply rejecting a second lot. It’s one of “those” rejections, he ones that seem helpful but close with the comment that you should read XYZ for more pointers. I’ve had several like that over the years and always wonder why they think I haven’t read XYZ, particularly when it’s been a fixture on the website for the last five years.

Anyway, it was good news in a way. After slightly polishing two of them I am now in a position to submit all three rejected pieces to another magazine this month. It’s a system that has worked before. It’s important to remember that a rejection is only a sign of one editor’s opinion and other editors may have different opinions.

My Orange Parker Pen

Done!

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A while ago I wrote I wanted to make “submissions to 9 different editors at five magazines, plus three possible competition entries.”

Well, I didn’t bother with the competition entries.  I just ran out of time and inspiration. And one of the magazines caught me out – it has a cut-off date of 25th and I let it pass because I wasn’t concentrating. I also forgot an auction in the same period. Sometimes a brain cannot hold all the infromation you need.

However, I have sent off nine submissions to the nine editors at five magazines. This suggests my original maths was wrong, but that’s the least of my worries.

So far I have had one result – a request to restructure a tanka prose. I can do that. I assume that the next two weeks will hold some mixed news – one of the editors always turns me down and I suspect I will be rejected by several others, as two submissions were written only minutes before I sent them off. This is not the way to write good poetry, but it is the way to meet targets. This month I intend writing everything I need at least two weeks before I need it so I can polish it.

I have ignored Julia and my WP reading over the last week or so, and need to catch up with both. Even as I type, she is cutting fruit for our breakfast. Time, I think, to stop typing for rest of the day and spend time on my Christmas present – a jigsaw of garden birds.

This evening I will start the rewrite and will also try to write a poem about doing jigsaws. In the life of a poet, nothing goes to waste. Then I will tell you the latest squirrel news . . .

Work in (Slow) Progress

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Progress so far is that I’ve found 16 haibun/tanka prose that are close to completion and have worked on six of them to improve them. I’m going to work my way through the rest now, but will have to get a move on as I’m not going fast enough.

Nine days to go, and a lot still to be done.

The good news is that I only need six good ones, as editors only usually accept one at a time. It helps to have three good ones as you never quite know what is going to be flavour of the month. There are also some that have been out before and I need to make sure they don’t go back to the same places.

Slightly less good news – I still need to get 24 good tanka and haiku written and I’m nowhere near finding inspiration for that.

I’ve managed to reduce the production of the prose poems to a fairly industrial process – write the prose (which is generally fairly simple), add the poem (not quite so simple), edit, send out, edit again, and repeat . . .

It’s easy enough to stack the prose sections up, and even to edit and re-edit. When in need of a poem that won’t come it’s also possible to take one from somewhere else. I also move chunks of prose from one to another, a bit like working in a breaker’s yard. This is the perspiration stage of the stage. The inspiration bit it trickier and easily derailed by tea and biscuits, visitors or writing about medallions.

So many distractions, so little time.

Tonight’s task is to revise four more prose sections and write some acceptable tanka. I have no distractions now so I’m hoping to rattle along. We have to stay over in Nottingham for a few days so I need to increase my speed to allow for days away. My aim – write faster and write quicker. With practice, the quality will come.

Orange Parker Pen

 

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

Moving On

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The last post I published was really Monday’s post. this one is today’s post, though as it is 23.45 according to my computer clock that state of affairs will only last another 15 minutes.

Today, for the first time in ages I am free from the tyranny of my need to write a presentation for the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire. It was a tyranny I wore lightly, in fact I managed to ignore it for most of the ten months leading up to the five days of panic that marked the run up to the meeting.

Chilwell Factory Check

When I finish this I am going to sort of a dozen old poems, edit them and send them off to different magazines. I’ve just had a spreadsheet from Robin Houghton with the latest details of poetry magazines.. You can find the sign up page here if you are interested. It is quicker than trying to find all the information yourself, and contains many magazines I’ve never heard of.

After that I am going to write a new piece for the Numismatic Society Facebook page – which will be my 10th, I note. I will probably use a piece from my old talk on Peace Medals. I was talking to someone about that recently – how it’s possible to build a body of work by recycling old articles. I used to buy books on local aspects of the Civil War – it was a noticeable feature of the small scale publications associated with it that a number of keen authors were doing a lot of recycling. It’s also known as “sweating your assets” in business jargon, which always makes me feel more relaxed about my lack of business success. What with running things up flagpoles and blue sky thinking, sweating my assets would have been a step too far.

Admiral Vernon & Commodore Brown

However, I need a reasonably early night tonight, so I’d better stop this and get to bed. Poetry can wait.

Photos are from my posts on Numismatic Society’s FB page, though I recycled them for use on WP too, which is where the links go.

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.