Category Archives: poetry

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.

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