Category Archives: writing

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 Same goes for the people who are often quoted on the subject – if your definition is outdated, have the courtesy to indicate this or update it.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.

 

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

Words Per Day

13 Replies

Tree cutting on the island.

Well, I said i was going to talk about word targets, so here I am. I have Checked the shopping list for Saturday, read emails (there were just two), checked WP (again, just a couple of comments, not needing much work) and turned to blogging. It is now 7.53 and I got out of bed at 7.31. That’s 22 minutes.

I didn’t experience an avalanche of regrets from people who preferred word counts to woodpeckers, so I’m going to take it that nobody is too concerned about the subject, except me and maybe a few passing writers.

Hemingway did 500 a day, Stephen King does 2,000 and a lot of people are somewhere in between. A thousand words a day seems to suit many people. I have written several book length accumulations of words and know that I can certainly do 1,000 to 2,000 a day. For an average sort of novel that means You should be able to do it in three months. At that rate, I can also polish a lot of it as I go along. What I can’t do is all the other stuff that goes into it. I end up, like Dr Frankenstein, with a pile of spare parts stitched together with good intentions (I think that’s part of a quote from Augusten Burroughs –  I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. My words do not live, and they certainly don’t build into a book. That’s why I turned to blogging (which is just rambling) and poetry, where you can get away with a handful or words, some mystery and a decent editor. Indecent editors, in case you are wondering, are the ones who don’t recognise my talent.

Mandarin drake at Arnot Hill Park, Nottinghamshire

Even with a diversion to check numbers and the quote I have just done 224 words in 14 minutes. Words aren’t the problem. Even good words aren’t the problem. The problem is that I’ve just gone back to add a bit and that’s another 6 minutes gone.

I’m now suspending writing at 8.12 to make breakfast for Julia as she is going out this morning and I try to be attentive.

But first, I will kill another minute or two reading back what I just wrote. That’s what writers do.

I bet Stephen King doesn’t have to stop and make breakfast for his wife. He probably has a housekeeper. I’ve read his book about writing but I don’t think he covers domestic staff.

8.14, I’m definitely going . . .

9.12 and I’m back. We had a moderate breakfast as Julia won’t be home until early afternoon, chatted and watched birds on the feeders. Nothing happened that needs noting down and it’s time to get back to work.

Nuthatch at Rufford Abbey

I was going well, but the pause has stopped me in my tracks. I re-read what I wrote earlier and am now staring at the screen. A lesser man would have writer’s block, I just can’t think of anything to say right now.

I’m examining word count from the point of view of a man trying to do many things. Tomorrow, for instance, I will be baking, amongst other things. I once read something that said it takes about fifteen minutes to change tasks and get back into the next one. That’s why multi-tasking, despite its almost mythic status, doesn’t really work. I researched that while I was working in the office at Quercus, as we used to call the corner with the desk in it.

That’s one of my problems with productivity, I’m trying to do too many things at a time and each one swallows up a small portion of time as you swap between them. It might be more like 5 minutes than the 15 minutes the research suggests, but do it a dozen times a day and that’s an hour gone for no result.

There’s also the time spent on research. Sometimes I can rip through something fairly quickly if I’m carrying the facts in my head (though they still need checking). Other times it takes a long time to gather all the facts and get them into order. It’s an imprecise calculation because sometimes I know what I need, or know where to look. Other times I just have to search, and search . . .

Gadwall

An example of that is a group of medals I’ve just been researching. Just before calling it finished, I checked the article and decided to run a quick newspaper search on his sons.  One went farming in Kenya after WW2 (having served in the Army since before the Great War). His grave showed him as a Lt Colonel, but I had a gap between him retiring in the late 1930s and reappearing on a gravestone in 1955. Reports of his death, which were printed in several newspapers, indicated that he had been in the Home Guard in WW2, before going to Kenya to farm. He had been gored by a rhinoceros which charged him as he was walking with his wife near their farm house. He pushed her behind a thorn bush for safety and tried to fight off the rhino with his walking stick. It has little to recommend it in some ways, as I was really researching the father, but it’s an interesting story to round things off. However, it probably took me half an hour to find the three reports and patch them together. It’s taken me a while here, as I’ve amended the last paragraph a couple of times to make it flow.

9.39 now. By the time I finish, I will have done a thousand words, just like a proper writer. It’s easier, of course, when you can just ramble rather than having to worry about plots and pacing and possibly, with my thoughts on detective fiction, probably poisons. Prussic acid, strychnine or perhaps the poisonous mushroom tha is only lethal when taken with alcohol. Sorry, I just wandered off to have a look at poisonous mushrooms. The facts don’t seem quite as cut and dried as stories I have read about it. It would be great if you wanted to make someone very ill, less good if you wanted to kill them. And it took me eight minutes to read.

Lomg Tailed Tit at Rufford Abbey

9.49 and I have passed 1,000 words. So, my point for today is that words are simple, even in quantity, but organisation and research, and domestic tasks, are making me less efficient. I will think about this, as I think their are large efficiencies to be had from organising, making lists and doing the research before the writing rather than alongside. If anyone has hints of efficiency please let me know.

1087 Words. 9.52. Allowing an hour for breakfast that’s a thousand words an hour. A touch over that if you add the final reading I just did.

Now, in my disorganised way, I will waste some time wondering what to do next . . .

They say, in case you are interested, that Edgar Wallace could write a 70,000 word novel in 3 days, using wax cylinder recordings and secretaries. That’s quick.

Heron at Arnot Hill Park

Is Writing a Pleasure or is it Publication?

13 Replies

We woke this morning after hearing moderately heavy rain overnight. The general aspect of the morning was wet, rather than snowy, icy or frosty.  Looking at the choice of words there, I realise that the story of the Innuit and all their words for snow might not be as outlandish as we think. We seem to have a good selection of words for it and some years we don’t get any. This year, I think, we may have a snowy winter. That will be good as it will see a lot of rats and disease off. On the other hand, the birds will need plenty of food.

For the first time in 12 months the rain did not make it inside, the builders having done their job well. I can’t help thinking it may have been more cost effective just to retile he roof with banknotes but hopefully the pain will subside.

The worst bit of the builders being here, apart from having to get up at a time dictated by someone else, is that we had the dining table in the living space and the conservatory contents in the dining area. Two days of living with clutter brought back a lot of old memories and was not pleasant. This morning, as 7pm dawned, I pulled the flannelette duvet cover up to my chin, arranged the coverlet to block any gaps and luxuriated in the warmth. It was good.

I suppose I ought to have used this as the beginning of the last post, but that one seemed to take on a life of its own. I also note that I seem to be a day behind again. This, I think, is mainly due to my lack of routine. The days bleed into one, particularly if I sleep in front of TV and restart late at night. I must get to grips with this for several reasons – health, vitality, writing quality and consistency are ones I can think of immediately.

During the day I exchanged emails with someone who told me I shouldn’t be stressing over the amount I wrote as it should be a relaxation now I was retired. Writing, he said, should be a pleasure. I have never found it to be a pleasure. For me, the pleasure comes from finishing and from publication. The writing is a real grind.

How about you? And, as an extra question,  would you carry on writing if you had nobody to read it?

Reading About Myself in Google

16 Replies

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

 

 

 

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

14 Replies

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

 

Struggling Still with Time

8 Replies

Buzzard

I had another acceptance. I’m now about to enter a lean streak with just three editors to reply – one I’ve never submitted to before, one is a new editor with a magazine that normally turns me down and the third is a guest editor in a magazine with which I have mixed results. And that final one is the one I submitted as the only submission of this month. With everyone cutting back on frequency of publication, and with them all operating on different schedules this sometimes happens. A few years ago there were several who published every month but both of them have now gone to publishing just six issues a year.

I now have more poetry to write, so I had a quick image search for Crowland Abbey. It’s been an interesting subject over the years, and I just wanted to look at some photos for ideas. I found a great picture, and a quote I recognised from John Clare’s sonnet about the abbey – Wrecks of Ornamented Stones. It’s a good quote and, I thought regretfully, a shame that someone had already used it.

Donkey watching . . .

Then I looked harder. It seems I’m being immodest in calling it a great picture, as it’s one of mine, and it was me who already used the title. Sometimes I’m just so prolific I forget what I’ve written. February 2017. We’ve seen a few changes since then. Like the old abbey I am “struggling still with time”.

Having appropriated another line of Clare’s poem I am now going back to my previous (pre-Crowland search) activity – reading tanka and stealing ideas to help me write poems of my own. That’s the T S Eliot method isn’t it?

“Good poets borrow, great poets steal.”

Captain Cook and a seagull

Unfortunately, as usual, it seems to be a misattribution. What he actually said was  “mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” I know that because I just lifted it from another blog. I could research it myself, but it was easier just to cut and paste and then post a link.

It’s pretty much the same, it’s just that the second quote is far too complicated. I look through a poem and extract something that sets me going. It’s not plagiarism, or outright theft, it’s seeking inspiration and understanding. Think of an opal miner. They take a stone from the depths of the earth, and give it a wash. It’s a thing of beauty in its own right. Then a stone cutter cuts and polishes. Still a thing of beauty, but different, as it is after a jeweller has set it.  Theft is probably not the right word, it’s just a well-travelled idea, and I’m about to take a few of them on a new journey.

Wren

 

Work in (Slow) Progress

7 Replies

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

 

Quick Progress

10 Replies

After writing that I had no submission plan for the coming year, I thought I had better get on with it. It seems I have quite a lot to do. There are 13 possible submissions to 9 different editors at five magazines, plus three possible competition entries.

They require 57 poems to make their selections. I have little prepared and just 12 days to do it in. I should really be writing poetry now, not blogging. Or thinking about breakfast. Mainly, I must admit, I am thinking about breakfast.

Last night I wrote ten tanka before bed. I have rewritten four of them and they are enough for two of the submissions (one editor requires three to select from, the other wants a single poem). I will let them stew for a few days, as it’s always good to go back with fresh eyes, but at least I have two of the thirteen done.

It is also possible that I won’t waste my money on the haiku competition, so that’s three done. It’s beginning to look a lot more manageable.

Now (having finished breakfast) I am going to set to and write the remaining 23 tanka. They will be reshaped by the time they are submitted but getting them all done will be a weight off my mind. After that I am going to sift through the pixelated pile of rejects and half-started prose poetry. There must be a few things in there that I can recycle. And that means that by this evening I will be  starting to write more poetry because I will be forced into it. Inspiration comes in many forms and has many names.