Tag Archives: acceptance

Some Thoughts on Poetry and Particularly Tanka

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 Same goes for the people who are often quoted on the subject – if your definition is outdated, have the courtesy to indicate this or update it.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

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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

A Tale of Two Results

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My Orange Parker Pen

I have just had another poem accepted, a haiku. It is 8 words long and scarcely seems long enough to be a poem but i is, and you wouldn’t believe how hard they are to write. I don’t normally have haiku accepted, and I sometimes have them mentioned as the reason for rejecting haibun, so I am quite pleased with this. Perhaps I’m starting to get the hang of this, though I’ve thought that before and been wrong.

A little later, I had a rejection. My poetry does not “fit the shape of the issue”.  All sorts of replies spring to mind. I could offer to write round poems perhaps . . .

In the end, I won’t. There’s no real etiquette for thanking someone for turning down your poetry for years on end that doesn’t risk being seen as sarcastic. Anyway, rejection rarely bothers me these days and in this case I sent my submissions expecting a rejection so it’s attracting my attention only because I need something to write about. Submitting to this particular periodical is actually more like an inoculation than a submission: I do it to ensure I keep my level of immunity topped up.

I have a submission window closing on the 15th, which is quite soon. It’s for haiku and I am going to polish up the rejects from this month and send them out again. Obviously, looking at them a second time will reveal a few with faults, but over half, maybe with the odd tweak, will be going out again. As I’ve said before, it’s surprising how many make it after two or three attempts.

Julia went to Nottingham by train earlier this week and passed this sign on he way. It commemorates Mallard’s world speed record.

6.44 & All That

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I had to do some writing late last night as I had to get up early. Counter intuitive? Yes, I agree.

In the old days I would just have wound up my alarm clock and gone to bed. Later, I would have set my electric clock and my alarm clock – living in the country there were often disruptions to the supply I learned you couldn’t trust the electric one. I then went back to traditional alarms and then to a small battery operated alarm clock that allowed me to “snooze”. This was a Bad Thing, as Sellar & Yeatman would say.

These days, of course, I use my phone. I am a modern man and can set an alarm on a telephone. I’m not that modern that it feels natural, but I manage. Anyway, I wrote a bit. The reason I did that was because my telephone battery had run down and I needed to charge it enough to make sure I had confidence it would last.

I selected 7.00 as the time to get up, took pain killers and went to sleep. At 6.44 I woke, annoyingly early, and was able, because of the aforementioned pills, to get a decent start.

I had to be at the surgery for 8.00 as I am once again in the hands of the medical profession. I will give no details as they do not show me in a good light. Basically, I have been self-medicating for the last two months and have finally had to admit I am not improving. Enter the Practice Nurse. That is the nurse who works at the GP Practice, not one that is trying to improve.

I thought I’d better point that out in case Donald Trump decided to send a medical ship to help.

Anyway, it all went well and it looks like I may be cured of my physical ailments in the next couple of months. The stupidity which led to me avoiding the doctor may take longer to cure, according to Julia, who is not very happy with me.

Wild flowers

Anyway, back to the point. To avoid disturbing Julia I used the torch on my phone to sneak into bed. While I was doing that I became fascinated by the torch. I mean, how great is it to have a torch that bright attached to your phone? It’s a tiny bulb too. I was so fascinated by it that I looked directly at it, dazzled myself, tripped and fell on the bed. This woke Julia up, which was both good and bad. Bad because she was a little irritated by being woken suddenly,  but good as it allowed me to tell her about how great my torch was. And because I didn’t fall on the floor.

With hindsight I may have been better just apologising and staying quiet.

The pictures are a bud vase Julia made from Zebra wood, with silk flowers in it, and the same bud vase without silk flowers in it. Also a random photo of summer flowers.

Neither the self-medication nor the waking a Julia were the worse things I did yesterday, I also sent of a set of poems to an editor by mistake, having already sent them to someone else. Editors hate that. I have written to withdraw them and apologise but so far have not heard back.

I also had a poem accepted this morning, but that’s a small bright spot in all the doom and displeasure I am accumulating around me.

 

 

The Line of Peas

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Hake and Chips in Cromer

I fell asleep in my chair last night, slept for nearly three hours, got up. went to bed, didn’t stop to look at emails or anything, and slept five hours more. At that point, just after 5am, I got up and started “work” as I call it. It’s taken me just over an hour to read blogs, comment and read emails. It’s 5.24 and I’m beginning to feel tired again. I also feel hungry. The diet must be working.

Overnight, I have had an acceptance for a haibun, the one I thought was likely to be refused. This is good.

Haddock Special at the Dolphin Fish Bar, Sutton on Sea

I also have a new pen. Julia made it during wood turning yesterday. She actually made three but one had an internal fault in the wood which, at a certain point, snagged on the cutting tool she was using and almost snapped it. Fortunately she survived without damage or injury, though the kit of pen fittings is now useless as some was already fitted and is not salvageable. That still leaves two – one for me and one for Number One Son’s birthday present. She’s getting quite good at it now and I have a pen and a pen pot to show for it. They are in the living room at the moment as my office is too cluttered to display such things.

After the Pea Soup yesterday, I moved on to reading some of the history of pea soup. I used to make pease pudding for Living History events and yesterday’s pea soup brought back many memories. Its modern descendent is, of course, mushy peas, as seen on many of my pictures of fish and chips. It’s nice to be part of a tradition.

Haddock Special at the Fishpan, Scarborough

 

Would Larkin call it Quiche?

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

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

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

I must guard against this effect when viewing my work.

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

Hidden Worlds

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

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

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Inspired by the life of Philip Larkin

(Published in Failed Haiku – February 2021)

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

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

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

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

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

Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

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

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

Photo by Roman Koval on Pexels.com

 

Poetry and Robins

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Robin - singing

Robin – singing

a robin
sings to its mate
when was the last time
I sang
for you?

That is my latest publication. It was a surprise, because I hadn’t ben told it was accepted. Fortunately I always check before sending things again, as editors don’t like simultaneous submissions. It’s in a German publication called Chrysanthemum. After waiting a while, I went to check on the website, assuming I’d been rejected but wanting to double check, and found the magazine had already been published and I am on pages 226 and 227.. It was a pleasant surprise. They also translated it into German. I knew this was going to happen, but hadn’t anticipated the different look (using capital letters) or the different dynamic that would come from what seemed to be a reordering of words.

Here’s the German translation.

ein Rotkehlchen
singt für seine Gefährtin
wann habe ich
das letzte Mal
für dich gesungen?

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

I just fed it into an internet translator and it put it into English in almost exactly my words. This was a surprise, and a superb effort by the human translator. I have to admit I was expecting it to come back seriously scrambled due to the changes in word order I could see and because of previous experience with internet translations.

I also had a haibun published.

Lesson not learned
Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once
a Roman town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then
rose again. So many empires, so many layers of dust telling one and the same story

dreams of
a second chance
— one more grey dawn

I’m not quite sure what happened in the edit as the title and last line have been altered in the published version. Altered but possibly not improved. What do you think? The original version is shown below.

Lessons we have not learned

Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once a Romans town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then rose again. So many layers, so many stories they could tell. So many men forget all empires turn to dust.

dreams of
a second chance
—one more grey dawn

Robin at Rufford Abbey

That means that in the first four months of the year I have made 30 submissions and 22 have resulted in acceptance. However, before congratulating myself, I have to remember that the 30 submissions contained 151 poems. Normally a submission contains three haibun or tanka prose and the submissions of shorter poems at often 10-15 poems. So when I say I made 30 submissions and had 22 acceptances this 77% success record could also be calculated as also only 15%. It all depends on how you look at it.

Robin

 

 

 

 

General Gleanings

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I found some nice stuff when moving things from one house to the next yesterday. Unfortunately, my feelings of joy were immediately dampened by a run of finding rubbish. The original plan was to leave that in Nottingham and have a skip to take it away. Unfortunately, over the years, things built up and became mixed and it’s become a lot harder to separate the two. This is particularly true at the moment, as I have a bad back and standing for extended periods can be quite trying.

The joy returned when I had an email accepting a poem. It’s a magazine that has published me before, but a new editor, who has constantly turned me down when acting as a guest editor at this magazine and at others. This counts as a small victory on two counts and validates the policy of increasing the number of submissions rather than cherry picking  the ones that are more likely to be successful.

The items were relatively modest, a battered white metal medallion, a worn coin and a 2d transport token.

The Nelson medallion is a membership token for the Shipwrecked Fishermen and Mariners Society. The Society was founded n 1839, so it post-dates Nelson by a few years. This one is dated 1882 and has a number scratched to the left of Nelson’s face – 3157. The slot on the top allows it to be worn on a ribbon as proof of membership. The charity was set up to provide lifeboats and support for shipwrecked sailors or their widows, orphans and parents.  They decided to give up the lifeboats in the 1850s and specialise in the care of survivors and dependents.

The coin is a 1 Franc coin of 1808. The mint Mark “A” seen to the right of the date denotes the Paris Mint. The 1808 A coin makes up 49% of the coin’s mintage and is thus the commonest and cheapest one. Added to its worn condition and this is a coin with a lot of history but not much else going for it. In 1808 Napoleon tried to extend the trade embargo against the UK and invaded the Iberian Peninsula, putting his brother on the throne of Spain and starting the Peninsula war, which would, in 1814, see Wellington’s victorious army sweep into France across the Pyrenees. Sic semper tyrannis.

 

The token is a 2d ticket for one of the Liverpool horse-drawn buses of the 19th Century, probably 1850s – 70s, but I still need to do a bit of work on that one.  This is quite a dark, well-worn specimen, which is good in this context, as somebody mde some copies a few years ago, which always makes me suspicious of examples in good condition.

Picking out the Nuggets

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Down to the museum tonight and three short talks on aspects of WW1 history. There is always something new to be extracted from talks, and in this case I came away knowing that the Germans only built 20 tanks in the war but captured over 100 of ours and used them against us. Strange, when you think how keen they were on them in the next war. We seem to have scrapped most of them after the war. The Imperial War Museum had one but scrapped it in 1922 and the Americans had one but scrapped it in 1942. That leaves just one survivor, which is in Australia. With hindsight it seems a strange way to treat  an historic vehicle, but I know we also scrapped several of our own in WW2 as we needed the steel.

Julia’s grandfather was a tank crewman in the Great War and survived without a scratch, only to be badly injured in the Coventry Blitz as an ARP Warden, as I’m sure I have mentioned before.

The one that should have been the most interesting talk turned out to be tinged with modern politics. Now, I don’t mind parallels being drawn, but sneering at  the people of 1914 for interning enemy aliens seems a bit rough. It’s easy to be wise in hindsight. Anyway, he clearly hadn’t done all the background research that I have when researching medallions and enamel badges – no mention of nationality legislation, or the Anti-German League, amongst other things. There are great gaps in my knowledge, as I am always aware when listening to specialists,  but it just shows how much you can learn as you potter about picking up snippets of information here and there.

To make it even better I had another acceptance today, which rounded things off nicely.

Robin. I went for a couple of old favorites tonight.