Tag Archives: passage of time

Following Up and Bits & Pieces

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I was recently asked for a description of various forms of Japanese poetry. I think you should find all you need here.  There are links in that one, which is about tanka and tanka prose, which will take you to haiku and haibun. One of the tanka links no longer works. If I remove it I them have to change the text, so am leaving it as I am short of time and am not a perfectionist.

The real way to write poetry of any type, as I have said before, is to pick up a pen and start writing. Eventually it will need typing but you’re a blogger, so you can already do that. Then email some off to editors.

If they are accepted, you are a genius. Well done, come back and tell me how you did it. Then tell everyone you learnt it all from me.

If your initial poems are rejected, join the club. Write some better ones and send them off. Each rejection hardens you up to cope with rejection, so failure is useful.

This year I have made 44 submissions and have had 18 acceptances, 17 rejections and have 9 answers pending. It’s not such a good rate as last year, but I’m writing to more places rather than just the ones that suit me. The point is to do something new rather than rack up an impressive ratio of accepted poetry.

Orange Parker Pen

I am, as i have said, looking at changing things round a bit. It may not see me improving or becoming more successful but it will get me out of a rut and make me use my brain differently.

Meanwhile, Sunday brought two emails, one accepting a haibun and one accepting a haiku. The ones that weren’t used (six haiku and two haibun) can go into the submissions for the coming month.

I need one lot of 10-15 and one lot of four for the 15th of the month. I now have enough. It’s a help and takes some of the pressure off.

Having said that, I just went to look at what I need to do. Even with this progress I still have quite a lot of work ahead of me. OK, I have three weeks to do it in,  but I am at a funeral in Norwich later today and on Thursday I will be messing about delivering the car for repair.

My Orange Parker Pen. I just wrote a poem about it, as all my hints to parker have come to nothing. It was rejected. So I sent it to somebody else.

 

Struggling Still with Time

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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

 

A Blink of an Eye

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Boy Scout gallantry Cross – awarded for rescuing a child from a canal.

Suddenly a week has gone. I have posted five times in that week, once managing twice a day. It isn’t just a week that has gone, my enthusiasm, energy and organisation all seem to have departed too.

Briefly I could feel them returning after a couple of acceptances, but it all seemed to fizzle out again.

Factory ID disc for Chilwell Shell Filling Factory

If anyone else had written this I would now be shouting at the screen about showing some self-discipline or making the NHS sort things out, but in real life the solution is seldom as simple as that. Added to that there are all sorts of things happening such as a request to display medallions at the Numismatic Society tonight. They would like me to take down the  medallions I have used as the inspiration for the Facebook posts I have done.

The 1982 Chilwell medallion – end of an era

I really have enough to do without searching them all out and working out some sort of display, but that’s life isn’t it – a succession of tasks, often requested by other people, that have to be done before you can do what you really want to do.

I’m going to call an end to this post now. It has reached a natural finishing point. Three times I managed to get over 250 words, and three times I have pruned it drastically because I didn’t like the way it was going. It’s near enough 250 words and will be even nearer by the time I have concluded this ending. Pictures are the medallions that I have written about on Facebook.

Chilwell Tank Fund badge – raising money to fight WW2