Tag Archives: poetry

Feeling Pleased with Myself

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I am sitting here, and I admit that I am feeling smug, I have just sent off a first free verse poem since spring 2023. In some ways it isn’t a long time, but it was long enough for me to lose the knack and it has taken a couple of months to get back into the swing of it.

I must have spent a month or so wondering if the skill was ever going to come back. But if you keep writing, even if it is rubbish, you eventually get back to something usable.

This, however, is as far as it goes for now. There is a lot more competition for space in traditional poetry magazines than there is in the word of haibun and tanka and it could be some time before I see anything in print. At least I’m pushing up my number of submissions for the year.

It’s important to submit as part of the process of learning to do better. As I have said in earlier posts, I am poor at writing haiku. I’ve always struggled and although I don’t particularly like it as a form, I feel I should practice haiku to improve myself, and to improve my haibun. You don’t improve at anything by only doing the easy bits.

This one is The Prince and the Orange Toad. I have two characters in mind. One will be a handsome Prince, willowy and thin. The other will be squatter, and with an immense self-satisfied grin. I’m not sure how it’s going to progress yet, but that doesn’t matter, because we all know I talk about more projects than I ever begin.

Finally, three views of a small bowl that Julia has done using a piece of wood that somebody gave her.  It’s her first bowl, it’s quite small and it is designed for putting rings in at night. It has turned out to have a very interesting grain pattern, and the inside reminds me of the Time Tunnel.

 

Sotheby’s Surrealist Auction Sale

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Sorry I’m so late. I wrote some poems, cooked a massive pasta bake, read some poetry, did some research, engaged in small talk with No 1 Son and my sister and generally lost my grip on the day.

So the poetry I mentioned did not get posted and when I go back to yesterday’s post I will have to add a note to say I was late.

Here it is, first published in Quail Eggs Issue 3 December 2025.

If you have a few minutes go and have a look. It is a pleasant, peaceful place. Just in case you are like me – click on he bars o the left of the title and everything opens up. I confess it took me a while to work it out.

Sotheby’s Surrealist Auction Sale

Blue, orange, yellow, red – Warhol’s copy of The Scream. I could do that. Make a copy, steal his inspiration, expending no imagination. Was there a class at art school called Copy Campbells Cans and Make a Mint? The road to Hell is paved with good imitations.

Warhol’s version has an auction estimate of £2 – £3 million. Mine, I expect, would do to line a budgie cage or two. I can see it now, a captive canary – they are easier to paint than budgies – with my copy of The Scream and melting pocket watches draped around the place. Collectors with fortunes bid on a print of a stolen idea. Sensing value in something mere mortals cannot see.

The bidding dies, a new Lot is announced. A porter shows off an empty coat hanger.

“Lot 164,” the auctioneer intones – “The Emperor’s New Clothes . . .”

as a child
I wondered if my blue
was the same as
other people saw
sometimes I still do

More Speed than Usual

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Flying Scotsman at NVR

10.45. This is the crossroads of the day. Yesterday I chose to research and write articles, interspersed with reading blogs and replying to comments.  A poetry book arrived, which I skimmed and found to be good. I collected Number One Son from the station – we had tea and watched TV and caught up. At midnight I found myself lacking a blog post. Such are the choices we make. However, I did find time to read some articles on writing haibun. I have made notes as part of my new self-education attempt.

Unfortunately Mallard is not at NVR.

Today I have choices to make again. Julia and No 1 Son have gone off to town. They are travelling by steam railway, as the NVR passes within a few hundred yards of the house and goes all the way to Peterborough.


Photograph is borrowed from Country Life magazine website and Courtesy of The Estate of Steve McQueen/ Sotheby’s.

So, do I fritter my time away or do I set to work and produce something useful? Whilst searching for the NVR site I already browsed and found some new information. Checking the link for the book I noted a couple of openings for poetry submissions. Then I noticed that Sotheby’s are holding a sale of important watches. They don’t seem that important, though they are all well beyond my budget. One, worn by Steve McQueen in Le Mans, comes with a filing box of correspondence and provenance and the upper estimate is $1,000,000. That’s a lot of money just to tell the time. And it’s a lot of money for an undeniably ugly watch.

However, as a piece of film history, and part of the story of a 20th Century icon, it is also a priceless relic. Pricing, as we always said in the antiques trade, is as much art as science. Well, I did, I’m not sure about the rest of them.

Give me a million dollars and I’d be happy to go on a round the world cruise with a £10 watch. The cruise would be so much more relaxing if I didn’t have to worry about losing my watch or having it stolen.

The next post of the day will be a haibun on the subject of auction sales. (Sorry, the day got away from me and it was posted in the early hours of toady, which would have been “tomorrow” when I originally posted about “The next post of the day.)

Photograph is borrowed from Country Life magazine website and Courtesy of The Estate of Steve McQueen/ Sotheby’s.

Thinking About Doing Something

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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

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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

I Dream of Writing Thunderbolts

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I had an answer to the last of February’s submissions yesterday – two poems accepted.  Today, I had the first reply for my March submissions – two poems accepted. That makes 15 so far this year. As a percentage my acceptances are about 50%, but I’m submitting to magazines that have resisted me for years in some cases, so I expect it. It’s all part of the hardening process.

Even the presence of growing queues at filling stations couldn’t bring me down, though it did stop me becoming 100% happy. The world appears to be at war and I can’t do a thing to stop it. I could write a poem, but that probably wouldn’t make the lunatic warlords stop the war, even if I could write a veritable thunderbolt of a poem.

My Orange Parker Pen

And that’s it. I sat up late two nights ago, grappling with last minute submissions. I then got up early to drop Julia at wood turning. Last night I also sat up writing. Then  I got up early(ish) this morning to take Julia to the railway station. I gazed at my screen for a few hours and did some basic tasks, went to the doctor, came back and more or less closed down. Couldn’t concentrate and eventually fell asleep a couple of times. It’s not been one of my finest days.

I have to be off early tomorrow morning too, as I have an appointment with rheumatology a 9.30. OK, not terribly early, but early enough. One of the qualities I had in youth was the ability to bounce back after limited sleep. I seem to have lost that.

The good news is that I only have one submission planned for April. Sometimes it falls like that. I can polish something that has been returned this month and try it again. I already have a piece in mind from the batch that was returned this morning.

In that quiet month I can catch up, regroup and, I hope, write some quality stuff. Maybe that veritable thunderbolt of a poem is waiting to be written next month . . .

Deep down, I want to be Dylan Thomas and write this poem.

 

 

 

 

More Poetry

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My Orange Parker Pen

This is a tanka prose that was first published in Blithe Spirit 36.1, the journal of the British Haiku Society, in February this year. It is different from the original version, which was about eggs and lockdown and parents. This is about writing a poem and cooking eggs. It deviates slightly from reality as I mention coffee, where we always have tea for breakfast. Tea doesn’t really smell so I took the lazy way out and said we had coffee so I could add an extra sense to the poem.

But first, a tanka, from the same issue. It is based on the annual culling of the Christmas card list as my circle of cousins decreases.

old Christmas card
displayed again
fading slightly
sent by a man
who will not send another

I thought that’s what it was about, anyway. Julia reads it as a story about the Christmas card I have been sending her since 1988. It’s a good one and the message is still relevant. Why waste money, I ask, on another?

 

Life, seen in a Frying Pan

In lockdown, I decided to make better scrambled eggs and wrote a poem in my head as I stirred and learned. It spilled onto paper, took shape and, like the eggs, looked good. On the first rejection I checked all the words and moved them into better order. On the second I added an anecdote, on the third an allegory. At the fourth attempt I slimmed it down.

After five attempts I wondered if it might be bad, or if editors might dislike poems about scrambled eggs. When you think about it, it isn’t a subject you ever see. Eventually it faded from my mind, as poems like it often do. Recently, stirring eggs and making breakfast for my wife, I breathed in the toast and coffee smells and remembered the first line.

five eggs
two broken yolks
a speck of shell
things which are not perfect
still turn out well

The pen that Julia made at the wood turning group

The Glittering Prize

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The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords
F E Smith, Lord Birkenhead

I thought I’d quote Smith for the title, but make it plain I had done so. I didn’t want you to think I’d just nicked the title off the telly, though this is probably unlikely as I just looked it up and find it aired in 1976. hardly a current reference.

I needed a title with “prize” in it as I just won a poetry prize. It’s a poem of the issue award from Eucalypt, a tanka magazine. Every issue, they have two, chosen by the winners of the previous issue’s awards. I now have a commentary on my work and my subscription has been extended by an issue. More worryingly for a man with a very lacklustre education, I have select a winner from the next issue and supply a commentary for it. The one supplied for mine was insightful. The one supplied for the other winner was decidedly erudite. The one about mine used the word trochee. It’s something like 53 years since I last used the word trochee. I’m pretty sure I only used it once then.

As I grow in confidence as a poet I no longer worry about imposter syndrome and am sure I will mange to write an acceptable commentary. I can blog, I can write poetry and I can write about coins, how difficult can it be? I’ll need a few quotes to fill up the space but as long as I get down to it promptly I should be OK.

In the meantime, I should get on with my medallion presentation and making lunch ready for Julia’s return. The poem was a about the stripy shed on the MENCAP Gardens – that’s the pictures today.

I now, of course, regret not taking a photo of the whole shed instead of being arty.

24 Posts 26 Days

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I suppose the title gives things away. Despite all my good intentions this will be post 24, but it is 26th January. Two days have been swallowed up by that mad whirl of naps, TV and procrastination. I can pull two days back quite easily, so it isn’t a problem for now. Be prepared for two supplementary posts over the coming days.

I had an email from an editor yesterday, two more acceptances, bringing the total for 2025 to 55. I know numbers mean nothing, because it’s about quality. But at the same time it does mean I’ve been applying myself to writing and I carried the plan through.

It’s the same with a blog a day – it doesn’t mean I’m writing better blog posts but it does, I hope, mean that I will improve because of the constant practice.

The same goes for ideas. In the past I have hoarded ideas, ready for the day when I feel that stars have aligned and the day is propitious for one of my great ideas. However, theory, and reality, seem to indicate that the more ideas you use, the more you will generate. It does seem to work.

In other contexts, I don’t consider this a good thing. Every time I think about it I remember being in a meeting once where one aspiring volunteer (or aspiring chair, if the truth is told) said “My strength is having ideas. If anyone needs an idea, just ask.”

What still makes me grit my teeth at this, is that everyone can have ideas, but what you need on a committee is people who will work.

That’s the secret with most things. I can have all the ideas I like, but if I don’t work, nothing happens. That’s why quantity is important, it means you are doing the work which will lead to quality. And if you are doing the work and achieving the quality, you may, with luck, become good.

Sunset at Sherwood

 

A Nomination is Announced

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Leaves and frost – Wilford, Nottingham

I’ve just had a newsletter through from the Tanka Society of America, and in it they have a list of the people they have put through as nominees for the Pushcart Prize. Those of you who think I am called Quercus (which was a name I go by the accident of working for Quercus Community when I started the blog) will wonder why I’m bothering to tell you this. Those of you who know my real name will note that it appears on the list, and all will become clear.

Although I am quite pleased with it, it’s important to remember that it’s only a nomination. I have won nothing.  On the other hand, an editor (or in this case two editors) have picked me out as being the writer of one of the six best things they have published this year. Pleasing as that is, there’s a big difference between a nomination and winning a prize. However, like the Oscars, people do note in their biographical notes that they are nominees. This is handy, as I’ve never yet won anything for writing. In fact I’ve never been a runner-up either – just “highly commended”. Twice in twenty years. You will not find me mentioned anywhere as an overnight success.

Heron at Clumber Park

I did get into the Red Moon Anthology a couple of times, I also slipped out again, as you are only as good as your last poem.  The first year I was in, I worried about never making it again. The next time, I worried less, but it wasn’t a great year and I didn’t write anything good enough to be chosen. That was depressing, but also made me concentrate a bit more, so I have bounced back. Of course, the trick is making sure I keep the quality coming.

Pushcart Prize Nominations for 2025

November 25, 2025

The Tanka Society of America is pleased to announce the following nominations for The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses LI anthology, as selected by Ribbons editors Liz Lanigan and Susan Weaver.

For those of you who are interested, this poem was turned down three times before it was accepted and became my most “successful” poem to date.  I actually think I may have written better poems last year, but that is how it goes. I certainly wrote worse ones!

Robin at Clumber, Nottinghamshire

 

The Dog-Eared Page 

Stumbling, after treading on my trouser cuffs, I fall against the wall. I have grown portly, and my waist has dropped, making my trouser legs too long. It is a hazard of old age I had not anticipated and I, like Prufrock, must wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Balding, sniggered at, ignored by singing sirens, I stagger on a one-way trip through the strange country that is old age. I never thought, when I first read Eliot as a teen, that I was looking at a route map of my life.

the road ahead
is shorter than the one
behind
crowded with regrets
and tests I did not pass