Found in Poetry

I had a poem published last week in The Writer's Cafe Magazine's 'Letters' issue. I enjoyed reading through the issue as I saw a few names I recognised, new and old friends, but also was introduced to some new names by their poems. The theme offered so many avenues for exploration and each poet seemed to find their own unique way. Thanks to The Writer's Cafe team for sharing my work and that of others.

My poem was quite fun to 'write' as it was a found poem based on a series of letters I wrote when I was 18 and had moved abroad to Norway. It was my first time living away from my family and my first time living in a foreign country. It has obviously set the tone for the rest of my life. It was amusing to read my teenage thoughts and interests again. I'm so glad my mum kept the letters. 

Found poetry can be a good way to kick-start your writing if you're in a slump. Find a text that inspires or stimulates you somehow and pull out the phrases and words that feel like a poem to you. The theme can follow the original text or it can veer off in whatever direction you want. 

Dave Bonta of Via Negativa has been following this idea with his erasure poems, a type of found poetry, written using The Diary of Samuel Pepys. An erasure poem lifts words and phrases directly and doesn't add or change anything to make the poem work. Worth having a peruse to see how he does it, simple but evocative poems appearing from old words. Of course, credit the original author and text.

And thanks to Dave Bonta by the way for featuring my blog on his weekly round-up of the Poetry Blogging Network. I wrote the paragraph above before I checked out his blog, so total coincidence that he is appearing twice in my blog. 

It was quite a shock to bumble upon my own words this morning on a blog I read regularly. I was touched to be included in this community of poets who are working to share their love of poetry and also their struggles with working in the medium. I've been following the links from Dave's round-up regularly and have added a few of my fellow bloggers to my reading list.

Other news in the week, another acceptance and lots of rejections. I'm debating applying for a fellowship, the Alpine Fellowship. It's a relatively simple one, no application forms, no justifying why you deserve it, no seeking references. Just submit your writing on the theme. But the poems I'm considering submitting are tied up with other submissions and they want unpublished work, so I either need to come up with something new or hope the poems are rejected in time by the magazines currently considering them. If they're not, I'll bookmark the Fellowship for next year and give myself more time to sort things. 

Lots of links for you to follow this week. Enjoy.

A Poem A Day and Blogging

If you had told me six months ago that I could write a decent draft of a poem a day, I would have said maybe as a fluke, but never regularly. I've always written very slowly, shaping and tinkering, but my recent online writing courses have taught me to trust my instinct and to just dive in to my writing.  Keeping writing practice as a daily activity helps to make it possible, like keeping the writing muscles limber. I've turned about 10 out of the 17 non-course prompts I've done into poems, some still pretty rough drafts, but some already submitted to magazines.

I'm finding my prompts from various places: newspaper articles and books I'm reading, places I'm at, websites that have daily prompts. I like to have someone else pick my prompts as otherwise I try to find ones that fit my preconceived ideas about what I should write about. I prefer when surprises appear in my writing. 

Reoccuring themes have been showing up, often to do with Scotland. I'm debating whether I want to add the poems I've written to my Scottish collection as they are part of the themes there, but while they're still being considered by publishers I'll just leave them. 

The poet Luisa A Igloria has been an inspiration in my daily writing. She has written and posted daily poems for over 8 years. She shares them on the Via Negativa blog which she shares with Dave Bonta who also writes daily. And while I'm sure she finds that not every one is good or worthy of publication, she has managed to produce four full length collection and 3 chapbooks and has won lots of awards in that time so it can be worth-while to write daily. I now have enough for at least one more collection after my Scottish and Finnish ones, but there's no obvious thematic flow so I'm not trying to put anything together right now.

Dave Bonta also does a weekly round-up of the Poet Bloggers Revival which I joined up. I'm not included in his round-up, but it's nice to read briefly what other bloggers are writing about and sometimes follow back to the original blog for more. It's interesting how he can often find themes stretching across the world to various poets. 

I'm quite chuffed that I've managed to keep up my weekly blogging this year. I might have missed one or two when on holiday, but otherwise, even when I was feeling quite low, I managed to write something. It gave me a goal to achieve, something to feel like I was still writing even when I couldn't produce a poem or a line of fiction. 

Less than two weeks before the kids finish for Christmas, so hopefully I can keep things going in that time and then ease down for the break. Take care.