Letting Out that Held Breath

You know when you've been holding your breath for a long time and you finally let it out and take a slow breath in. You realise how good it feels, it almost goes to your head, the beauty of it. Then someone comes along and kicks you in the gut, taking that breath away just for a moment. It hurts, but it reminds you that breathing is the best thing ever. Even so, you can't help holding it still for small moments because you're afraid someone's going to take it away again. Yeah, that. It's been that sort of complicated, exhausted week. But I'm taking the occasional deep breath and am ready to move forward full of new energy. Soon it will be easier.

I've continued with my two GloPoWriMo courses and am trying to write at least one poem a day. Some days I manage both, some like yesterday when I had my first day of teaching in forever I managed nothing. So today I made up by finishing one draft I had started and sketching another rough one. It feels good to keep the momentum going.

I had a dream last night that the publisher I sent my collection to last year had recently responded, but my email had a secret, unsearchable folder it was hiding things in and I couldn't read it. I hate my technology nightmares. Waiting a year for a response from a publisher is not unheard of, but it's so frustrating. I sent a query last month which I also haven't received a response from. I don't know if there is a problem with my emails or if they're just too busy to respond or what. I also don't know if I should send another query to their general email. 

I've sent my collection this week out to another publisher as I've kind of given up hope. I think it's the third publisher I've tried since I sent to the original one last year. To be honest, I've given up hope that my preferred publisher will accept it. It's been a tough year, especially the last six months and I did find myself clinging onto the hope of an acceptance, but I realise it was silly and I need to try other places, lots until I find someone who wants to publish it. So exhale and move on. 

Home Truths

Writing a poem a day or even two for GloPoWriMo means I often have to scurry around for subjects. I've been doing prompt a day since August and it's no surprise that sometimes the same theme comes up. I've had Brexit twice, mythical animals, smells, colours about four times, pets, ect. I don't want to rehash old subjects unless I can really see a new avenue to explore, so I'm not holding myself back from looking at ideas that maybe feel a bit too personal or too close to the bone if they pop into my head for a prompt. 

I've often avoided writing about my family, my childhood in the past, not because anything too horrible happened, but it feels like it's not only mine to use. Many of the people I could write about are alive and might take my delving into past moments they are connected to as an invasion of their privacy. Others are dead, but living members might not like their 'dirty laundry' being aired in public, however limited the poetry reading public may be. I don't use names, but I guess if you know my family it wouldn't be hard to trace relationships.  

I published a poem in my first book about tracing my family tree through rumours and the characteristics I felt were passed down from one generation to the next. I made the mistake of sharing it with my ever-opinionated grandfather. He took exception to most of it, but it may have been the fact that I pointed out that there was a trend of sons not talking to fathers, which included himself, though I didn't mention anyone in particular. 

The truth hurts sometimes but I don't want to avoid it. I don't attack anyone, go out of my way to hurt them and, of course, everything is my opinion and point of view, but I do want to be able to explore difficult moments even if they might not be comfortable for those involved or myself for that matter. I don't need to try and publish them if they're too raw, but I want to be able to write them.

So I've waded into my childhood a lot recently. I noticed a decade or so ago how my grandmother, maiden aunt, even my mother would spend a lot of time together just revisiting the past, the good old days, the people they knew, the food they ate. It felt like such an 'old' thing to do when I was so caught up in the now, but I can now see there is some comfort in going back to favourite childhood haunts or bringing back cherished moments. And it also widens my fodder for my writing material.

That said I'm stuck for both prompts for today. 

First Week GloPoWrMo 2019

I've started my double GloPoWriMo courses. I'm trying to write one poem in the morning and one in the afternoon, depending on time. Neither course has a theme, so I'm free to wander to whatever subject pops into my head. Again I'm not worried about finishing anything in a day, just to begin something, to shape it a little. I'm also not bothered if a theme doesn't grab me or if it's something like today when one of the prompts is 'your favourite colour' which I've covered in a couple of courses lately, so I'll just skip it.

I'm trying to work every day, but I'm surprised how missing one morning can throw me off. Not just because I'm a poem behind, but I can't focus as well if I try to fit it in between appointments and school runs. I like my slow start morning of reading the news, commenting on other pieces of writing in my courses and then posting my own work before starting a new poem. Anything else feels like I'm shoe-horning it in. As I've found with the kids, routines have their benefits to keep you focussed and on task. 

I was in Switzerland over the weekend, catching up with friends. I made sure I had some time just on my own to explore Luzern and to write. Spring is already well under way there, so it was lovely to just sit in the sun and soak up the city, scribbling whatever popped into my head. Primroses, wild garlic, violets were popping up in every sunny corner.  There's still snow in my back garden, though it's almost melted away. Even the birch trees in Switzerland were starting to affect my allergy, but it was worth it, just to get out for a bit. Chatting with friends and some new scenery has hopefully blown a fresh wind through my writing. 

I'm trying to do some rewrites after my mentoring session. It's going very slowly as I can't see a way to untangle one of the poems, full of Finnish terms. Again that problem of making sure they're understood in the poem without weighing the text down with explanations while also getting my idea across. I make a few small changes and then leave it to simmer. Hopefully it will all come together soon. 

Enjoy the sun wherever you are. 

Finding Balance

One word that kept coming up in my recent mentoring discussion with Angela Carr was 'balance' and it's a word I use a lot in my creative writing teaching as well. We as writers struggle to achieve balance in so many different ways.

A poem or story hangs on many fine threads; imagery, background information, action, language, emotion, and the author attempts to keep them all balanced between what the reader needs to understand the piece and what the author themselves desires of their work. If the language is too difficult to follow or the emotion not well-presented or if the writers tells too much, breaking the threads, the connection to the reader can be lost. 

A balance between what is presented on the page and what the reader sculpts from the words in their own mind. A balance between what the author wants the reader to see and what they can lay out with words. All these things carry the weight of the writing and relying too heavily on one or not giving enough attention to another can throw off the poem or story. 

Once I get past the initial rush to lay out images or the plot, I love the fine tuning, the balancing of all the finer points of writing, playing with the language, weighting words by their placement, drawing out imagery. I try to keep the reader in my mind, what they need, how much I want to lead them and how much I want them to run off on their own with my words. But also giving precedence to what I want the poem to do and say. It's a delicate act of balance above the poem while stepping within it. 

Sometimes it works and sometimes I focus too much on what I want, the 'thing' I'm trying to make the poem do that I force it into shape and it shows in its reluctance. This is when I need mentors, writing group companions and other readers to step up and tell me something isn't working. I find it so helpful to have these dialogues because I am mired deeper within my own writing than another reader and often I cannot see where the problem is, even though I may have a sense of their being one.

So even though criticism can be hard to take, it ultimately can help you achieve that balance your writing needs. But it's never easy. 

In other news, three online magazines have featured my work recently The Stockholm Review of Literature which I just stumbled upon, ink, sweat and tears and The Honest Ulsterman. The latter two I've been trying to get into for a while, so was overjoyed when they found something they liked. I'm still wandering through the issues and there is a wide variety of authors and styles to choose from, so I hope you find something you enjoy. Thanks to the hard-working editors and their staff for offering such great opportunities to get writers' work out into the world and for accepting my poems. 

Just a reminder that GloPoWriMo - Global (or National if you're in the US) Poetry Writing Month starts April First and runs the entire month. One of the challenges is to write a poem a day which until this autumn I never thought I could (see links for my thoughts on this two years ago) so I'm going to step up to the challenge, but because I'm an idiot I've signed up for two online writing courses in April - one with Angela Carr and one with Wendy Pratt, both of whom I've mentioned here before as I've done several courses with them. 

Both courses have limited places and are filling up. There is no pressure with either tutor to write a poem a day or to share them on their private Facebook pages (visible only to the writers on the course and the tutor) but they are guaranteed to have a good positive atmosphere and the daily writing prompts are a good way of getting your writing brain working. They both have a small fee, check out the links. 

I have no preconceptions that I'll be writing two poems a day, but I figured between the two daily prompts I should come up with at least one good first draft daily. And anything I don't manage during the month, I can use to keep myself writing afterwards. I hope you think about joining one of the courses or get involved with other GloPoWriMo events, check out the website listed above for activities, prompts and local events. 

Grounding

I've just had a discussion with Angela Carr in a mentoring session about grounding the reader in poems. She suggested and has anecdotal evidence of other poems/editors saying the same that the first stanza should ground the reader in the poem. By grounding I mean a good understanding of the who, what, where, when sort of details that the poem is hung on.

This idea caught my attention as one repeated comment I've had from other poets reading my work, until recently, was that I shouldn't introduce my poems so much in the first lines or stanza. That I should go for impact to grab the reader's attention and then ground them once they have an interest in the poem. They always seem to want to move the information further down or remove it totally because it was too 'telling'.

The same is said about novel openings, that the first lines and sections should grab your attention and then you can build up information from there. But with fiction you have much more space to develop these things.

I'm torn on this subject and don't have a clear answer for what is best to do. I did agree with my previous critics that many of my earlier poems did start off with a stanza that set up the location and feel of them poem and it left them feeling a bit staid and I have liked the pieces I've written recently that have more of a hook to pull the reader in. 

I'm worried a little that each of my Finnish poems would have to have the word Finland shoe-horned into the first stanza in order to ground the reader. I do rely sometimes on the idea that my Finnish collection is mostly set in Finland with me and my family as the 'protagonists' and similarly for my Scottish collection and that will be obvious when they are actually published collections, but in the individual poems this will not always be clear at the beginning if published in a magazine without background detail.

So I can see what she means. You don't want the reader to walk away with too many questions after your first stanza but I also don't want to have everything explained, sometimes it's nice for the reader to take the words and fit themselves into them, using their own experiences.

How much background info does the reader need? If I reference a myth connected to a creature, do I need to explain it to them or can I just use the imagery from it and hope if they're interested they'll look it up themselves, as long as my connections to the images and the myth work within the poem on their own. 

Yeats never mentioned Zeus in 'Leda and the Swan' and I remember a teacher having to explain the myth to the class, though I knew it. Does the power of the poem still hold if you don't know the story? I don't want to spoon-feed my reader info, but in some poems there are certain bits of info that would help the reader to understand better, so I do have to includ that. Do I have to explain every Finnish word or cultural reference, include a glossery in my book or can I leave some to context?

I need to go back and look at poets and poems I like to see how much info do they actually give when opening the poem and whether the details I want the reader to know to understand the poem come through clearly. 

It was a thought-provoking conversation and it once again highlights the benefits of having other readers critque your work, especially those with experience in the genre. 

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.

Ticking Boxes

I thought I posted this week, but I guess I didn't. Time getting away with me and I can't remember if I had an interesting subject to look at. 

My online course with Wendy Pratt finished and I've gone back to my list of verbs from Angela Carr's suggestions. I'm still writing a poem draft daily, I've written over 40 poems so far this year. 

I'm getting my second unpublished collection ready to send out. I've edited it once and need to look at layout again. That means spreading it out on the floor and moving things about, but I just can't summon up the enthusiasm just now. Struggling with things just now. I should be sending my first collection out to other publishers, getting this one ready to go out.

I've been researching poetry publishers and it's depressing. The smaller publishers want or are only able to support their local talent which I respect, so often aren't interested in international writers. The ones who are big enough are in such high demand they shut their intake of unsolicited  submissions. I can't publish locally as I can't find a Finnish poetry publisher that publishes English collections, again fair enough, but it leaves me in an unhappy position of once again not fitting the right boxes though I try and do what publishers require.

I can see why so many writers are turning to self-publishing, though I don't think I'm there yet. There's a plethora of writers who want to be published, but with e-books, Amazon and people preferring social media and television to reading there's not many publishers looking for authors and poetry is always a struggle to sell on both sides.

For now I'll keep plugging along and hope that some good news will be forth-coming.