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.  

A Voice Not Taken

Last week was our skiing or spring holiday for schools, so all the kids were home most of the time, often with extras. I tried to keep up with my daily prompts, but  I didn't get a chance to blog. And while my writing routine was sadly out of whack, I did manage to write all except one of my poems some time during the day. The one I didn't manage is because I haven't thought of an approach to the prompt and haven't had the time to just free-form write about it until I figure something out. 

I've gotten a few rejections over the past two weeks, but no acceptances. One magazine The Seventh Quarry published two of my poems in their latest edition. Nice to have that drop into my post box, I just need to find some time to peruse the work.

I workshopped some poems in my writing group on Friday and took a poem that I had a very specific question about. The prompt I wrote it for was to use a photograph taken in a war zone and write a poem where we use the voice of one of the people in the scene. I chose a photo from the 1960s in Northern Ireland from this collection, where the family are all dressed up walking past razor wire and a British soldier with his finger on his rifle's trigger. I chose the young girl's point of view. 

The poem I wrote was ok, but needed some tweaking, but that wasn't my main question to the group. I wondered whether it was appropriate to assume to understand that person's feelings, thoughts and motivations from a picture and to write a poem in her voice. I felt uncomfortable trying to imagine how she must have felt, having no connection with the Troubles or Northern Ireland. 

One person on the course suggested it was cultural appropriate to put on these 'voices' without a true understanding of the situation and the people we were depicting. And I kind of get where they were coming from. It didn't feel right to pretend to understand that girl. I had imagined she was scared and worried and just want to grow up in a non-threatening world and while I probably wasn't totally wrong, but at that time there was so much going on under the surface that I could never truly comprehend. Maybe she felt protected by the soldier rather than threatened, maybe she agreed with their presence, maybe he was just like a policeman on the beat to her.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get my writing group to really discuss this subject really due to lack of time. In the end, I think I've decided to put the poem aside. It doesn't feel right, I wouldn't feel comfortable sending to a publisher in Ireland or Northern Ireland where I send a lot of my work. So it'll go into hibernation. Maybe I'll see a way around my issues at a later time. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for imagining to be other characters or to use other voices in my writing and have used imaginary characters or people from my family's past before. But this issue is so layered and sensitive and volatile that I don't think I could write from their point of view, just as I couldn't imagine being a person of colour or to have a disability or major illness and do them justice by pretending to understand what they were going through. 

It's an interesting prompt to try and take on the voice of a character other than yourself for poetry. We do it all the time for fiction, but poetry seems to lean more towards the intensely personal for the author. I would avoid attempting it with this sort of subject matter, but taking a mythical, fictional or historical figure or a totally made up character can help push your awareness of this writing style. Give it a try. 

Winter Warmer

I've been busy on Wendy Pratt's new course, but am also dipping in and out of Angela Carr's challenge to continue writing for 100 days. She's given us a list of 100 verbs and we can try and use them to write a poem. So some days I'm sketching out two poems in the morning. 

I'm still finding the Poems to Save the World course difficult. I'm not good on writing a social commentary or on current events, but I've managed a few that I will continue to work on. But I have a pile that I've set aside as dross. Maybe I'll have another look at them once these courses stop. I really haven't had much time for editing. Wendy's suggested finding a strong metaphor to hang our discouse on, but I'm struggling with that and having it feel so unpoetic, but hopefully I'm hitting a few marks with my writing. 

But I have had another two magazines accept my work, one online and one in print. Unbelievable really to have so many this early in the year. I'm getting used to online magazines, but I still prefer print. The rejections are still coming in and I need to catch up with my new submissions. I've had one publisher reject my collection as well, but these smaller acceptances are keeping me going through this long winter. 

Writing Out of Your Comfort Zone

Last week I wrote about getting caught up in a theme or subject in your writing. This week I want to look at how to push yourself beyond your interests.

Wendy Pratt's new online course 'Poems to Save the World' is looking at subjects that are culturally and socially important, connected with news and current events. I'm finding it very difficult to approach and feel often that I'm taking a negative stance on issues. I don't get wrapped up emotionally in news stories, so it's hard to write about a physical reaction I've had to a news article, so I've written about my lack of response, the feeling that constant negative news is wearing down my emotional responses.

This course is pushing me, to examine my place in the world and how I react to it, my interest in it or lack there of. And of course, how I can write about it. Finding ways to respond to prompts that aren't the kind of subject I would ususally chose is a good challenge for me. How do you make the stark details of news articles poetic? How do you find the poetic in things you haven't experienced but only read about or seen on the television or social media? How does news reporting affect how we view information?

So far I've not liked any of the poems I've written, they don't seem like poetry, but more reportage, feeding information to the reader. I need to work on this. 

My poem 'Book Editor at GOMA' was published in Issue 18 of Riggwelter, a monthly online journal. Check it out.

More good news, I've had 3 acceptences from magazines since the year started, that's just over a month. I can't imagine I'll keep up this momentum, but even if I could just a little that would be great.