Personal Reflections
With the pamplet due out soon I've been thinking on my 'poetry journey', for want of a better expression. I started this blog back in 2006 as a sideline to my pregnancy blog and as a place to showcase the many little poems that I'd written on and off since I was in my early twenties with the hope that it would spur me on to writing more and better poems. Well it did that! I removed those early posts a couple of years ago when I outgrew them but I remember my first couple of regular blog readers and how important they were to me in keeping me writing when perhaps I wouldn't have. I remember the first poem I had published, which seemed like a minor miracle! And now I'm so happy to have my very own pamphlet coming out. It's been a long process for me but it's always been about the writing, my first poems were total trash and my very first aim was to write a poem I could be proud of. That, in a sense, hasn't changed. I'm always keen to learn how writers write better because I want always to be progressing in my writing. It doesn't matter what stage you're at in writing, the aim, for me, is to get more out of the language, more out of a poem, to be learning always. This makes writing exciting and a continual challenge, I guess this is what I love about it.
8 comments:
You have indeed made progress- I'm really looking ofrward to your pamphlet.
thanks elizabeth! :)
Looking back at the poems I was so proud of when I wrote them I wonder now what on earth I must have been thinking at the time. But that was my goal too, to write a poem that meant something to me and that would stand the test of time. It took me 453 poems to do that and 452 pretty awful poems preceded that one. But I think what I was looking for more than anything was my voice. I remember watching The Glenn Miller Story on TV and the moment Miller found his sound: that made sense to me and when I wrote that 453rd poem I knew I had found my voice. 601 poems later I’m still going strong. I’m looking forward to seeing your collection. The main reason is that I’ve never read more than one poem of yours at a time and I’m keen to see how they come across as a body of work. Anyone can write a decent poem but a collection is another beast entirely. Only you will know if you’ve found your voice yet. You have a voice – I could pick one of your poems out of a line-up – but who knows how much you might stretch that in the years to come. You might even, as I found the need to, move towards prose if you find you have more to say than can be crammed into a handful of poems.
hi jim, the whole finding your voice has always been too abstact for me, I need something concrete, that I can analyse. I can definitely say I've found my own cues which I'm sure is the same thing as what people mean when they say they've found their voice. I've found my way into dealing with a subject matter, my approach. you'll judge for yourself how my poems hold together as a collection but I'm confident that it's not a collection of individual poems, I have my own recuring themes and obsessions and I've written enough poems to prune and prune some more the poems that don't fit with the collection. there are some poems I would have liked to put in but they stood out from the rest like a sore thumb. anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing what you think about it!
I think you're very individual. Probably that means the collection will 'hang together', but who cares if it doesn't? First collections, and second, third, fourth collections come to think of it, are often a series of individual poems. A poem is a poem is a poem. 'A collection of distilled verbo juices' in itself. To say that anyone can write a poem but constructing a 'collection' is a more difficult challenge doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Your date still on in Glasgow? Hope to be there to see you and Geoff.
thankyou shug! if it hangs together even remotely close to the way your multitude of collections do then I'll be very happy :)
I've not heard otherwise on the date so I'm presuming so. that would be great if you could make it and titus too, though it may be a little nervewracking having the glittering award-winning Penpont literati contingent there...!
i agree with Jim here, you certainly have your own voice, i can recognize your poems very easily, the imagery, even rhythm patterns! i know it is difficult to grasp this from your own perspective, people tell me similar things about my 'style' while i wonder what makes them to say that :-)
thanks roxana! :) oh yes, you have your own style...
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