Advice to Rejected Poets (and Storytellers)

 A poet posted on social media, asking if she should just give up trying to get published after a recent string of rejections.  

'Hang in there, keep trying,' said many in response. With which I do not disagree, but I added this:

Pardon me for sounding like an absolute barbarian, but –

When younger I used to get published often, even sometimes had editors of publications requesting submissions. Then I discovered blogging. I get many more readers this way! The circulation of even the most prestigious lit mags and anthologies cannot compare.

Maybe being selected for publication by someone else seems a sign that your work has merit? (Ignoring the fact that not all editors make perfect choices.) Well, you can do both, blog and submit – though many editors regard blogging as prior publication, so you have to be choosy about what you send where. But to me that just proves the point, that blogging = readers.

The cost is that you do need to interact with other bloggers in your genre, advertise your stuff on social media and so on – but that applies also to getting readers for other forms of publication, including your own books even if published by industry leaders.

International groups of blogging poets who post prompts and share work include dVerse, earthweal, Poetic Bloomings, Poets and Storytellers United (of which – full disclosure – I am currently Coordinator) and Poetic Asides. Google 'em. [But for anyone reading this here at my SnakyPoet blog, I've made links so you don't have to Google.]

I also like to post some things in poetry groups on facebook. Instant community, gentle feedback, and various opportunities for seeing latest journals to submit to or being selected for group anthologies.

What Do Poets Do In April?

For many of us around the world, April has become NaPoWriMo, National (really international) Poetry Writing Month, with the goal of writing a new poem every day.

There are daily prompts available at Poetic Asides, imaginary garden with real toads, a Dirty Thirty group on facebook, and NaPoWriMo itself. Or you can do it unprompted.

I like to play in the garden with the toads. Their prompts appeal to me more than some others (a purely subjective thing) and I like that they are a fairly small group, so the obligatory participation isn't a  chore – and in any case the poetry there is so much to my taste, it's a joy to read it all.

The poems I write are being posted on my poetry blog, Enheduanna's Daughter. You can see them all in sequence via the tag April Poetry Month 2019, with the latest appearing at the top; or you can subscribe to be blog by email (click the little block of horizontal lines to reveal the sidebar where this option is available, then scroll down) ... or you can just dip into the blog from time to time and see what you see.  Oh, and I am also linking to the poems on facebook ... if you happen to have access to my timeline there.

'Why do you need prompts?' my friend Rob Schackne once asked me, implying that there is more than enough in life and the world to inspire us anyway. But I like the fact that the prompts, by taking me in unexpected directions, can pull from my unconscious things that might not otherwise have emerged ... not in quite the same way, if at all.

Besides, it's fun!

Poetry Competitions

I don't usually enter them. I question the notion of competition in art – though I can see that, to many, big prizes and high recognition seem well worthwhile. (And then, every submission to a magazine or anthology is a kind of competition.)

I do sometimes take part in smaller competitions with no remuneration, such as those offered by Robert Lee Brewer at Poetic Asides. He likes to acquaint his readers with different poetic forms, and often gives us a month-long challenge to write in a particular form. I enjoy trying out new forms – some more than others – and trying continually for a month is a great way to learn.

I like that it's called a challenge rather than a competition. Although a number of poets take part, it's a friendly experience. Essentially, we're all challenging ourselves.

I'm not so anti-competition that I'm not thrilled to have been placed in the top 10 a few times recently!

In the Haiku Sonnet Challenge I came 7th, with Walking Around Town.

In the Dizain Challenge I came second, with Burning.

In the Trimeric Challenge I came third with The Peaceful Place and also 10th with Reminders.

New ebooks, new Amazon page!

How exciting: I have a new Amazon page! Click here to see.

This has been created in conjunction with the release of two new chapbooks which I've been working on for some time. There they are at the right, in my sidebar, look!

LIFE AFTER DEATH consists of poems I wrote in the first intense weeks after Andrew's death, chronicling the adjustment to such a radical change in my life.

THE IMAGINED OTHER is a series of somonka, love poems in the form of pairs of tanka, each pair forming a conversation between two lovers, like a call and response. They were written for a form challenge at Robert Lee Brewer's 'Poetic Asides' section of Writers' Digest. I wrote some by myself, taking both voices; the rest were collaborations with other poets.

These are very short books — but, I hope, not slight!

They are ebooks. I don't intend to produce them as paperbacks.

My Amazon page, set up by my publisher, surprised me in a couple of ways. For one thing, I found out I am included in a Bibliography of Australian Literature — but I am unlikely to find out what they say about me, as the volume costs around $80!  Next time I am in a major city with a major reference library, perhaps I'll check.

The other surprise was to find that my 2005 publication, SECRET LEOPARD, is selling second-hand for over $400! In fact that's the lowest price. Other used copies are selling for over $700! I assure you that neither I nor Amazon set those prices! And if anyone is foolish enough to buy at that price, I won't see any of the money. I did sell it through Amazon myself when it first came out, but it wasn't exactly a best-seller, and Amazon eventually dropped it. Now some sellers are evidently treating it as a collector's item. It's true there are not too many left, but until they run out you can get them from me at $10 each, plus postage. Clearly a bargain!

New ebooks, new Amazon page!

How exciting: I have a new Amazon page! Click here to see.

This has been created in conjunction with the release of two new chapbooks which I've been working on for some time. There they are at the right, in my sidebar, look!

LIFE AFTER DEATH consists of poems I wrote in the first intense weeks after Andrew's death, chronicling the adjustment to such a radical change in my life.

THE IMAGINED OTHER is a series of somonka, love poems in the form of pairs of tanka, each pair forming a conversation between two lovers, like a call and response. They were written for a form challenge at Robert Lee Brewer's 'Poetic Asides' section of Writers' Digest. I wrote some by myself, taking both voices; the rest were collaborations with other poets.

These are very short books — but, I hope, not slight!

They are ebooks. I don't intend to produce them as paperbacks.

My Amazon page, set up by my publisher, surprised me in a couple of ways. For one thing, I found out I am included in a Bibliography of Australian Literature — but I am unlikely to find out what they say about me, as the volume costs around $80!  Next time I am in a major city with a major reference library, perhaps I'll check.

The other surprise was to find that my 2005 publication, SECRET LEOPARD, is selling second-hand for over $400! In fact that's the lowest price. Other used copies are selling for over $700! I assure you that neither I nor Amazon set those prices! And if anyone is foolish enough to buy at that price, I won't see any of the money. I did sell it through Amazon myself when it first came out, but it wasn't exactly a best-seller, and Amazon eventually dropped it. Now some sellers are evidently treating it as a collector's item. It's true there are not too many left, but until they run out you can get them from me at $10 each, plus postage. Clearly a bargain!

Now I'm Writing Poetry for Children

At least, I hope so. As a former children's librarian, I know that writing for children is one of the hardest things a writer can do. The cardinal rule I learned is that a good children's book is one that adults enjoy too. The great trap in writing for children is to talk down to them. Kids aren't stupid; they can tell, and they hate it. I wouldn't on purpose, but what if I do it unconsciously? I'm not around kids very often these days. I might have forgotten how to talk to them.

But no. The way to talk to kids is to know that they're people. I've always got on well with them for just that reason. 'She meets them at their own level,' a kindergarten teacher said about me once — not so; I assume they are at mine. Children's author Michael Dugan advised that you don't necessarily have to modify your language —  it's the concept you have to get right for the age group. If children understand the concept, he said, they will understand the language.

Two of my poems from years ago, The Day We Lost the Volkswagen and Vagabond, have both been published in anthologies for schoolchildren. They were written for adults and just happen to work for kids too. My late great friend and mentor, the poet Barbara Giles, asked if she could submit them for the first of the anthologies and I agreed. (The second anthology asked permission after seeing it in the first.) Barbara then suggested I try writing for children  — 'at the risk of raising a rival', she said — and gave me the (usually unshared) name of her London editor who dealt with such material. But, what with one thing and another, I never took up her kind suggestion.

A while back, in response to a prompt, a fun thing bubbled up and wrote itself. The Bees' Knees was not specifically written for children either, and adults love it — but I saw that children would probably enjoy it too. And so, with Robert Lee Brewer of Poetic Asides hosting his usual November Poem A Day Chapbook Challenge right now, I decided to try for a book of verse for children. Already it's scary, at only two days in! But if I don't try, I might not fail but neither can I succeed.

It's uncharted territory. For sure children like rhyme and metre, but will they also respond to free verse? I hope so! My first poem of the series insisted on being written that way. The second topic lent itself to rhyme, and I managed a sort of rough four-beat rhythm.

And what age group am I aiming for? Who knows? But if it has to appeal to adults too, then perhaps I won't worry too much about that. Perhaps it can have broad appeal.

Many years ago now, I participated in a poetry reading in Hobart when I was visiting. The organisers graciously gave me the spot after the star, Gwen Harwood, who read something so brilliant and beautiful that the only way I could think of to follow it successfully was to change the mood entirely and do a punchy performance piece. I chose The Volkswagen. Afterwards a father brought his young daughter up to ask for my autograph. She was very excited because her teacher used one of the school anthologies it was in, and she loved it. A great moment for me — and it showed me that the publishers were right: the poem did work for kids. (She was maybe seven.)

I don't have to put all 30 poems in a chapbook, of course. I can't imagine that all of them will be good enough. On the other hand, as I don't seriously expect to win, I could add more poems to it if I like, and make it something bigger than a chapbook. I certainly should include the three I've mentioned above.

This leaves aside questions of where and how to find a publisher and market for such a volume. But first, let's see if I even have what it takes. I'm about to find out. Wish me luck, folks!

Half way through April, poeming month

There are many reasons why this blog is rather neglected of late.

One is that my Shifting Fog blog tends to have more day-to-day relevance — unfortunately. (And the fact that the situation described there takes up so much time.)

Right now, though, it's mainly because April is National Poetry Month in the USA, which of course tends to mean all over the world too. In the usual fit of madness, I signed on yet again to follow the prompts at Poetic Asides and am now churning out a poem a day. So the only one of my blogs that is getting regularly updated is my main poetry blog, The Passionate Crone. That gets updated daily!

There's good and bad about producing a poem every day:

Little time for tweaking and polishing — but revision is often best done after a time lapse anyway.

The sense of community is nice — though it's often hard to keep up with everyone else's pieces, let alone comment; a quick skim is about the size of it. Which is a pity, as there are some wonderful poems appearing.

The love life does suffer a bit. I am more likely to be staying up and poeming than going to bed with my man — and when I do get there, he's usually fast asleep. He is only grudgingly resigned to this, but after 19 years of marriage he kinda knows the score by now, when there's a big poetry push on.

I do end up with some good ones, which would probably never have happened without the prompts.

Poetic Asides publishes weekly prompts during the rest of the year. Why don't I do that instead (or even as well)? It'd be easier than this frantic pace. Usually, after the month-long poetry binges, I feel a need for a dry spell. Silly, really. I am making resolutions that THIS year I'll handle it more intelligently after April ends.

Meanwhile, on with the dance!

Poetry Screeches to a Halt

Mine, that is.

A year ago, someone told me about '30 Poems in 30 Days' happening throughout September at PoeWar.com (Writer's Resource Center). I participated joyfully. I'm still grateful to John Hewitt, who started it all, for the poems I produced and the friends I made. That was the beginning of a most prolific year of writing, often in response to other online prompts I found – notably another Poem A Day challenge during the month of April, this time instigated by Robert Lee Brewer of Poetic Asides. My Haiku on Friday profile became popular, and I was recently asked to create something similar on LiveJournal: Friday Haiku, which I then handed over to someone else to host. One of my favourite games is x365, in which bloggers write about people who've made an impact on them, one a day for a year, in the same number of words as their age – so I, for instance am writing 68-word portraits. My one regret about all this poetic activity was that I had trouble keeping up with my favourite poets on MySpace, many of whom are prolific themselves.

Finally the wheel turned and we were back to September. John started another 30 Poems in 30 Days, which I began enthusiastically. The prompts were just as good, some people I met last time turned up again, interesting new people joined …. but by Day 6 I had run out of puff. On that day, in fact, I posted a poem that was a few months old instead of writing a new one, then made my farewells from the project. And I haven't written a poem since. Even my 68x365 blog has been languishing, though I do intend to resume and will have to do some catching up. The only things I've still been able to write are the haiku. (And some people say haiku aren't poems anyhow, but a genre of their own.)

I thought I must be experiencing burn-out. I don't say I'm not, but I realise there's another factor. I've observed that, for friends of mine who have more than one vocation, things tend to go in phases. I know people who are both artists and writers. They'll paint madly for three or four months, then suddenly that will stop and they'll find themselves scribbling furiously for the next six. My own dual vocations are quite different: poet and therapist. During this year of being consumed by poetry, the therapist has taken a back seat. But not any more.

At the weekend Andrew and I did a course in Thought Field Therapy. We've been acquainted with this modality for some years now. Our teacher, Carol, was one of the first people in Australia to learn it. Soon after she became a practitioner, she told us about this exciting thing she'd done, we tried it out and then couldn't stop recommending it to people. That was maybe eight years ago, and at some point she went to America and trained as a teacher. At first we didn't think of learning it ourselves. We already had a number of excellent modalities, and when TFT was indicated, for ourselves or others, we had Carol and other friends whom she trained.

Now we've all moved a little further away from Murwillumbah, in different directions, and one practitioner has more-or-less retired. Suddenly the training called to us, and so we did it – and loved it. I had fully expected to love Theta Healing, which we also learned quite recently, and indeed I do love it. I had not expected to fall in love with TFT in the same way, but to my delighted surprise I did. By the end of the weekend I realised: oh, that's why the poetry dried up – I'm in a healer phase now.

I don't expect the poetry will stop altogether, just as I didn't entirely stop giving people treatments during the writing phase; but the focus is different for the next while, however long that may turn out to be. I'm so excited, I can hardly wait to get into it! I'm getting new business cards printed; I'm creating brochures, and new signs for the market stall.

And aha! Now I can indulge in the pleasure of poetry by reading rather than writing it. All those lovely blogs to devour – whoopee!

Growing up poetic

Nancy and Robert over at Poetic Asides , one of my favourite blogs, say they started out writing free verse and only later experimented with forms. For me it was the opposite way round. I was brought up on formal poetry, which my parents, grandparents, aunt and uncles all loved. So when I started making poems as a little girl, it was natural to give them rhyme and rhythm.

Below is my first poem, written when I was seven. Well, I didn't write it immediately; I made it in my head first, saying it over to myself in my mind until I had something I thought worked – which was quite quick really. Explaining my process at Writer's Resource Center, I spoke of training myself to hold lines and verses in my head when my kids were small, when I couldn't always get straight to pen and paper as soon as the poems started forming in my mind. I had forgotten until just now that that was how I started out. Indeed, 'forming in my mind' is always what happens first.

So here's that first poem:

When the violin leaves
whirl round and round,
when the violin leaves
scatter the ground,
then Jack Frost comes out
and throws snow all about.

My Dad asked me why 'violin leaves' and I explained that I thought the leaves I was looking at were shaped like tiny violins. My first metaphor! It was quickly followed by my lifelong urge to be understood. I changed the phrase to 'autumn leaves' and called the poem 'Autumn' so that it wouldn't need explaining. I still hold accessibility as one of the highest values in writing, and at the age of 68 am only just starting to soften that stance a little, to accommodate more indirectness and mystery.

What with the Jack Frost image, completely derivative, and the mention of snow – which I only remember happening once, briefly, in the town where I grew up – my alterations made the piece ordinary. I was happy, later, to put it back the way I first composed it, even though more people 'got' the second version. Accessibility's one thing, compromise is another.

My Dad, no mean versifier himself, took my poem seriously enough to have a conversation with me about the merits of 'violin leaves' over 'autumn leaves' and the spuriousness of my other images. Probably I'd have continued creating verses anyway, but his attitude certainly encouraged me. He made me feel that I had enough potential to strive for greater things.

At school I played a bit with the forms we learned about: ballads and sonnets mostly, and eventually some free verse. I didn't have much idea how to go about it though until a family friend, who wrote very formal verse himself, took the trouble to introduce me to the word and idea of 'prosody' and the techniques of scansion. He explained about the number of beats to a line, and patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. He showed me how to note metre on paper, and I still do it the way he showed me, with / for heavy syllables and . for unstressed ones, so an iambic pentameter (5 beats to a line, each beat having an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) looks like this, the way I write it: . / . / . / . / . /

I couldn't imagine anything better to be than a poet. To bring so much beauty into the world! When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always 'a famous poet', until eventually my father explained regretfully that a poet wasn't a thing you could 'be' in that sense and I'd have to find some other way to earn a living; and that, furthermore, very few poets ever became really famous. He opined that while my juvenile efforts were unusually good, he didn't know that they indicated latent genius!

Mucking around making poems remained one of my favourite pastimes, but by the time I was in my late teens I was convinced I could never be a 'real poet' – real poets were those other people, the brilliant shining lights who got published in books and literary magazines. I imagined their wonderful works were the result of inborn genius and divine inspiration; I didn't understand about the 99% perspiration. Nothing could stop me making poems, but as I entered adulthood it became my private indulgence. I seldom revised or polished anything. I was doing it just for me. But I still wanted to shape it; it was never just blurting stuff on to the page.

Poetic form is all about making patterns, so I started experimenting. I played with rhyme and rhythm, preferring a loose rhythm with a variable number of unstressed syllables to a strict meter – probably because I found it easier! I parodied popular songs just to get variations in rhymes and rhythms. I started making up my own forms (nothing very elaborate or innovative, I'm afraid) usually starting with a pattern of the number of lines to a verse and then looking at rhyme schemes and rhythms. So when I did finally try to go public with poetry, I discovered to my own surprise that I had given myself a good grounding in form while I thought I was just playing around.

I sometimes allowed people to see my very private scribblings, and they usually said they liked them. I was never sure if they were just being polite. One boyfriend told me it was like 'a diary in verse' because it was all confessional stuff, though we didn't know that term then. It was not until I was in my early thirties, the young mother of two small children, that I started asking myself why I was always restless and discontented even though I had everything I was supposed to want: nice husband, nice house in nice suburb, nice kids, nice career (in librarianship) which I was able to pursue part time while the kids were so young…. All that niceness could have been a clue!

'What more do you want?' I asked myself, and the proverbial lightbulb went off in my head. The thing I had always wanted was to be a poet, not just as a private self-indulgence, but really ... whatever 'really' meant. Well, one thing I knew it meant was being published. So I figured I'd better try.

That was a different game. In another post I talk about training myself more consciously by attempting every style of poetry in English to that date. (1975 if you must know.) At least, that was the intention. Pound's Cantos proved daunting, and by that time my own words, in my own style, were screaming inside me to get out. I sent some pieces to Nation Review, the most radical Australian publication of the day.

'These are too long for us,' the editor wrote back. 'Send us some shorter pieces.' I did, by return mail, and he selected four! I never looked back.