The Post Hand-in Slump

The last couple of months have been quietish for me. One reason being I tripped over in August and have been suffering effects of concussion ever since, but secondly because I am in that kind of weird limbo space that comes after you finish writing a poetry collection. It's a similar feeling to what happens on courses when one finishes a project - at art school we used to call it the post-hand in slump. 

And slump is exactly what it feels like. It's a kind of no man's land for a writer. The big final push has been made and the  project has been finished. Most of the edits are done. It's a waiting game then, and there are months (years sometimes) before the book becomes real. And usually at this point there is no real writing to be done - in fact, if I hadn't been here before, I might think I might never write again! I've just looked it up and Google tells me it's post-project depression - and adds that it might be necessary for replenishing our batteries before we plunge ourselves into another project. It makes sense I guess. 

It does feel like a kind of limbo though - that space between finishing a book and it coming out - with some publisher's that gap can be years. I guess I am lucky that my wait is not quite that long! There has been some movement today though - the first endorsement (for the cover) came through, and it was more than I could have hoped for. Also this week artist and designer Natty Peterkin sent some potential cover images over to my publisher and my editor liked the same one I did. These are the little things that help it feel real - that there might really be a book at some point. 

The value of writing workshops and courses

I have heard a lot of criticism levelled at writing workshops and courses and I would like to set out my case in their defence - and not because I run workshops, but because as a writer I find them invaluable.

I have spent the last couple of years (well longer really) working on a collection loosely themed around grief and loss. I was lucky enough to get an Arts Council DYCP grant last year which enabled me to take valuable time away from earning a living to write, to travel to Wiltshire to revisit where my mum is buried and I was also able to participate in two different Arvon at Home weeks.

Sometimes my students and mentees are surprised when I tell them that I feel it is important that I still attend workshops and writing weeks. I think they imagine that by book four you will magically have the formula for a good collection at your fingertips. Not so. The truth is that despite doing research - reading around my subject area (loss/grief themed poetry, fiction and non fiction) and attending a course about grief - I was still left with myself and my own style of writing, my own preoccupations. Although I had written some poems I was happy with I had come to a point where anything new I was writing felt a bit samey. and there were also one or two events that I wanted to write about but hadn't managed too. One of these was my mum's funeral and the other was the trip I had made to where she was buried - when there my friend and I had immediately seen an enormous hare followed by deer - this had felt like some kind of sign, but for the life of me I couldn't write about it. What I needed was for someone to rattle my cage, to jolt me out of my comfortable writing rut.

The bones of the title sequence 'Grey Time', came out a zoom prose poem workshop with Carrie Etter. I started writing it in the workshop and just couldn't stop writing for about an hour afterwards. Sometimes an exercise, a poem, or something someone says can just unlock something in your head. 

What those two Arvon weeks did was to give me me new ways to approach my subject matter - new ways into writing. In the first of the weeks Rebecca Goss introduced us to a recent form called the centena - a poem of exactly 100 words (excluding the title) opening and ending with the same three words. This tiny form proved to be exactly the kind of container I need to talk about my mum's funeral. It might sound counterintuitive but sometimes a tight writing constraint can actually be freeing. I surprised myself!

The second of the two courses was with Tara Bergin and Yomi Sode and was looking at ways of using research in poetry. This course yielded a massive harvest for me in terms of moving my book forward. Tara's writing exercises are very complicated, but precise, and this somehow opened up mind to possibilities and ways of writing. I was able to bring to the table things that I might never have considered using - map references, references to art works etc. I did a lot of research and reading that week - none of it specifically about grief, but all connected to things I was trying to write about. I wrote a lot that week - all of it surprising, and several of the poems have become the backbone of the collection. One of the components of an Arvon course is that you get a tutorial with each of the tutors and this was really fruitful for me too. Yomi offered me some excellent editing advice on the poem that now opens the collection and Tara made a suggestion that changed how I thought about the collection entirely. I had a sequence of prose poems that ran over two or three pages - just a couple of line breaks between each one. Tara suggested that they each needed to be on a page of their own. This blew my mind - I knew immediately that she was right, but it meant that the sequence would run over nine or ten pages rather than two. This meant I would need to take  more poems out. I was reluctant to do this at first, but realised as I was editing that I needed to take out everything that felt that didn't feel like it fitted with my main themes - loss/grief/, violence, motherhood and neurodivergence. This sounds like a wide remit but actually the themes really feed into one another - the main thrust of the collection being different types of loss. I took out a lot of poems but the result is a collection that feels much more coherent. 

I want to say here that workshops and courses aren't always entirely pleasurable. Sometimes they push you into uncomfortable territory. Sometimes exercises seem pointless or you feel resistance to them (the ones I resist most usually yield the best results), sometime they make my head hurt - but in a good way - because I am learning and being pushed out of my comfort zone. As a writer I feel I need this otherwise I would just write the same book over and over again. Yes, my preoccupations may be the same but challenging myself gives me new ways to come at them, new insights, new ways of working. Hopefully the results are worth it.

girl was born - an exploration of a poem

I was recently asked to write some background to one of my poems and explain why I used a particular form for it. It is interesting going back to a poem and trying to remember the intention behind it. I couldn't remember when I wrote the poem - except I knew it was before I moved house in 2021. The intentions were clearer to me and the reasons I laid it out as prose poem with slashes. I will share the poem and what I wrote. The poem is from my book The Telling.

girl was born

girl was in the world / her mother was a horse / and her father was a pony / or was it the other way round / girl never knew when a day would turn sour / the world was a farmyard full of plastic animals / the houses were wooden / tiny painted rectangles for windows / nothing to look out from / girl looked out of her rectangular eyes with longing / girl reached for quiet / she reached for making sense / the words danced themselves up and down on the page / until finally she understood them / girl was born too late / or too early / she became a sister / then she became a sister again / she ran up the slippery stairs two at time / she jumped down them / girl was a ratty tennis ball / somewhere along the way she lost her bounce / girl was born a second time / girl was born of the woods / her father was a pine tree / her mother was a bramble / the house was full of midges / there was no way of returning to where she had come from / she picked up a twig shaped like a gun and aimed it

I wrote this as a stream of consciousness piece. I was thinking about how it felt like I had two different lives as a child. The first life from birth to three years old where we lived in a bedsit in my mum's friend's house in London (Ealing) - the friend had three kids, a dog and was a dress maker, the house was always busy. And then the second life when we moved to Thetford, a small town in Norfolk. There we had a two bedroom council house and I was the only child until my sister was born two years later. In Thetford the house was quiet. During the day it was just me and my mum. We lived opposite a pine wood - that wood was a big part of my childhood and often creeps into my poems, as does the pine forest that Thetford was surrounded by. I was a bright (some might say precocious) child (I was also neuro-divergent but we didn't know that then). I refused to go to nursery and also insisted on learning to read when I was 3 or 4. I learned using the Dr Seuss books. I was also a tomboy - preferring cars and guns to dolls. 

The poem is about a girl trying to make sense of the world around her. The objects (such as toys) become anchors or signs to steer by. Sometimes the separation between the girl and the object becomes blurred. I have always imagined people as different types of animal and object and vice versa. It helps me to make sense of things and is probably heavily influenced by the types of book I read as a child - fairytales, Tolkien and Enid Blyton - books where animals and trees talk and the most surprising and surreal things can happen. 

The order of the poem is not logical, it is not a linear chronologically ordered narrative. Memories are generally not linear - one memory can spark another and another. I knew it would probably be a prose poem as I was writing it. I like the density of a prose poem and the way it can keep that stream of consciousness feel. When it came to editing it, using conventional punctuation like full stops and commas felt wrong. Commas and full stops made each thought (each segment) feel too final, too separate somehow, but I still felt like I needed to break up the text with more than just a simple space. The use of the space in place of punctuation feels (to me) like it slows down the speed at which one reads the text. I like the use of slashes in poems - it feels like each slash is a momentary pause in thought - but exactly that - momentary, the eye moves on fairly quickly as the text feels more cohesive than if it had gaps and line breaks. It also means that you can break the syntax of the poem in unexpected places (a little like enjambement I suppose). I like this and when I read the poem out loud, I do read it with these tiny breaks. It might sound a little jarring at first, but I like this - it feels right for the voice of the poem.  Natalie Diaz says of her slashed poems "I hope they make the readers’ eyes uncomfortable, that they physically and musically express the disjointed, jagged experience explored in the poem."

You can buy my book The Telling from Nine Arches Press - https://www.ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the-telling

First Draft of New Collection

I am working on my third collection, or what I should say is that I am struggling with my third collection. I have cut the poems down by two thirds. I have put them in an order that I like and makes some kind of sense to me but I still have way to many. At the moment I have 117 A4 pages which is way to many.

I thought it might be helpful to go back and look at what Threat looked like at this stage in the process. The second draft of Threat looks nothing like the finished article. The order is different and I counted thirty-six poems that didn't make the final cut - THIRTY-SIX! This is reassuring but also a bit daunting. There are some big decisions to be made. With my last book I was lucky enough to have funding for some mentoring but I don't have that luxury this time. I need to really interrogate each poem to make sure it is earning its keep, to check that I don't have several poems that are doing or saying the same thing. It is exciting. It is scary. It is exciting and scary!

Threat - New collection published May 30th

"Forensically detailed and disturbing, the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small town lives seeps to the surface of these unsettling and visceral poems."
If I had to sum what Threat is about in one short sentence, it would probably be - that which makes us human.
Threat has been a long time in the making. Some of the poems were written before my last collection was published. Some of them are much newer. When I started putting the collection together it was tentatively titled Hometown. As it turned out that title had already been taken by the marvellous Carrie Etter - but as the collection evolved it seemed that it was growing beyond its town boundaries and that a different title would be more apt. Threat was the title of a poem in the collection - the poem itself was edited out but the title remained - it just seemed to perfectly fit the themes and concerns of the book. As a collection I am both proud  and a little terrified of it. It feels incredibly exposing - the poems feel personal - and some of them are - though others are not - or rather bits of them are - there is an overlap, always, between lived experience and fantasy - or rather my lived experience and the experiences of other people. Like Sharon Olds I feel I can't claim all the experiences as completely or directly mine.

"Poems like mine - I don't call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong- doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine 'apparently personal'. Or in my case apparently very personal." (Sharon Olds, The Guardian, 26th July 2008).

There is some sense of working out or through some difficult stuff  - but equally the narrator is trying to put into words or make some sense of experiences and feelings that might ring true for other people - experience such as human fallibility, loss, familial dysfunction (which we all experience to some degree or another), what it feels like to live in the human body, what it feels like to be an adolescent girl in a small town, ageing etc. I hope the reader is surprised by where the collection takes them - just as I was surprised at where the writing of it took me. It certainly visits some dark places but ultimately swims back up towards the light. There is a playfulness in this collection too - that I feel Bird Sisters perhaps lacked.



The cover art for the book was done by artist and graphic designer Natty Peterkin. I knew I wanted to use an image of Thetford forest as part of the art work but other than that I had to let go of control and let Natty run with it. Natty read the book several times and decided that he wanted to make some kind of painted semi abstract shadow creature part of the image. What he came up with is perfect - is it a man? Is it a beast? Is it a teddy bear? We just don't know.

Threat comes out with Nine Arches Press on May 30th and is available for pre-order now.

Julia will be launching the collection at Cafe Writers in Norwich on June 10th with Helen Ivory and at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden on July 19th with Jessica Mookherjee.

Collection Update

Over a month since I last blogged and a lot has happened.

Firstly I went away to a little chalet on the Norfolk coast that has no internet and spent several days finally getting the new collection in an order that I was relatively happy with. There is a kind of magic that happens when I am away from home alone, and that coupled with the fact that I was mid way through NaPoWriMo meant that as well as working on the collection order I also wrote a whole new sequence of poems. The new sequence is very different so it won't go in the collection I am currently working on - it may be a pamphlet in its own right, or it may turn out to be the beginnings of another collection - only time will tell. I am quite excited about it though.

I did finish the ordering and then last week I went to Rugby to meet with Jane at Nine Arches HQ. I have to admit I was more than a little nervous in case she didn't like it. Luckily she did! We spent a very intense and productive day going through the collection poem by poem - the upshot was that the order is now pretty fixed. We took thirteen poems out and I need to find or write something to bring together the final section. I am very happy with it. There is still a bit of work to do - but it doesn't feel insurmountable. We settled on "Threat" as the title - which was the title I have liked all along - but we took the poem of the same title out as it is not strong enough to bear the weight of being the title poem. Publication date has been set as end of January 2019. Very exciting.

collection as an entity in its own right - making sense of chaos

The second day of NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) and today marks a long awaited return to thinking about my collection. At the beginning of March I went to see my mentor (Pascale Petit) in Cornwall and I have avoided looking at it since. I had thought it was finished and I had shown it to a friend who also thought it was finished. Pascale, however, didn't agree. She felt that the title was misleading and that I needed to rethink the sections and put a different poem as the opener. She was right of course, it is just uncomfortable to hear and involves a major rethink of order. Since I saw her I have been engaged in a period of busyness, creative procrastination and avoidance, but of course while all that is going on the subconscious mind is worrying away at the problem.

Today I started really thinking about the order in earnest. Pascale was definitely right about the poem she suggested as the opener. I realised that I have  been resistant to putting it first because it feels more scary, as of course it sets the whole tone for the book. Aside from that I am still nowhere near knowing how to reorder the poems. This morning I spent some time looking at some of my favourite collections (All My Mad Mothers, What the Living Do, Falling Awake and Say Something Back) to see how they are ordered. I also re-read Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems, which is a book I read when I was working on my first collection. One of the things I realised from reading it again is that maybe I have been too obvious in clumping themed poems together - for example family poems, relationship poems, home town poems etc. I may need to be more fluid in my connections and find other ways that the poems speak to one another. Originally the book was divided into five sections, the titles of which were: Honey Don't Blow Up the Kids; Heart is where the Home Is; Tell Me More Lies About Love; Family and Other Distractions; and Evidence of Body. I may keep a couple of these in some form but I am not sure yet.

To help me think about order I started thinking about what the themes are in a less overt way. This is what I have come up with so far:

body as an entity in its own right

body as a house for the soul or spirit

body as commodity (that which we have become)

grief vs guilt

making sense of the past

making sense of emotion

the physical weight of the past

class and the struggle to know where/how/if one fits in

the family as guardian and destroyer

self vs identity

the curse/blessing of femininity (woman and her relationship to the world)

hometown (where do we come from/where do we really belong?)

Of course some of these overlap one another, but I am hoping it will help me think about how the poems hang together. I have also started writing more bits that may help tie it all together. I had also been waiting to see if a sequence I started in Devon was good enough to go into the collection - it's always wise to get a bit of distance between writing something and deciding if it actually has legs. It is too easy to get overexcited about something fresh and think it is the best thing you have written. I think this sequence is good enough though and including it will change the shape of the whole, which is probably a good thing. The hardest thing will be saying goodbye to a few poems that I am fond of and that have already been published. Never easy but it will make for a better MS in the long run.

My plan now is to work some more on order and fitting the new poems in and then make a date to meet up with Jane at Nine Arches Press, who has brilliant editorial eye.

Read about ordering my first collection here

A few thoughts about the use of language in poems

Language is glorious isn't it? For the last few months I have been fascinated by colloquialisms - those cliched sayings (often metaphors) that people use all the time in everyday speech. This morning, for example, I am obsessed with the phrase "the whole kit and caboodle." Looking it up on the internet I can find several different definitions and roots it stems from - but actually that's not what interests me about it. What I love is the sound of it. The shapes it forces the mouth into when you say it out loud. The images it conjures when you put it into the mouth of someone in a story or a poem. You can instantly imagine the type of person who might say it. In the poems I have been working on for my new collection I have slipped in a few of these kind of phrases. Yes they ARE cliched, but they are also the language of everyday speech and using the language of the everyday can make poetry more accessible. I think one can occasionally get away with using a cliched phrase when it is done deliberately and for a good reason. When you can't get away with it is when it is simply down to lazy writing - the phrase is used because it was the first that came to hand, or worse still - you hadn't noticed it's a cliche. Well I think I have got away with it. I guess time will tell.

Another thing I like to do is make up words or run words together (I got my class to write poems where they joined two words together and now a couple of my students are obsessed with it). I did an exercise from Helena Nelson's How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published which asked me to make up a word and use it in a poem. Making up a word is surprisingly difficult but it is fun to try. In the end I made up several words and used them all in one poem. For me it helped that I had an idea of the poem I wanted to write using the word and I wanted the word to sound wistful. You can read my poem here on Amaryllis. I think I can get away with it because it is one poem - although if I did it too often it could feel tired or gimmicky. For me the excitement of writing poetry is being able to constantly reinvent style and try out new things. I am influenced by what I am reading of course (both prose and poetry) but also by what's going on around me and by the world in general. I was reading a poem by Lynn Emanuel this morning (from her collection Then Suddenly) where she compares prose to poetry and she pretty much summed up how I feel about it (and why I have never finished my bits of novels). In poetry you don't need all the detail - the reader does a lot more of the work of getting from a to b themselves. "So please, don't ask me for a little trail of bread crumbs to get from the smile to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the death at the end, although you can ask me a lot about death. That's all I like, the very beginning and the very end. I haven't got the stomach for the rest of it." (Lynn Emanuel 'The Politics of Narrative')

Arvon and a tentative return to form

It has been a busy couple of months since I last blogged. In November I went on an Arvon course at Lumb Bank. The course was called The Difficult Second Album and was aimed specifically at poets writing a second collection. I had been looking longingly at it in the brochure on and off all year, knowing that there was no way that I could afford it. However in September I decided that I would ask them for a grant - assuming they would say no - they said yes, and then I got my Arts Council grant and that paid for the other bit and the train tickets.

On arrival I was initially disappointed to find that Helen Mort was too sick to come and that Bill (Herbert) would instead be running the course with Tara Bergin who had originally been the planned mid week reader. Tara stepped in as tutor and Kim Moore took her place as midweek reader.

On the first evening we were asked a series of questions about our own writing practice (things we were happy or unhappy with, things we might want to change) and about the collection we are working on, these were questions to take away and think about during the week. This was extremely useful. I found that during the course of the week some things had begun to shift in the way I was viewing my collection and how the poems were working together as a whole.


In the morning workshops the tutors gave us lots of exercises that were designed to take us out of our comfort zones and our usual go-to ways of writing. All the exercises were fun but some were quite challenging. I found that even if I didn’t produce anything immediately usable I was almost always left with the beginnings of something to work on later. These exercises gave me some new approaches to my subject matter that I will definitely take forward and use in my collection. I produced several poems during the week that once edited might well go in the collection too.


The tutorials that I had with Tara and Bill were immensely helpful. Bill provided interesting ideas on ordering of lines and stanzas within individual poems. We also had a really interesting discussion on how the poems (and the voices of the poems) were fitting/working together in the collection as a whole – ordering the collection is something that I have been struggling with so this was really helpful. I have come away with new ideas on how to approach this – for example I am now planning to break up a sequence of poems that had previously been clumped together and use parts of it between the other poems in the book to tie them together thematically. Tara gave me some really useful ways of thinking about and owning difficult subject matter and on how to tap the power of particular poems. She also gave me a very helpful suggestion about retitling a poem to make it more alarming and powerful.

The group was lovely and right from the beginning it felt like a very supportive and creative atmosphere to be in. I came away from the week invigorated and inspired - and sad to leave the hills and my new poetry family behind.

Of course once back in everyday life it is hard to keep up the momentum. I have managed little bits of writing though, and this week I found myself writing a specular. The specular is not a form I had been particularly drawn to before, although I had written one - or rather made one (from bits of John Berryman's letters to his mother) during my week at Lumb Bank. I have been using a lot of repetition of words, phrases and lines in my recent poems - although not using strict forms. I have been using some rhyme as well, which is something I am not usually a fan of. It is interesting to me that I am being drawn to rhyme and repetition. I have often felt a real resistance to writing in form in the past. I like the way a specular can change the meaning of what has previously been said and bring new insights into the subject of the poem. I am now beginning to wonder if I will end up having anything like a sestina or villanelle in the collection - some of the repetitive poems almost feel like they could be in one of these forms - however where the subject matter is very chaotic it felt more natural that they were almost in form but not quite, so that the poem becomes as dysfunctional as its subject matter.






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Self as Hometown (or hometown as self)

The idea of hometown is something that I have been exploring in my writing recently - exactly what hometown means to me, where my hometown is, what it is/was like, what effect the environment that I grew up in had on me etc. I have often found myself perplexed by the term hometown - people often ask me what my hometown is and I am never really sure how to answer them. Is it the place I was born, the place where I spent my formative years, or is it the place that I have lived in for the longest amount of time? Or is it the place that I am most drawn to - the place that feels like home? In these migratory times I suspect that there are many people who feel just as rootless as I do. I rather envy people like my son, who was born, grew up and still lives in the same place. I usually answer the question by saying where I grew up, the place where I spent my formative years. This is the place that I am revisiting in some of the poems for my new collection, not just the place itself, but the people and the attitudes of the place and time. Hometown also suggests to me the idea of self and selfhood, as if the self is a type of hometown whose streets and borders change over the years much like those of a real town. Buildings are knocked down and newer modern ones are erected. The self, of course, operates within the language and parameters of the actual hometown. It is, when one starts to examine it, a many layered, multi-faceted thing. And, of course, our recognisable self begins to be formed in our hometown during our formative years, it is moulded by our families and schools, the people we meet and the experiences we have - both good and bad. I am not sure exactly where the collection is going to go, but I am finding it an exciting process getting there. 

The Difficult Second Collection

I am working on my second poetry collection. I have been working on it for what seems like a long time. Writing poems is not the problem for me, I have pretty regular flurries of writing. The hardest part, for me, is putting the collection together - deciding what order to put the poems in, where the gaps are, what to leave out.

The trouble is that it is hard to always be objective about your own writing. I think that I am fairly objective when editing. I am good at taking on board criticism and responding accordingly. I am actually a pretty rigorous editor of my own work - I edit and re-edit. I am always tweaking right up until publication. But viewing the poems as a body of work that work together as single beast is quite another thing. I had a few nights away earlier in the year to try and get to grips with it. I ordered the poems, then I re-ordered them, and then I ordered them again. Then I gave up and started writing. By the third day (when it was almost time to go home) I had started writing a sequence. I think that the sequence is going to be important to the collection, but I haven't had the mental space to get much further with it at home.

One of the things that happens if I am away on my own is that I get into a creative rhythm. It takes a few days to hit it - usually around three. I have to do a lot of reading and a lot of mediocre writing, then suddenly I hit my stride and I am away. When I was writing my first collection I had a week away in Wells-next-the-sea. I thought I had gone there to work on ordering the collection. What happened instead was that I wrote one of the major sequences in the book. It is rare that I write proper sequences at home. I don't have the time or the mental space that it needs. I don't have a designated workspace. I have work and demands and noisy neighbours and all the day to day stuff that I am able to put aside temporarily when I am away.

I have applied for an Arts Council grant - one of the things I have asked for is time away to write.

Wenlock, Books and Beyond

I am reading at Much Wenlock Poetry Festival this weekend as part of the Nine Arches Showcase with Abegail Morley and Isobel Dixon. Excited but nervous is probably the description that bests describes how I feel about it. A friend of mine suggested that I blog about the experience, which I may do if I have time.

Having a book out is tremendously exciting but it also makes one feel a little weird - it is after all the culmination of a lot of (years) work, so there is inevitably a feeling of anti-climax and something ending. There is also the realisation, as the book gets nearer to being in my hand, that other people are going to read and judge it. Having a poetry collection is very different to having poems published in journals. If a poem is published in a journal people either like it or they don't like it and move on. With a collection each poem isn't simply judged on its own individual merits - the body of work is looked at as a whole. The poems have to work together, but be different enough to one another to hold the readers attention and not make them bored. There has to be no feeling of padding - poems that are in their as filler - that perhaps aren't doing enough to earn their place. For a first collection there is also some extra pressure - as it is your first foray into the grown up poetry world - people will judge you more on your first collection than on subsequent collections. It is your first and possibly only chance to grab the poetry reader's attention, if a reader thinks your first book is weak they may not ever look at your work again.

I think it is also very important that the first collection feels like a fully realised whole and not the best poems you have written over X many years - a greatest hits almost. This is a trap that I have seen a few first collections fall into. A few strong poems and then the rest feel like filler. I have mixed emotions when I read a book like that - happy to have read some good poems, but tinged with a sadness that it wasn't good all the way through, that the poet didn't have the courage to wait longer (until they had more really strong work) or to put out a pamphlet rather than a full collection. I am hoping that my collection doesn't fall into this category. I feel confident that it doesn't because I waited and didn't publish too soon, and because I had Pascale Petit as a (most excellent) mentor and she threw out quite a lot of the padding and sent me away to write more. Working with a publisher then adds an extra stage of close editing - where poems are tweaked even more, and more poems are thrown out.

Well I will have the book in my hands in a couple of days - and it will be unleashed on the public. I wonder what they will think.

Some Brilliant News

So those of you who have read my posts on putting together a collection and sending out work might be pleased to know that all the hard work has finally paid off. My collection Bird Sisters will be published by Nine Arches Press in Spring 2016. To say I am pleased would be the understatement of the year. I am absolutely delighted. Jane Commane is my editor (yes I have an editor) and I am very much looking forward to working with her. Nine Arches won the Saboteur Award for most innovative publisher last year. They publish some really interesting poetry and prose and I love their journal Under the Radar so I am very pleased that they have decided to publish me.

If you happen to be at Wenlock Poetry Festival this weekend Nine Arches are the publisher in residence.

Getting back in the saddle

It's an interesting thing that since, for all intents and purposes, I have pretty much finished putting together my collection that my creative drive seems to have been at a very low ebb. I don't think that it is just because of finishing the collection - although it always helps me to have goals and deadlines to work to. Unfortunately finishing the collection has coincided with the demise of my regular work shopping group as well - half of them have moved away, and the death of a very old friend.Consequently I have had had a couple of months of writing very little at all, which has felt very frustrating.

However I have just returned from a two week break on the Norfolk coast and I am now ready to get back in the writing saddle. Today I was poetry busking in Wymondham - it was the opening event of the Wymondham Words Literature Festival. There were about eight readers who took it in turns to read a poem - some of their own and some by other people. It was great to hear such a variety of poetry read out, and also to be given a surprisingly warm reception by the public who were going about their Saturday shopping. My next move is to find a new work shopping group, or recruit some new members for the existing one. I also want to make a definite space for writing in my house. i am thinking of reclaiming the tiny back room upstairs, and to set myself times for writing and stick to them.

Back to the Old Question of Order

 I am back to the old question of how to order my collection - having put together a pamphlet sized collection - I then expanded it to a full collection - however I knew in my heart of hearts that some of the poems weren't entirely up to scratch. This was confirmed when my mentor looked at it. She earmarked some poems to take out and some to work on some more and some themes that I could pursue further.  Luckily I had already been writing some new and what I consider to be more exciting work. I had been thinking that I would save this new work but now I am thinking that it will be the nucleus of the collection (along with the sequence of prose poems).

I feel like I have worked hard on this collection - pushing myself to edit and re-edit and pushing the boundaries of my writing.  I now have to reconsider my order. I had put the poems in a kind of chronological order - starting with poems about childhood. This I now realise is a little obvious - I need to be more subtle, to find other more tenuous connections between the poems.

Next week I am devoting a full five days to working on what I have - I am excited and a little scared. I will be away from the Internet and my usual distractions. I will be forced to face myself and my writing demons.

Getting Closer

I feel like I am getting closer to an idea of how I want to order my collection now and I have a working title as well. One of the most difficult choices is what things to put in and what things to leave out. I tend to find that I don't ever really like much of my work that is over a year old - but used that as a criteria for will go in the collection it will be very thin.  I have a body of work that I produced on my MA at UEA but I am not really keen on much of it now - and anything written before that is almost definitely out.

The only thing that I know for certain at this juncture is that my sequence of prose poems is definitely going in, and some of my poems about transformation.  The prose poems have a fairly unique voice and at one point I had thought that I might wait until I had enough of them for a mini collection or a pamphlet - the trouble is that I have flurries of writing them and then I don't write any for ages. Each time I write one I think that now I am surely done with them, but then a month or so later another one pops out.

Later and other repetitions

So someone said the other day that they had heard that you should never use the word later in a poem. I am not sure that I agree with this, but it did make me more aware of how and when I  use it in my own poems. I gave a reading at Ely River Rhymes Festival yesterday and one of the things I noticed was that two of the poems I read used the word later to signify something that will or could happen later on. This seems like too many  times - I don't want that kind of repetition of ideas in one reading.

I sometimes notice this kind of repetition in books. I know we all have particular words and phrases that we are attracted to, and that these ideas sometimes appear in more than one poem. For example I have a poem called "The Bird Inside" in which the "I" is "full to the brim with tweets and whistles" - and I have used a similar sentiment in another poem, which is about a new mother in hospital, where "her mouth emits a series of beeps and whistles..." Two very similar ideas, so similar in fact, that although the poems have quite different subject matter I don't feel comfortable reading them in the same reading. This is the kind of thing that I think I would really notice if I was reading a collection, and I wonder, although I like both poems, whether one of them should be ejected from the collection that I am putting together.

But back to the idea of whether "later" is an over-used conceit in poetry. I suppose it is used a fair amount (I will probably notice it a lot more now that my awareness has been drawn to it) and I will be thinking hard over the next few of days about whether there are other ways of signalling something that might or will happen later on in a poem.

How to order a collection

So I have finally come back to thinking about putting a collection of poems - or at least a pamphlet sized collection - that I can send off to publishers. There are several reasons why I have been putting it off and these include lack of time and fear of rejection.  Still the time has come and today I began thinking about how I would ever put the poems I have into some kind of order. This led me to thinking about what the overriding themes are within my work and I narrowed it down to: childhood/family, loss/alienation and other poems - it is these other poems that are the most problematical to place. Some of them are about place e.g. rivers, forests, journeys) but others are more abstract and harder to define.  It is hard to know how to put this body of work together in any kind of comprehensible order.  I have thought of moving through the work as if it is a life cycle starting with poems about childhood moving through to adulthood but that leaves me wondering how to place the poems about nature and other subjects. It also made me wonder do I mix my prose poems which are about a fictional family amongst more personal poems about childhood? These are difficult questions and as yet I have come up with no definite answers.

Big Journey, Small Journey

I am wondering if it is enough to write a collection of poems that are about journeys or does there have to be more to it, some deeper meaning behind it? Should the poems be making some kind of bigger point -should the collection be some kind of metaphorical or spiritual journey, or perhaps echo the journey through life?

One of our poetry tutors told us that a poem should not be a story or an atmosphere - so the question I need to ask myself is are my journey poems merely an atmosphere? They are certainly trying to capture both the atmosphere and essence of a particular place. I suppose, though, that for a poem to be purely an atmosphere it would have to be nothing more than a physical description of a place. On first reading my poems are just that, but I am also trying to convey something more, to give the reader something beyond place that they can relate to (so that you could read them without ever having been to the places within them and still get something from them). This is where the ideas of how man affects the environment and the idea of a life journey (life/death) come in. Through physical description the poems convey a sense of how man changes the landscape - using ideas such as: fields, crops, litter, signs, etc. The use of devices such as the crosses on trees waiting to be felled also indicates this physical changing of the landscape but also alludes to the idea of life and death.