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.

Poetry Competitions - some hints and tips

As a freelancer and believer in the written word I have many hats - some I wear for money and some I wear for the simple love of the hat. Two of these hats involve poetry competitions - one I sift for (for money), the other I print all the poems for and send them to the judge (for love). I have been donning these hats for several years and am frustrated by how many people shoot themselves in the foot when entering poetry competitions. 

I thought it might be helpful to list some dos and don'ts. I am not an expert. Like you I enter many competitions and don't get anywhere. I have won a couple of competitions and both times I thought the poems unlikely to win. This list is by no means exhaustive.

1) Difficult and emotive content

It is painful reading poetry competition entries - not because the entries are bad (although inevitably some are) but because people are baring their souls and telling you their deepest (and darkest) secrets. There are many poems that move me with their content but will never make the shortlist because they are not doing enough as a poem, or are too oblique, or are simply prose broken into lines to look like a poem. This is sad for a reader - some of those poems have important things to say. Some feel like a cathartic exercise for the writer but are not offering much to reader. A poem about trauma (or loss) needs to offer something to the reader too. A poem is not a misery memoir - though it can touch on the same subjects. I actually find poems more powerful if they are less explicit in their content (I like this in films too) - something alluded to but not explicitly spelt out - a good example of this is the poem 'The Bicycle' by Katrina Naomi from her book What the Crocodile Taught Me. 

Another way into difficult subject matter is to use metaphor.

2) Size isn't everything

Short poems are good, they can be very powerful - but it's unlikely that a haiku will win a major poetry competition - they just don't stand a chance against those poems that have more space to make their point. Save them for short poem competitions - Magma has a short poem category in its annual competition. Of course, there is every chance that I may be proved wrong one day.

Similarly there are poems that feel way too long. Some of these go off at odd tangents (this may work in a prose poem but works less well in a conventional one). Some say the same thing over and over in a variety of ways. Some poems feel like they need the ending and beginnings lopped off - the introduction and the explanation. A good poem feels tight and not baggy. Frisk your poems thoroughly for superfluous weight - you should be doing this anyway, but it's even more important for a competition poem.

tip: One technique I use is to take longer poem and make it shorter to fit the competition guidelines. Sometimes it can't be done, but often it can - and usually the poem is better for it.

3) Write like you live in the twenty-first century

It's as simple as that. I see many poems that read as if they were penned in the 1800's - loaded with words like 'hast', 'thou' and 'whence'. The only time this is acceptable is if you are writing a pastiche - but it's dubious even then. If you are writing like that because all the poetry you read looks like that, then you need to start reading modern poetry. If you don't know where to start get in contact with me and I will send you a reading list. 

tip: Don't expect to love all modern poetry - you need to find the poets that speak to you. You wouldn't expect to go into a library and like the first novel you pick up. Poetry is the same.

Syntax is important too. Beginning poets often think that poetry is some kind of special code and this leads to poems that sometimes don't make grammatical sense - sentences without clauses, sentences that are broken up in odd ways. A poem should be written the way we speak. Try reading your poem out loud and you will soon hear if the sentence structures are odd or unnatural.

4) Rhyming

Rhyming is fine - personally I like a bit of rhyme - but it has to be good. If you are rhyming because you think all poetry has to rhyme then please go back and read number three above. Good rhyme can be amazing - it doesn't whack you round the head shouting I am a rhyming poem - in fact sometimes you might not even notice the rhyme at first. Other times the rhymes want themselves to be noticed. Similar effects can be had from half rhymes, slant rhymes and repetition. A word should never feel like it's in the poem simply for the rhyme scheme - better to ditch the rhyme scheme or put the poem away for a while and hope the right word comes to you.

5) Angst and anger

In the course of sifting/printing and teaching I see many poems that express deep felt sorrow,  grief, angst or anger. While these poems may be cathartic to write - they offer little to the reader. If a poem's message is 'I am angry - really angry' - the reader is left with the question, why? If you need to write an angry poem tell us why you are angry or at least hint at it. 

If you are despairing and feel like the world hates you - please give us some clues as to why you feel like that (and see a counsellor). These kind of poems are frustrating to me as I feel the raw emotion of them but they also leave me a little cold - they don't let me into the world of the poem/writer. I think that's the difference between therapeutic writing and poetry for general consumption - my morning pages are not for anyone else's eyes. I can moan and rage in them and I don't have to explain myself. If I want to put those emotions into a poem I have to offer the reader a way into them too - they have to care about the narrator or feel like there is some kind of universal truth that they can relate to, an 'oh yes that bothers me in that way too'. 

Grief poems can be really difficult too. Sometimes we need a bit of distance from the loss. Sometimes we need a lot of distance. It has been more than ten years since my brother died and I still find it hard to write about. Some of the most successful poems relating to loss of a loved one are about the small things rather than directly about the loss itself. Penelope Shuttle's 'Peter's Shoes' is a great example of this. We all understand what that 'year' means - yet she hasn't felt the need to spell it out. The use of 'you' and 'your' in the poem is clever to - it addresses the dead person but allows the reader to bring their own meaning to the poem (their own lost or dead) in a way that using the specific name throughout wouldn't.

6) Subject matter

Pretty much anything goes in terms of subject matter these days but there are some things to be wary of (and, yes, I have definitely seen all of these):

a middle class white person writing of the black experience 

poems about murdering young women that read like a script for CSI

explicit sex for the sake of it

racist/homophobic/sexist poems

ekphrastic poems that describe the art work/painting that they are based on, but don't do much more than that

poems based on historic events that just describe the event and don't offer us anything new (be careful with this type of poem of overloading it with facts from all your research too)

anecdotes about something that happened and simply that - sometimes these are just prose chopped up to look like a poem

7) Form

Anything goes in term of form really - although as I said earlier a Haiku is unlikely to win a major competition. Poems in strict form can and do win as do poems in free verse. The trick is to do it well and for the form to fit the subject matter. Also check whether your poem is actually a poem and not just a piece of prose chopped up - could it be a prose poem, a bit of life writing or a short story?

8) The Title

You would be amazed looking through a mailbag for a competition or a journal at how many poems have the same title. I must have read a hundred poems in the last year called 'Lockdown' for instance. One line titles like'Lockdown', 'Snow' or 'Rain' are best avoided. I would also avoid titles that are a pun - especially if it's a serious poem. You also don't want a title that gives away the whole poem or a title that is a line of the poem (this takes the power away from the line in the poem). Titles are notoriously difficult. If you are having problems ask your workshopping group or a writer friend. Sometimes when I have been really stuck a friend or a tutor has immediately suggested a title that brings the poem alive.

9) The ending

I talked earlier about poems that feel like they should end sooner. Beware of over-blown or summing-up endings. Trust your reader - you really shouldn't need to spell it all out for us. I have noticed that some great poems go a bit weird towards the end - sometimes a really good poem will suddenly go all poetic, start using archaic words, or hit us round the head with a bit of moral guidance. Similarly some writers feel the end to end on a pun, a joke, or a punchline. Trust the poem to do the work. Endings are hard but there is shortcut to the perfect ending. Workshop your poem if you are having trouble, pay for a critique, or put the poem away for a while so you can come back to it with fresh eyes.

Putting Together a Poetry Collection

 Well, it's done I finally pressed send on my third collection and now, hopefully, it is in the hands/in tray of my editor. I just hope she likes it. 

One of the hardest things about putting together a poetry collection is whittling it down to a manageable size. I got mine down from well over a hundred pages to just under ninety - but I know it will have to get even smaller. 

The process goes something like this:

Print out all poems and decide which are strong enough to go in the collection. 

Look at what themes are emerging and group poems according to theme.

Decide if you want sections and what order they will be in (this can change later).

Order poems within their sections and think about how sections link together - is it a logical progression, does the end poem of one section link to the first poem of the next one.

Section order may be somewhat led my your strongest poems - you want your strongest poems first and last. Also think about how you want the reader to feel when they finish the collection. I always like to put a positive poem last.

Take anything out that feels like filler or poems that are doing a similar thing to each other - you are bound to have some of these - writers often explore the same ideas over and over. I don't necessarily mean poems on the same theme but poems that have a similar feel or message - pick the strongest. 

If you can get someone to read it and give you their impressions. If you can afford a mentor I would highly recommend it. People we workshop with regularly tend to be less critical because they already know our work - I like to (if I can) get someone to read it who hasn't read/workshopped the poems as I have been writing them. Having an outside reader can be vital. They can pick up if the order doesn't make sense or isn't working. With my first two collections I had funding for a mentor and she helped me make some really tough editorial decisions - changing order, taking out poems (and writing more to replace them) and crucially putting a strong sequence first - I had been a little scared of doing that for some reason. With the collection I just sent off, a friend read through it and flagged up a problem with the order of the final section which we were then able to fix.

Don't be afraid to take stuff out and write more. 

Don't feel that everything that has been published has to go in. Similarly not all your best poems have to go in. A collection is not your greatest hits - it should work coherently. I have a sequence of poems that is really strong but it just hasn't fitted with my last book or this one.

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!

The Post Book Slump

I hesitated about naming this post The Post Book Slump, but after talking to other authors I think it is something that needs to be acknowledged and talked about. What I am talking about is that time after your book has been out for a little while - in my case six months - when the excitement has died down but you still haven't got your writing mojo back.

I have very much been in this space for the past few months. At first I put it down to that fact that I had been travelling a fair bit for readings - but actually when I am 'on it' with writing, travelling is usually a fruitful time for me creatively. I have written before about how much I love writing on trains, but at the moment even trains aren't getting me writing. It is a bit like the post hand-in slump I used to get as a student, and very much like the cavernous feeling of loss I felt both at the end of my degree and the MA. I came across this blog post today https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1046-surviving-the-post-dissertation-slump which is about post PhD slump - but a lot of it feels pretty relevant to the way it can feel once a book is published - especially the feelings of 'so what' and Imposter Syndrome.

I had mistakenly thought that this would get easier with more publications, but for some reason I have found it harder with the publication of my second book than I did with the first. I have also found doing readings harder - partly because the subject matter feels more exposing and more gritty - there is always a niggly worry at the back of my mind as to how new audiences will react, which I didn't really have with the first collection. There is also a pressure (or it feels like there is) to write something radically different to what than what I have written before - but as a wise poet once said to me: 'you can only write what you can write.'

At the moment I am on a writing retreat. I had hoped that getting away and having time to read and write would give me the kick in the pants I feel I need. Of course things are never as simple as you imagine. I have been here a week now and the writing is slow - though I have done a little. Instead I have been focusing on reading poetry books, typing up and editing, and I have also used the time to make some submissions - something I have been very slack about of late. I am planning to use some of my Arts Council DYCP grant to pay for some mentoring and time management sessions. Life is busy when I am at home and it can be very easy to get so sucked down the rabbit hole of work that there is little time for anything else.

The main thing is that I have decided not to be too hard on myself and to try not to be too impatient. If you are in the post book/hand in slump I urge you to do the same.

Ye Gods

It is September. I am doing the September write a poem a day challenge. I am doing it because since I went to Rugby to meet with my editor and we licked my collection into a final order I have not been writing much, and I miss it. I need to get back to it.

After the initial excitement of finalising when the book is coming out (May since you ask), and the tweaking of the poems - I went into a kind of limbo. I wasn't too worried, I recognise the pattern. At university we called it the post hand in slump. However much you think it won't happen, it does. I see my son go through it every time he comes back from being on tour with his band, and every time they finish an album. I have seen my friends go through it too once they have sent collections off to their publishers.

The second stage after finalising a collection (and I recognise this from last time too) is the oh my god what have I done phase. The phase where you become convinced that your book will upset and offend everyone on the planet. The phase where you start to doubt yourself and your choices - where it is tempting to fiddle and tweak - and mostly at this stage it is best to sit on your hands and not do that (beyond the odd comma) because the book has been accepted and edited after all. It's also best not to burn the manuscript, blow up the computer, or run screaming into the distance - all of which become hugely tempting at this point in the process. It's funny I had been thinking about this when I was walking into the city today and my friend Rose who is preparing for her first art show posted about it on Facebook. She described it as the urge to throw herself out of a window. Yes I get that - I really do. I am hoping writing a poem a day - even if it's just five minutes of writing (which mostly it is). I am on day 13 and so far I have written one thing I like - onwards and upwards.

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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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.

Never simply the bird (some thoughts on what poetry does)

Poetry is that thing that happens between seeing the bird (or hearing the bird) and recognising the bird. It helps us to recognise the bird – but more than that – it helps us to understand the bird in some way, or to think about the bird (that ordinary bird that you see everyday on your street or in your garden) in new and different ways. Poetry adds meaning to the bird (or cat or house or whatever). Sometimes it puts the bird in a context we might never have expected, or it takes that ordinary common garden bird and shows us how extraordinary it is, and somehow it simultaneously tells us something about ourselves or about (human) life, love, meaning etc. The poet may not have set out to intentionally do this. He/she may simply have set out to write a poem about the bird or to write about the place that he/she always sees the bird, or about how the bird makes him/her feel. But that’s the beauty of (good) poetry – it does something secret, something other, it’s where the magic happens. Good poetry moves and changes the reader; it shows us new ways to put words together, it gives us new ways to feel and view the world, or it reveals to us something about ourselves and our own personal connection with the world.

Some more waffly thoughts on subject matter in poems

When we are editing a poem one of the things we have to think about is the subject matter. Some subject matter is unique or unusual – which can be a good thing because it will immediately make the reader more interested – I am thinking here of poems like Jo Shapcott’s poems Piss Flower or Scorpion (which starts “I kill it because…”). Titles or opening lines like this will immediately grab the reader’s attention – but of course the rest of the poem then has to live up to this arresting start.

Subject matter can also be the bane of a poem. It might be too anecdotal (I have talked about this before here) and needs to have something that lifts it above and beyond the anecdote itself – some kind of insight (though not too obvious or cheesy), or something unexplained or unexpected might take place. Or it may be that your subject matter is something that has been written about many times before (how many poems have you read about cats, dogs, death, the moon, mothers, childbirth, etc.?). The question then is whether your poem is doing anything different to all the other poems on the subject – or is it just another poem saying how beautiful the moon is – if the latter then it is probably best to put that poem aside and move on. That isn’t to say that we should never write about these subjects (although there are people who would tell you otherwise). But you might find that you have to write quite a few poems about the moon or a dog or whatever before you hit an idea that will stand up to proper critical scrutiny. I decided that I wanted to reclaim the moon a year or two ago – after many poets and poetry teachers had told me it was a subject best avoided. I decided to tackle it during NaPoWriMo (National poetry writing month). I wrote about six different moon poems in all ranging from pretty trite to almost but not quite OK, and then when I had all but given up on the idea my moon poem came – I am not saying it’s a brilliant poem but it’s certainly not like any other moon poem I have read.

Of course the other thing to bear in mind when you are writing about something like the moon (as well as all the poems that have gone before) is the weight of common knowledge about your subject. The science, the mythology, the religious connotations – even if none of this stuff makes it into your poem, it is there at your shoulder and you should be aware of it, it should inform your writing, even if only on a subconscious level. But one needs to beware too, of this knowledge. As a teacher I see many poems that are over-burdened with facts: poems written by eager students who are keen to squeeze in every interesting thing they know about their subject matter. There is no need to squeeze everything you know into one poem, however interesting it is, save some facts for other poems you might write later, or if you feel you have to get all those juicy facts in then perhaps you should write an essay. Personally I don’t read poetry to learn about a subject – although sometimes I do learn something – I read a poem to be moved, to feel connected, to learn something about the world that I already knew but perhaps couldn’t articulate, to be excited by concepts or language or form, to connect with what makes us/me human, to feel like I have accidentally stumbled on home.

Further reading and links on the subject:

Poetry and Ambition

Jen Campbell on what makes a poem good

What makes a poem good...

What makes a good poem (or not) - one of those rambling blog posts that ends up miles from where it started.

Today I have been sending out rejections for Lighthouse - it makes me feel a bit like the big, bad wolf. Actually it is worse than that because I suspect he liked being bad. I, on the other hand, feel guilty. Especially when rejecting a poet whose work I like or a poet I know. The editorial meeting this time was a long one - well over three hours. The sifting of the submissions is done before hand so that in the meeting we only discuss the poets who have made it into the maybe folder. We rejected some pretty good poets. I have been thinking as I send out emails about what it is that makes a poem a good poem. What exactly is it that makes a poetry editor sit up and take notice. I think for Lighthouse a poem has to be very strong as there are four, sometimes five, editors to get past. Either we all like a poem or one or more editors has to love it enough to stand up and fight for it. Probably ninety percent or more of what we receive does not fit into this category. I am going to try and quantify what makes a good poem. Of course this is from my own perspective - the other Lighthouse editors may have completely different views.

A good poem should:

• Not simply be an anecdote or a description  - there are a lot of these kind of poems around. I have a few myself - none of them made it into my book. My mentor took out an anecdotal poem about living in a commune - I liked the poem, it had gone down well at a reading. She said so "so what, it's not telling me anything new." An anecdote is not in itself a bad thing, but the poem needs to be doing something else as well. Esther Morgan once said in a workshop that when you have read a poem "something should have changed, or you should have learnt something." I think this is what Pascal (my mentor) meant - my poem wasn't doing anything other than describing living in a commune. There was no pivotal moment or insight - the thing that makes you remember a poem and go back to it again. Similarly poems that are simply descriptions of something - a place, an art work etc. are rarely doing enough as a poem to make them really interesting and worth coming back to. I sometimes wish when reading this type of poem that the reader had given a little something of themselves to the poem.
• Not just a list - list poems are interesting. I like them and I sometimes write them, but successful ones are doing something more than simply listing stuff. they are suggesting a back story or making you think about something that is not being overtly stated. A good example of this is "About His Person" by Simon Armitage. The poem lists all the articles found on a dead man (although he never states that anyone is dead), the articles hint at the kind of person he was and the life he lead. List poems can be much more subtle than this too, but they do need that extra something.
• Be exciting to read - what makes a poem exciting for one person may be different to what does it for another person of course. Some people like rhyme, for some people it's the content. For me it is a mixture of things - the content is important, but so is the use of language - a really good writer can write about the most trivial of things and make it sound exciting. A poem that uses language in exciting ways will make me sit up and take notice. Jen Hadfield was one of the poets who first did this for me - take a look at her poem "XXI The World".
• Do something different - personally I like poems that come at things aslant. Even the most boring of subjects can be made interesting in the hands of a great writer - "Ironing" by Vicki Feaver does this brilliantly. I also like poems that tackle big topics in new ways - two great examples of this are Amy Newman's "Dear Editor" poems and Toon Tellegen's book Raptors. Raptors is introduced by an unreliable narrator who immediately sets the tone for the rest of the book: "Years ago I invented someone whom I called my father. It was morning, very early, I couldn’t sleep any more, I remember it quite clearly. My father didn’t seem surprised at having suddenly appeared out of nowhere and, in his turn, invented my mother, my brothers and myself." Raptors explores the idea of family dynamics and hierarchies. Tellegen uses the idea of family as a framework and constructs and deconstructs it. He tells us stories, and those stories often conflict with one another. In essence he recreates the complexities of family dynamics and the way that family memories are changed and manipulated, and he does it in a very surreal and exciting way.  Amy Newman's collection Dear Editor also deals with the dynamics of family. Her series of prose poems takes the form of letters to an imaginary literary journal editor - each starts in the same way "Dear Editor, Please consider the enclosed poems for publication. They are from my manuscript X = Pawn Capture..." Each poem uses the game of chess as jumping off point for describing the dynamics and interactions between the narrator's family members. However, the poems are about more than simply chess and family, there is a lot about religion and the saints in the book and also about language itself. It is a clever and fascinating collection.
• Not be overly poetic - a poem should definitely avoid the purple prose, it should try and avoid 'poetic' words and abstract nouns (shards, shimmery, solitary, longing etc) and it should avoid as much as possible being flowery and pretty - even if it is about something flowery and pretty. Alice Oswald is a master of this, take a look at her poem Narcissus and you will see what I mean. She only uses one (what I would call) poemy word in the entire poem - glittery, but she gets away with it because the rest of the poem is so surprising. As a journal editor I see a lot of overly poetic writing and it does make my heart sink just a little.
• Have a strong beginning and ending - one of the things that stood out when reading back over my editorial notes yesterday was how often I had written things like - this would be a much better poem with the first/last or first and last stanzas. It is so tempting as a writer to want to spell everything out for your reader in case they don't get it. One of the things I am always telling my students is that they should trust their readers more. George Szirtes once said to me in a tutorial: "jump right into the poem, and step off lightly at the end." I have never forgotten this - it is great advice. Imagine how boring it would be if every film set up the back story before it started properly - of course they don't do that - they jump right into the action and do a slow reveal and usually we work it out.
• Not be too obscure - of course there is such a thing as being too obscure. Sometimes this comes from over-editing - the writer takes out so much that the original meaning or story is lost. Sometimes writers write something that sounds nice and poetic but falls apart when you try and unpick what the writer is actually trying to say. A lot of writers start off writing this kind of poetry because it approximates what they think poetry should sound like. There is nothing more exciting as a teacher that when a budding poet moves beyond this phase and starts writing in new and more interesting ways. This happens much quicker if the student is reading widely. Reading shows them all the different possibilities and ways of using language. There is conversely deliberately obscure poetry. My son calls this beardy poetry (no offence intended to men who wear beards). What he means is intellectual and academic poetry, which does not do much more than showing off that it is intellectual and academic - the kind of poetry that shouts "look at me, I am so clever and well read." This kind of poetry doesn't really care if you don't get it - it assumes that you must be too stupid or uneducated. Some people like this kind of poetry - I am afraid it turns me off. Don't get me wrong I do like intellectual and clever poetry - but for me it needs to be doing something more. Poetry has to speak to the reader, I think, and that is what makes us go back to it. That doesn't mean it always has to be personal - but a poem that reflects something of the human condition is generally more memorable.
• Not simply tell a story - though of course there are many great narrative poems - for example Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot." What I am talking about is poems that feel like a story that has been broken up to look like a poem. One trick as a writer is to ask yourself why you are writing it as a poem and not a story. If you feel like you have to cram every tiny detail into the poem, then perhaps a short story would be a better medium. Similarly if you feel the need to tell a complicated back story. The trick is that less is more. Skip the big build up and jump right in. Traditionally narrative poetry had strict meter and form. These days pretty much anything goes. Keep it simplish and aim to grab your readers attention. The narrative will still have a beginning, middle and end but it may allude to wider concerns, and it may not tell us everything. I like to think of a good story poem as being like an art house film, it is immensely satisfying but leaves some questions unanswered. It will also create a very particular mood or feeling that draws the reader in. Two good examples of this are: "At Roane Head" by Robin Robertson and "The Tyre" by Simon Armitage.
• Feel true - that doesn't mean they have to be true. I have a sequence of prose poems in my collection that people often think are true - they aren't. I think of a poem as a tiny work of fiction. That doesn't mean that it can't be about something real but one of the most common problems in poetry workshops is people getting hung up on not changing things or leaving things out because the poem is about something real. If you are writing about real events and are attached to the back story and all the details then perhaps you should consider writing it as part of a memoir. I have sometimes written about events and then changed details because they felt better for the poem. Similarly you can use real concrete details as basis for or to flesh out fictional works. For instance in my prose poems I have used concrete details from my own childhood to make the story feel more real and believable. For me what matters is the truth of the poem not the actual truth. I love a poem if it sweeps me up and makes me believe in it. It could be a mythological story or a poem about going to the shops with your grandmother, whatever, just make me believe it. It has to resonate with the reader. I have read countless poems about real (and sometimes sad and dramatic events) that haven't achieved this. Even Sharon Olds - probably America's most famous and current confessional poet has said in interviews that not everything in her poems is true.
• Not take itself too seriously but not try to be funny - If you had asked me a few years ago I would have told you that I was a 'serious writer'. However, I have come to see that much of my poetry has a dark humour in it. It is not in every poem, and I don't usually set out to write something humorous - if it happens it happens. Poetry that doesn't do it for me is poetry is that tries too hard to be funny, that works at it, or has a clever punchline - those poems are rarely memorable. Similarly poems that take themselves too seriously and are overburdened with portentous description and abstract nouns. You are not Edgar Allan Poe, and he might not have been so big if he was writing today. There is a lot of humour in everyday life and I like poems that reflect this without whacking me in the face with it. Poets that can take a serious subject matter and inject a little humour into it but retain its seriousness. A great example of this is the poem "Somewhat Unravelled" by Jo Shapcott from her award winning collection Of Mutability.

This blog post has grown way bigger than I intended so I am going to stop now. This, of course, is purely my own opinion on what makes good poetry - and because humans are fickle, my opinions might be different next week or next month. It is as much a meditation on poetry for myself as anything else, but if it helps anyone to think about what they are submitting to journals and why, that would be an added bonus. I haven't touched here on ways people submit or whether submitters have actually read the journal to see if their work fits with it. That's a whole other post.

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.

Getting it out there revisited

Reading back over my blog posts I came across one I had written in February called Getting it Out There. In the post I bemoan the fact that I had very little (almost nothing actually) published last year. The upshot was that with the encouragement of Heidi Williamson my writing coach, and after reading Jo Bell's blog post about poetry submissions, I decided to shake up my approach to submissions.

When I say shake it up what I actually mean is put a rocket under it and light the touch paper. I resolved that I would send out at least one submission per week. What I found when I first started doing this was that some weeks I would send more than one lot of poems off - it's the getting started that's the hard bit, but once I have I sometimes find that I get on a roll and then it's easy to send more. My new spreadsheets (submission spreadsheet and poem destinations) make it much easier to track where I am sending stuff - and more importantly where I have sent things before - crucial if you don't want to submit the same poem to a journal twice (I have done this and it's very embarrassing!). The poem destinations spreadsheet lists all my poems that I think are submittable (probably a tenth or less of what I have written) and next to each poem all the journals each poem has been sent to. I highlight a journal in yellow if it accepts the poem so that I know not to send out the poem again.  Of course spreadsheets are only as good as the person filling them in/reading them so mistakes and multiple submissions can and do still occur - but hopefully much less often.

I send to both print and online journals - always making sure that I have read the journal first and that I send something that I think will fit either the journal's style or the theme. I have kept up this submitting schedule for several months (I have slowed down a bit now) and I have been astonished by the results. Firstly I discovered that the more rejections I receive the less bothered am. When I was sending one submission every few months I would get very attached to the outcome and feel slightly depressed when the rejection arrived. Sending more work out inevitably means a lot more rejections but when I have several submissions out there I am less attached to each one. Secondly I have had almost thirty poems published already this year, with several more pending publication. All those years I had been brooding over occasional rejections and not sending out my work because I didn't think it was good enough - something that this months Mslexia cites as a common response amongst women - all I actually needed to do was send out more work.

Of course rejection still hurts, and if I have a few nos in a row it can still make me feel despondent, but now when I feel the despondency creeping up I remind myself to look at my Publishing History and I feel a lot better about the whole thing. 

Some tips for submitting:

1) Read the journal.

2) Read the submission guidelines - they vary from journal to journal.

3) Send a polite cover letter/email including a brief and relevant bio (unless the guidelines ask you not to) listing the names of the poems and thanking the editors for taking the time to read your work.

4) Send several poems so the editor gets a feel for your work.

5) Don't expect a receipt or acknowledgement that they have received it - and please don't email asking for one.

6) Don't resubmit immediately as soon as you get a rejection. Leave at least a month or so in between. Magma is the exception to this as they have a different editor for each issue. 

7) If you are submitting the same poem to several places email the other places immediately if a poem is accepted elsewhere.

8) If you have a poem accepted by a journal wait to submit more work (unless they ask you for some). Journals often like to wait at least an issue before they publish a poet again - Nutshells and Nuggets asks successful submitters to wait six months before re-submitting.

9) Don't use fancy fonts. 

10) include you name and contact details in the header or footer of each page (unless the journal asks you not to - some journals read anonymously - check the guidelines).
11) Don't automatically assume a poem is bad because it gets rejected - I have had poems published after being rejected by five other places, and some that are strong that haven't found a home because they don't quite fit anywhere.
12) Don't send a poem out too soon after writing. Leave it a bit and edit it again. If you can take it to a workshopping group. If you write a poem you feel will be good there is always that excitement that makes you want to send it out into the world too soon - and if you do this the likelihood is it will be rejected. You will look at it later and feel embarrassed because it needs editing - but then, of course, you can't submit it to that journal as they have already rejected it. I speak from bitter experience! 

The Writing Process Blog Tour

I was nominated to take part in the blog tour by Heidi-Jo Swain.

What am I working on?

I have recently finished putting together my first poetry collection with the help of my rather marvellous mentor Pascale Petit - I was lucky enough to get some funding for this from 

I was recently shortlisted for The Poetry School Pighog Pamphlet Competition so I have been making a smaller pamphlet sized collection from my larger one - which is not as easy as it sounds - I want the poems to work together as a whole with themes running through, not just be the best poems of the full collection. 

Right now I am working on a sequence of poems based around numbers. The poems were sparked off by a prompt on Jo Bell's 52 blog. Each week for year Jo, or a guest blogger, posts a writing prompt along with links to poems to read or listen to. It has been surprisingly inspiring and last week's prompt found me frantically writing almost an entire sequence. 

I am also in the process of co-editing issue 5 of Lighthouse along with prose writer Anna de Vaul - a process complicated by the fact that she is currently on the other side of the world with a patchy Internet connection! As well as that I am supposed to be writing a book review for Ink, Sweat and Tears.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

That's a tough question to answer - and of course there are those who would argue that there is no such thing as an original idea. I like to think that I use language in an original way and that I look at familiar subjects (such as family, household objects etc) from a slightly different viewpoint to other people. I am very much taken with Viktor Shklovsky's ideas of ostranenie or making strange - making familiar objects appear unfamiliar. This is something that Getrude Staein also liked to explore and I found her prose poems in Tender Buttons particularly inspiring. 

I like to have an element of realism in my work too - combining real life experience with fiction and a hint of oddness to try an create something unique but believable - as in my series of prose poems about a dysfunctional religious family.

I am sure that there are some similarities between my work and other writers. And of course I think that when we are often, whether consciously or unconsciously, influenced by what we are reading especially if it is really inspiring. 

Why do I write what I do?

I love both poetry and fiction - I am a great advocate for the ability of literature to change peoples' lives for the better, and I have always written (and read) both poetry and prose. In fact in my early 20s I wrote a book of short stories that was rejected by several publishers. When I came to do my creative writing degree in 2006 I thought that I would be concentrating on prose,  however what actually happened was that the course (and the tutors) rekindled my love for all things poetry, and I subsequently went on to do The Poetry MA at The University of East Anglia (UEA). 

I write because I have to - I have a compelling urge to put pen to paper - and I would still write even if there was no chance of ever making it into print. I think it is my way of making sense of the world - and I hope that in some small way it can help other people make some sense of it too.

How does my writing process work?

I tend to write sporadically and manically. I may go for weeks where I don't write much at all, and then an idea will seize me - this is happening at the moment - and I will be scribbling away at every opportunity. I think one of the reasons I don't write all the time is because I am busy, and everyday life has a habit of interfering with the creative process. A couple of years ago I had some money and I took myself off to a house near the sea for a week. Removed from all my usual distractions (internet, phone, work, emails, Facebook, household chores, teaching...) I found that I became amazingly productive and I wrote a whole sequence of poems that has since become the final sequence in my collection.

I do try and do things that encourage my writing practice. I aim to write morning pages every day - although in reality I manage about three to four days a week. I read both poetry and fiction (although I have discovered that if I read too much prose I stop writing poetry), I belong to a critquing group and I also try and get along to readings and other literary events. All this feeds into my writing practice. I write long hand into lined notebooks, then edit on the computer. If I am feeling really blocked a train journey always seems to free me up - I start writing almost as soon as the train sets off!

I am not so good at editing though and I often put it off for weeks - sometimes even months. Sometimes I will take my lap-top to a cafe when I need to get some editing done - it is amazing how much work one can get done without having the Internet as a distraction! Deadlines too are good for making one work harder.

I hope you enjoyed this stop on the blog tour - please check out the blogs I have nominated next week.

Helen Ivory

Helen Ivory was born in Luton in 1969 and began to write poems at Norwich School of Art in 1997, under the tuition of George Szirtes. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999 and then disappeared into a field in the Norfolk countryside to look after two thousand free-range hens. When she emerged ten or so years later, she had two collections with Bloodaxe Books and had helped, with her own bare hands, to build several houses.

She is an experienced creative writing tutor and workshop leader and has taught both undergraduates and in adult education for around ten years. She has also run workshops in schools and is a freelance tutor and mentor. She is currently an Editor for The Poetry Archive,  Editor of the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and Course Director for Creative Writing for Continuing Education at UEA. Her fourth Bloodaxe Books collection is Waiting for Bluebeard. (2013)  She is Co-editor with George Szirtes of In their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on their Poetry (Salt 2012)

Meryl Pugh

Meryl Pugh was born in 1968, in Ely, East Anglia and grew up in Wales, New Zealand, Suffolk and the Forest of Dean, where her family settled. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge and the Institute of Education, London, she has a Distinction in the MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA.

Her first pamphlet collection, Relinquish, was published in 2007 by Arrowhead Press. Selections of her poetry have appeared in four anthologies: Goldfish 3 (eds Maura Dooley & Blake Morrison, Goldsmiths College, 2011), Reactions 5 (ed Clare Pollard, Pen & Ink Press, 2005), Promises to Keep(ed Dean Parkin, Jerwood/Arvon, 2004), Entering the Tapestry (eds Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett, Enitharmon, 2003). Reviews and poems have appeared in many print and online journals, including Horizon Review, New Welsh Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales andThe Rialto.

Pugh divides her time between Norwich and Leytonstone, East London (her home for the last thirteen years).

Rosemarie Blackthorn

Details coming soon...