On Not Writing

I have been in a writing slump for months. When I say slump, what I actually mean is that I simply have not been writing. Call it writer's block, post hand in malaise, whatever - but the truth is that for many writers this kind of writing desert fills us with fear and panic. 

Mine started after I had sent the almost final version of my MS to my publisher - it was fine to begin with - well, not fine but expected. Then in May I fell over and banged the back of my head. I was not knocked out, I didn't break anything (I've had a head scan). But what it has done is left me with a thing called post concussion syndrome - something I knew nothing about before but is, apparently, quite common. There are some physical effects - scalp pain, headaches etc, but by far the worst thing (for me) has been the way that it has effected my critical and creative thinking. I was literally unable to put together new courses or write book reviews. I could critique single poems, but I couldn't hold a whole pamphlet or collection in my head. 

Of course this has had a knock-on effect on my earning ability as I had been planning to write and then run a new email course in September or October and I wasn't able to do that - and as most freelancers can tell you - losing that momentum in the freelance world can cost you customers long term. When I put out feelers on my social media accounts recently about potentially running a new email course, I had not a single enquiry. I can only assume that the lack of activity has affected the algorithms so that my posts are less seen, or that my prolonged absence has meant my potential clients have moved on and found other tutors to fill the hole.

Anyway, this post is not really about that. Luckily my symptoms are (very slowly) improving and during the Christmas break (after a couple of weeks of getting back to morning pages) I have even written one or two (fairly awful) poems. My biggest worry now is that perhaps everything I write post head-injury might be trite rubbish, but I have to trust that slowly and with regular practice that the skills will come back. One of the things I had been looking forward to was The January Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. What is brilliant is that they operate a pay what you can system for people (like me) who are down on their luck. For anyone unfamiliar with the format - they run a one hour writing workshop each morning in January where they share poems and offer prompts. It's become very popular, with almost 300 participants this year. Today was day five and while not all the prompts have inspired me, some of them really have. And most importantly I am writing, I am moving the pen across the page, and I am finding things to write about.

So what is it I am trying to say here - probably not to despair if you hit a writing slump or setback - even if it goes on for months. Perhaps cut yourself a little slack to begin with - sometimes we just need a break - especially when life is super stressful or busy, or like me something medical gets in the way. Keep reading though, even if it's just the odd poem. I did keep reading when I was able and I am sure this has helped. Eventually a poem might speak to you or inspire you and send you back to the page. And maybe a workshop (Verve Poetry Festival runs a great and affordable online workshop series) or something like the January Writing Hours will help. (I can also offer single lessons which contain links to poems to read and prompts on a variety of different subjects - contact me through my website https://juliawebb.org/ or on social media for details).

If you like what I do please consider buying me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/hqdiufpgsz

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.

Writerly Preoccupations

When I was batting around ideas for a workshop one of the exercises I came up with was getting the participants to look at what preoccupies them as a writer - what interests them and inspires them, what themes they keep coming back to. As always I did the exercise myself to see what happened and it turned out to be a really useful and productive thing to do. 

You might want to try it - think about what interests you as a writer or artist? What are your preoccupations? What subjects or themes interest you? What things do you find yourself coming back to? Don't just limit yourself to things you have written about - I am interested in many different things that directly, but sometimes indirectly into my work. I found I learnt things about myself by doing this exercise.

Here are mine:

Human relationships place; the intersection between the human world, the natural world and the mystical realm; how events changes us - especially loss and grief; family dynamics; how place affects us and/or shapes us; psychology and counselling; music and lyrics; the past and how we repeat behaviour patterns; cruelty and violence (and the reasons for it); myth and fairytale; parallel universes; a Utopian future; the disintegration of a caring democratic society; repetition and internal rhyme; other worlds; art house film; stories where the ending is ambiguous or left open; other species; where wildness encroaches on order; edges and borders; otherness; the the physical body (and how it ages); being a parent - and how that changes over time; loss and grief; the stories and lies we tell ourselves (and others); memory; collective memory; the way memory changes over time; trauma and how its passed down through families.

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

How I didn’t become a short story writer

First I was a novel writer (aged five).
Then I was a poet.

Then I was a short story writer.

Then I was a poet again.

Then I was a short story writer.

Now I am a poet.

I think I was probably a bad short story writer. 

The first time I was a short story writer I wrote in an experimental style. At that time U.K. publishers did not publish many books of short stories, and certainly not ones by unknown writers. They were definitely not interested in publishing experimental short stories by a young unknown writer who hadn't even been to university. At that time I read a lot of American short story collections which were a huge influence on my work - Jayne Ann Philips, Ellen Gilchrist, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff., Louise Erdrich. I think now that what I wrote back then sits somewhere between flash fiction and prose poetry. It rarely had a narrative arc. It was often just sniffing around the edges of something.

I was a kid from a council estate who left school at sixteen and went to live in a hippy commune. But as a kid I virtually lived in the local library, and while I lived in the commune I continued hitchhiking into town to use the library. 

You could say the library saved me. 

You could say the library made me. 

I wasn't educated back then. I didn't know about literary journals. I didn't know much at all really. I loved to read and I loved to write. I wrote in those small reporter's notebooks with the metal spiral at the top and I typed my work up on an electronic typewriter. When I look at those old short stories now, I think that maybe I was ahead of my time. They might have been ahead of their time but they're still not very good. But there's something about them that stops me throwing them out. Repeated words and phrases, poetic rhythms, the kind of surrealism that still appeals to me in writing.

When I have tried to write short stories in recent years they have felt stilted and unimaginative in comparison to those early works. I have become a slave to plot but somehow the plots are never good ones. Either the stories are boring and unoriginal or they don't make sense. It seems I have given over my original thinking to the poet in me and I don't know how to become a short story writer again.

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.

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.

Running with it - back to writing (again)

After a few weeks of barely writing (post hand in slump!) I have been on a writing binge. Partly fuelled by the workshops and readings I went to at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and partly fuelled by a shift in my poetry thinking - something too hard to quantify exactly, but nevertheless I know it has happened. It's true I have been reading a lot and that definitely helps, and not just poetry books, but books concerned with writing - I found Mark Doty's "The Art of Description" particularly inspiring and really readable. Through looking closely at some well known (and not so well known) poems Doty focusses in on the essence of what makes good poems good.

Which brings me to this week when I was lucky enough to attend not one but two really inspiring poetry events. the first was Jacob Polley performing his show "Lamanby" at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich. "Lamanby" is a show featuring poems from Polley's award winning collection Jackself with video, sounds and music and atmospheric lighting, the Medieval Dragon Hall was the perfect setting for it. Polley is a superb performer and I am still thinking about the show almost a week later and have started re-reading the book - which, has, in turn, fed into my writing. The second inspiring performance I attended this week was Jill Abram's Stablemates in London featuring Mark Doty, Andrew McMillan and Fiona Benson. I don't very often book up for events in London as it is such a pain to get there, but Mark Doty rarely comes to Britain so it was too good an opportunity to pass up. I was certainly not disappointed - what an evening. Benson read from her forthcoming collection - the poems were mostly concerned with rape - to be honest I found them quite harrowing and was glad that she went first, though I think the book will be really good. Andrew McMillan is always a joy to hear read and did not disappoint. He read from "Playtime". Mark Doty was amazing - he read a bunch of new poems of his laptop. He was erudite and engaging and I went home with my poetry well brimming over and very pleased I had gone.

I started my latest writing binge in Aldeburgh. I began writing almost the minute I got there - it was like I had been given permission to put on my writing head - and I haven't really stopped since. I have begun several things that might become sequences of sorts. One thing came out of an exercise that I set my Friday class. We had been talking about sequences and what kinds  of topics might be good to write sequences about. We had brainstormed a list and I suggested writing about the thing on your list that you were least attracted to writing about. My subject was writing. I never usually write poems about writing - it's just not my thing - so that was the topic I felt I had to choose. I had bought in some books of sequences - one of which was "Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil" by C.D. Wright. The book is an exploration of writing, part essay, part poetry, part memoir. I picked it up and started flicking through it for inspiration and some phrases in pages I had previously bookmarked leaped out at me. This is how my sequence started - it is part comment on writing process, part fictional narrative and is interspersed with quotes by C.D. Wright. I am interested in juxtaposing the different elements against each other - I am not sure if it works but I found it exciting to write and edit. here is a short extract:

"The bishop had stopped paying attention and was dipping his biscuit into his lukewarm tea.

The poems were roaring along the road outside the overlarge window, they had the shapes of busses and lorries, cars even – but I wasn’t fooled.

‘Some of us do not read or write particularly for pleasure or instruction, but to be changed, healed, changed.’ (C.D. Wright)

When I returned from the bathroom the bishop was scrutinizing my notebook.

Your trouble, he said, is the undercurrents, everything beneath your surface is oily dark."

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.

Mother's Day Poem - Knitting

Knitting

My mother is knitting a womb,
soft click of needles in the semi-darkness,
pictures from the turned down TV
reflected in the half-moons of her glasses,

she watches a mime of cowboys
slinging guns in a dusty street,
a stampede of shooting and horses;
all that death.

My mother is knitting a womb,
out of wool the colour of wine or blood,
her glass of wine on the low coffee table,
a man falls down dead in the dust.

My mother smiles,
she hears me in the doorway,
come in dear she says don’t just stand there,
I sit down next to her in the semi-darkness,

sinking into the cushions of the old red sofa,
she pours me a glass of wine,
a man falls off a roof,
a horse rolls in the dust.

Julia Webb

New Directions and Big Decisions

This collection that I am working on is becoming increasingly problematic - not so much because of its themes or even the ordering of the poems - but because it is simply too big - and to make matters worse I can't stop writing. I have culled it by about half already and it is still at 90 plus A4 pages. I know I shouldn't moan - most people I have spoken to have pointed out that this is surely a good problem to have, and in some ways they are right. I am beginning to wonder whether I should pull one of the threads out (hoping, of course, that the whole thing doesn't unravel like an old jumper) and make it the back bone of another book.

To do that feels rather scary. For one thing most writers want to put their best stuff in their collections - why wouldn't you? For another thing there is no guarantee that I will even have a third collection published. I am lucky to have a second - and if the second is not well received I may not get another chance. The things I am writing now feel risky, and at the same time I am finding it incredibly exciting. Things that I am doing with my Arts Council funding (like the research trip to London) seem to be really bearing fruit and taking my ideas in new directions. The new stuff feels more rooted in the physical and less in the landscape of personal history - this in itself I find intriguing as I went to London to look more at my 'personal history' and while I did do that I found myself more moved by the physicality of the places I visited than any past connections. I would like to spend more time visiting there to see what more will come.

Fear and Self-Loathing in the Suburbs

There has been a lot of talk lately about working class writers.

What do you say when some one asks you what class you are? Do you know what class you are? I am not not sure that I know how to answer that question anymore. I definitely grew up working class - five of us lived in a two bedroomed council house. My dad worked in industry - although he was not a labourer but had a skilled job as an engineering draughtsman. I left school at 16. I was on the dole. I did a series of unskilled and labour intensive jobs - farm work, cleaning, warehouse work, catering. It was only in my late twenties that I began to study and therefore improve my lot. I trained as a nursery nurse and became a pre-school supervisor. I trained and became (albeit briefly) a reflexologist. Then at 40 I had an epiphany quit my job and went back to study full time - first doing a creative writing degree and then a poetry MA. Therein is the heart of the problem - I feel both working class and middle class at the same time. Basically I feel like I don't quite fit in either camp.

This is why I have a problem with the question 'where are all the working class writers?' To me it seems that if you are a writer the act of writing itself means that perhaps you are no longer working class. I feel like on some levels getting educated made me middle class. I feel working class and I can certainly write about my own working class experiences, however, looked out from the outside my life might seem very middle class. I work in the arts - teaching, writing, mentoring etc. I live in a middle class area (although I am poor and rent my house). I have a degree and an MA (and the corresponding massive student debt). My son went to university and did an MA. Our house is full of books and art stuff. I go to live literature events. When I can afford it I go to the theatre. I moved house because my son was unhappy and I wanted him to go to a better school. So as you can see on a lot of levels I am middle class now - however I have never felt like I quite fit in. I rent my house rather than owning it (some one once described my end of the street as 'the common end' - meaning lots of rentals). I was a single parent. My career started late, so consequently I don't have the advantages of years in a decent job.

The book I am working on is not really about class - although class does come into it. It is more about identity (and threat to identity). It is about what shapes and defines us - and in this collection at least it examines the things that threaten both us and our identity - things people say and do, ways we cause pain and discomfort to one another, conflict (familial, local, global), the stories we tell our families and those our families tell us, the stories we tell ourselves.

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.

Back to Writing (finally)

It's always interesting to me how time off from teaching and the internet can start me writing again. Throw in a good poetry book or two and I am well away. After a worryingly dry spell that has lasted a good couple of months, just the odd poem here and there, I have written twenty two pages over the last three days. I put this down, in part, to the influence of Melissa Lee-Houghton's book Sunshine, which I received as a Christmas present. I had been looking forward to reading Houghton's latest collection as I really loved her last book Beautiful Girls. Houghton taps into some of the same themes that come up from my own past - although her past is even bleaker and darker, but somehow (like reading Sharon Olds and Pascale Petit) reading these poems gives me a kind of permission to return and explore some of the darker aspects of my own past. Of course it's not just the themes - I have to find the writing style exciting too and I do find Lee-Houghton's use of language both exciting and inspiring.

I am not largely (well I don't think I am) a confessional poet - although when I first started taking poetry writing seriously I did err towards writing in that style. In fact I wrote largely in a confessional style until mid way through my MA when my style started changing and evolving - it wasn't that I stopped writing about that stuff completely, but I felt less need to tackle those themes head on. A lot of the poems in my collection Bird Sisters, for instance, do touch on family tension and difficult (mostly familial) relationships, but they deal with them either in a fictional or a metaphorical way - for example in one sequence the narrator's sister is an owl.

These new poems that I have been writing are more in the style of my poem Friday Night King's Head, which was published on Proletarian Poetry earlier this year. Friday Night King's Head is from a sequence of stream of consciousness style prose poems that I have been writing occasionally over the last couple of years. The poems are dense and prosey - and usually explore one event or incident (Friday Night King's Head is about one Friday night in my old local). Sometimes the poems jump from one theme to another echoing the way memory and thought works, and sometimes they explore one subject more deeply - for example one of the poems is a list of things that as a child/teen the narrator was told not to do, each sentence starting with the word don't. The poem offers a slow revealing of the family dynamic - this poem was in part inspired by Lee-Houghton's poem A Good Home, which starts with the words "Don't run on the lawn." (In recognition of this I will put "after Melissa Lee-Houghton in italics below the title - I know there is a technical name for this but I can't think of it right now).

It feels exciting to be writing again after such a dry spell. It makes me realise how writing makes me feel happier and more fulfilled. I know I have been doing things that have been detrimental to my creativity - printing out all the Cafe Writers competition poems for example and i also wrote cover endorsements for a couple of books which takes concentration and close reading. I just hope that now I am back in the saddle that I can keep this writing momentum up.

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...

On Writing and Discovery

These outpourings  come both bidden and unbidden, these bidings and bindings, these flows that can only ever be temporarily stemmed.

Writing is a rare thing but is also not/no/never a rare thing.

A rare thing indeed is to make the most perfect sense, as if to draw a sigh from the reader.

Like those blank/dry months of unsatisfying reading, when you suddenly and unexpectedly (after almost having given up all hope of ever being moved by poetry again) come upon something so right and profound that it makes you want to leap up out of your seat. throw the book into the air and shout: Yes that's it, that's exactly it! And then you want to read it again, over and over.

And it might be a mere simple, a distillation of the essence of something: a revelation of the true somethingness of something.

Or it might be a big thing, like the biggest, most exciting, most explosive use of language poem that warps your mind into a shape that it can never fully spring back from, that changes your relationship to the world/word.

And you might read it over and over.

It's a bit like sex in the excitement of that first time - the tentative and not so tentative exploration.

But it's also not like sex, because sex has room to get better and better, but although a mega exciting poem is still mega exciting on the second or fourth or sixteenth reading, you can never better that YES moment, that moment of revelation and discovery.

It must be like being an archaeologist or an explorer or an astronaut even.

That first moon-step is always going to be the one you most remember.

And these moon-steps; what are they but a doorway to another world, another way of thinking. They break the mind wide open like a rock cracked apart to reveal its crystals. They send the writer scuttling sideways for pen and paper.

Some thoughts on new writers and publishing

As a tutor one of the most common mistakes I see in new writers is their acting to soon on that urge to get their work out there. I think most writers have it - I definitely did - when you really find the thing you feel is your calling it is very exciting and every new poem or short story you write is the best thing you have ever written and of course you can't wait to share it with the rest of the world. And maybe it IS the best thing YOU have ever written, and maybe your friends and family and even tutors have praised it, but that doesn't mean that it will necessarily cut it in the competitive publishing world.

I am not saying this to be mean or judgemental - I sent out some howlers before I knew better. For years I wrote poetry without really working on (or knowing how to work on) my craft and I would send the best (in my eyes) of those poems to the occasional competition convinced it might stand a chance - I look back on those with horror now. And then when I started writing seriously and my work started improving and evolving and I was dipping my toe into the writing world, again I was keen to start getting it out there. I remember a particularly painful rejection that came from a guest editor of Magma suggesting I might want to do a creative writing course - I was apoplectic at the time - I was in the last year of a creative writing degree of course I was a serious writer - but looking back he was right. My writing was showing signs of something promising but I was still making beginner's mistakes and I was nowhere near there yet (not that I am now either - but I am a bit further along the path).

A wise tutor (and respected poet) once told me that it takes six years hard work to become a mediocre poet. At the time I thought that was a little harsh but now I realise that he was right. I have worked on my craft seriously for six years now (I don't count the time on my Creative Writing BA in that - if I count that too it's nine years) and I only now feel that I am really beginning to find my feet with my writing. I started sending work out sporadically to journals towards the end of my MA year and didn't start thinking about pulling poems into a pamphlet or collection until a couple of years after that. And all the while I was writing a lot as well as reading lots of journals, poetry collections, poetry websites, essays and books on writing.

Social media has been a great thing for writers. I am involved with several Facebook workshopping groups and was part of Jo Bell's 52 project last year. Social media has enabled writers to feel less isolated, to make connections, to get invaluable feedback on their work, and to make lasting friendships. But the down side of this web community is that it can make people competitive and over eager to be published. Consequently there has been a small rash of web zines and journals springing up that are not overly discerning about what they publish and don't reject much (if any work). On the one hand a little healthy competition can be good and more poetry publishing opportunities must surely be a good thing, but the down side of this is that it is easier than ever to get into print but that the quality of the work being published is not always so good. I know from my own experience that as you improve as a writer that you are sometimes embarrassed by your earlier efforts - which is OK if it is just the odd poem in a back issue of a journal that no one will ever see - but less good if it is emblazoned across the internet and the first thing that comes up if an editor googles your name. Luckily for me the internet poetry world was not so big when I started out and I have managed to locate and delete the awful poetry blog I started years ago.

So what's my point? I am not saying that new writers should never send work out or think about what might happen further down the line if they keep writing. I am just saying be cautious. Sit on your work for a while first, edit re-edit, put it away for a while and then edit some more. Be aware that not everything you write will be good enough to publish - I probably write 10-15 poems to get one or two that are OK. Keep reading and writing and reading. Read widely. Read journals to see what's out there and get an idea of where your work might eventually sit. Read collections to learn and be inspired and to get an idea of how collections work. If you are a relatively new writer put publishing on the back burner for a bit - it's better to enter in a blaze of glory than with something mediocre, and if getting published is your only reason for writing perhaps consider another career.