Thursday 22 September 2011

How to order a collection

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

Friday 2 September 2011

Writing Away

So there is something about being away from home that makes me write. I think it is to do with beinng away from the day to day pressure of trying to earn a living etc. But it is more than that too - sometimes all I have to do is simply get on a train and I get the urge to start writing - maybe it's to do with being in a space where I can't do anything else for a while. Being on holiday also puts me in that space and couple that with reading some inspirational poetry ("Infinite Differences: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets" edited by Carrie Etter) and I am well away. I just hope that when I come to typing up and editingv that there is some reasonable poetry...