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.

The Beauty of a Writing Retreat

I spent five days last week on my own in a holiday cottage at Wells-next-the-sea writing. It was an amazing experience. My normal life is pretty busy with lots of different threads of things that I am involved in, plus I share a house with my 20-year-old son who is at Art School so my home life is often busy too. It was great to have time to just fully focus on my work. I found that I got into a completely different zone of thinking about it. I now completely understand why people go on longer writing retreats. if I had had another week or two I probably would have written an entire book.

I didn't however re-order my collection, but what I did do was generate a lot of new work. I already had a couple of new sequences that I had been working on and which I knew would change my collection significantly once I added them in. What I did when I was away was to write an entirely new sequence of about twenty poems that compliments one of the other sequences. I am very excited about it - I can now see that the collection is taking on a definite shape and isn't just going to be the best poems I have written over the last year or two - it will have a theme and a form. Now I just have to work out how the other poems will fit around the sequences.