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.

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.

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! 

Getting it Out There

I was updating my personal bibliography a couple of months ago and was shocked to discover that I had only had one poem published in 2014. I had had work accepted that will come out this year, I had been shortlisted in a pamphlet competition and I had written a couple of reviews - but still only one poem. I was shocked. Part of my problem is that I have never been pro-active enough about sending out my work. I had a beginner's flurry - where you send out lots of work that isn't good enough because you are so excited about this amazing writing thing. But since then I have sent out in fits and starts - fits mostly.

Once I had discovered this I started sending the occasional thing out. I also made one of my New Year Resolutions to be to get my work out there more to send out at least one submission a week. The more work you send out, the more you stand a chance of having something accepted, and ultimately the more chance you have of a publisher taking your pamphlet or collection seriously - it's not rocket science. Amazingly once you start sending work out regularly it suddenly becomes less of a big deal. I have found that now I am sending out more and more work, and I have already had a few things accepted.

There are two things that really helped motivate me with this - one was being coached by a friend who was training as a writing coach - kind of like a life coach but for writers. She asked me lots of questions about my writing life that made me think about what I do and why - you can read more about that here. The second thing was reading a blog post by Canal Laureate Jo Bell, which you can read here. One of the things that Jo suggests is making a database or spreadsheet to track which pieces of writing you send where and when you might expect a reply by. This is a brilliant (and simple) idea. It means that you are less likely to submit the same poem to journals at the same time, or, and I have done this, send the same poem to the same journal twice.  I actually made two spreadsheets - one that shows which all the journals poems have been submitted to - I highlight the place it is eventually published in - and the other which shows what poems are currently out, where they have gone and when to expect a reply by. It has certainly revolutionised my submission practice.

Submissions and Inspiration

I am making a concerted effort this month to make at least one poetry submission per week - it doesn't sound like much I know but it is far more than i have been doing. I realised that I had let things go woefully on the submissions front when a few weeks ago I decided that maybe it was time to submit to The Rialto again - after all a few months had passed since I last submitted. I was shocked to discover that the last time I submitted work to the journal was actually 2012! It was a real wake-up call. I knew I had been slacking on the submissions front - and even more so since I finished my collection last year. I think the lack of movement on that front has made me lose my enthusiasm somewhat - as well as for some months quashing my creativity altogether. I am pleased to say that I am now back in the writing saddle - in part due to Jo Bell's 52 Blog - every week she posts a writing prompt and links to poems around that week's themes. It has been surprisingly inspiring - and somehow once you start writing again more and more comes. Now I just need to man up and ask the publisher who has had some of my poems for eight months to make a decision.

Motivation and self-imposed deadlines

I was talking to a writer friend earlier in the week about how one can keep oneself motivated post MA. I am finding that my writing, but more especially my editing, has become sporadic now that I don't have deadlines to write for. I guess that one answer would be to set my own deadlines, but I know from experience that I don't adhere to my own deadlines in the same way - I thrive under that outside pressure, it gives me that extra push to work on my poems that bit harder.  I am also quite slack about submitting work to journals and competitions  - yet I know that this is the way to get your work known, it doesn't make sense. Last year I used the excuse of not having enough money as I was a student - yet I am still hardly submitting, I need to sort it out. My friend said that he is the same, he will have a flurry of sending stuff off and then not send any for a while - he thought maybe it was to do with rejection, and he could be right. Rejection is something that as emerging writers we have to learn to live with but it can be hard sometimes.

On a more positive note I have had had two websites ask if they can use my poems this week. I was flattered and although they weren't offering money I said yes. It is just good to get the work out there. As sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow says "an artist's enemy is obscurity..."