PAMPHLET!: Repeat 'till Fade

SO:

Since the start of May, mostly to keep me sane in the avalanche of 'adult' poetry stuff that I've been working on, there's been a separate, quite distinct seam of real-time, mental-health focused writing. What seems like a thousand years ago this was how I'd deal with reality on a daily basis. Back then, most of it was made into content and shoveled off to my websites and social media presences.

This time, it's been kept away from the limelight, mostly because there was no need to share it. Other 'projects' remain more important. There was also zero pressure on me to produce anything of any commercial value either and that has meant an order on the page that I cannot remember ever seeing. Suddenly, as of yesterday afternoon, I had 18 poems which have now resolved themselves into a self-determined sequence. As of this morning, the first draft is complete.

I have, for largely the last eight years, never produced anything this honest.

They're sitting there now, waiting for me to find the time to edit them. The sequence is solid, there is no need (I feel) to alter that side of things. The poems themselves do, in places, absolutely need work, however, and so that will be the part time faff between doing all the stuff that I'm currently going to get paid for. We're going to name things going forward for ease of reference too. This pamphlet, as a result, will be referred as Project 1668.

This moniker has a direct reference to the pamphlet's epigram, but won't give any of the major details away. The contest window it will now be sent to has a while before it closes too, so there's no massive sweat on to have anything done and dusted immediately. Mostly I'm putting it here as a commitment to myself, as I thought I'd done with the sweat of trying to get my work recognised by traditional publishing. It turns out that I'm not.

It is time to stop listening to my head and lead with my heart.

There's gonna be a LOT of Pamphlet news in the near future, so laying down the foundations seemed like a decent idea at this point. If you follow me on BlueSky I've been commentating on this pamphlet's construction in real time since my first Art Trail appointment, which spawned the poem that was the original Poem One in the sequence. That job is now being done by an already published piece that was built to do just that. The last poem will now be the other poem that demanded to start the sequence, and I feel all of this is now exactly as it should be.

I'll keep you up to date in the weeks that follow on how things are working out.