Writing the Perfect Beast #25

Starting in October 2005, I decided to talk honestly about the business of how I write poetry. There are people who teach how to create poetry, how to format it, how to submit and how publishing in general works. I am not seeing that many people doing work on what you need to do with your brain and mental attitudes to make that stick, grow and then evolve. HI THERE.

Let’s see if we can change that.

Over the next week or so I will reconstruct the 24 other parts of this journey, which as (can sometimes happen) were corrupted between being downloaded from Substack and here. That, in itself, is a salutatory reminder to myself that the best-laid plans of even the most organised and committed writers will occasionally go south through no fault of their own. There is extra work to be done.

When I started this set of musings, it was from a place of near-defeat. 'Traditional' publishing had kicked me in the head. We will also reinstate the Forest Management series of posts as a warning to myself (and others) that trust must always be a two-way street in publishing. If you don't think someone gets how deeply personal your work is, think more than twice about trusting them.

I have now become a poet working in many spaces simultaneously.

I came extremely close to packing it in entirely at the end of last year. The whole 'darkest before the dawn' thing gets quoted a lot for good reason, and the knowledge that what I am now is a great deal away from the person that I was has become abundantly apparent in the last week. Old me would have crumbled under the circumstance. New me reached out to the people that mattered then dug in.

The results are significant. I took a chance with several pieces of work, and the results were a genuine surprise. Some exciting opportunities have been cemented. Waiting for traditional publishing to extract the digit is a painful and often utterly dispiriting process, so instead there is work to do under my own auspice. We know what needs to be done, and it will be.

We'll have details on what that entails here beginning on Wednesday.

NEXT Monday, I'm going to start providing support here for multiple people at once. I will be bringing my Stanza group into the fold, providing them with a Regular Writing Prompt directly into their inbox, which I hope they will find useful. If you're reading this and that is something you may be interested in, please comment at the bottom of this post, and I will add you to the list.

We're also going to spend the next however many weeks it takes me to expand on how I approach some basic poetic principles:

• Form (from the architecture of traditional poetry to the pursuit of individual truth from within that)
• Substance (why certain poems are and not immediately accessible can be surmised from a structured response to emotional resonance)
• Function (what can a poem do, exactly, and is there anything it can't?)
• Feeling (is a dirty word for many poets, but absolutely matters regardless)

If this goes well as a project, I intend to use it the basis of a Short-Form Zoom Course around the November/December mark of this year, and as a way of opening up my own stall of being a creative facilitator. I've wanted to do this for the best part of three years but couldn't find the means to host the process successfully. Now we are here, it can and will happen.

I hope this might make some of you excited enough to start considering a signup to this site if you're reading me on BlueSky. If I can get one new person a week to come along, I'll take that as a victory. Maybe that person today could be you...

We will see :D