Writing the Perfect Beast #31

Starting in October 2025, 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 shining a light on what you need to do with your brain and mental attitudes to make all of that knowledge stick, grow and then evolve. HI THERE.

On what now becomes a new, regular on Sunday post, LET'S GET SERIOUS.

This week, I was almost offered publication.

I have also this week used some of my hard-earned poetry money on learning to become a better boxer. It is a humbling and frustrating experience, unpicking years of sessions when all I've ever done is hit a bag for three minutes at a time. 45 minute blocks leave me physically and mentally exhausted. However, what is now becoming clear is that both body and brain are altering.

There's a lot to be said for the parallels that can be drawn between sport and attainment in other spaces. Like it or not, for a lot of my life as a poet, I am placed in competition with a ridiculous number of other talented and worthy writers. There are a stupidly small number of openings for a huge pool of 'players' and sometimes, the fact you don't get to be chosen is the thing that breaks you.

This week, I finally moved past that issue into unknown territory.

Publishing the actual rejection text from my failed double pamphlet entry on Friday (and not making an erasure poem from failure) was, it has to be said, a bit of a game-changing experience. This was bolstered by three other conversations on the day from friends who all get the variables at play, that value how hard I work and how much I want this, and who feel (in varying degrees) the same way.

None of my friends are in contest with me. I want nothing but success and joy and recognition for them all, and this is where the whole 'pitting us all against each other' thing is ultimately doomed to failure. It's also why learning to deal with why the process of 'failure' becomes a vital part of a larger journey matters... except, it doesn't. None of this is anything other than unqualified success.

Every time you advance quality and skill in your work, you become stronger.

This planet does love us to take sides in absolutely everything. If it's not good versus evil, it's country against country, city against city, poet v poet. The problems with this are manyfold, not least the mental and physical toll it can exact on those of us who, at the end of the day, are only doing this to keep themselves sane. Does publication even matter at that point? I know it doesn't, so why still try?

This is a question I have asked myself a lot in the last year, and the answer is that I have a point to prove. In the end, if all I ever do is write to express how I feel, why can't that be enough? Where does the obsession with publication even fit into a larger mental health landscape? For me it's the hope that if someone else sees my work and empathises with it, that might help their own journey to do the same.

I am here to help people accept poetry as a coping mechanism.

I'm not a magical realist, but I could be, if it helped my brain. Every form of poetry has value but ultimately there is a predilection to the more reflective and emotional conduits for no other reason than it gives the internal chaos a distinct direction in which to travel. Laying the paths, ploughing the land, building the structures... all of it has my own emotional resonance as a barometer.

I've always been a problem solver, for as long as I can remember. The poetry has become not only a way to do that for myself but, over time, may become the means by which others also redefine their own existences. If enough of us have the difficult conversations, and can be honest with ourselves around belief and intent, who knows what poetry could be capable of in the future.

This week, I redefined that ambition going forward.