Month: April 2020

Angst/

SloPo

How are you doing?

Apparently we’re now all feasting on The Repair Shop and reruns of The Vicar of Dibley. The skies are bluer and quieter than ever, all the better to hear birdsong. Stars are brighter, if you have access to outdoor space at night time. I realise these are terrible times for so many people and I’m one of the fortunate ones. I’m not facing financial ruin, I’m ‘locked down’ in the company of my best friend and I have a garden. I’m able to appreciate Spring and watch things grow. Just the word grow makes me slow down. So what if I haven’t written any stonking new poems lately. I have a few ideas, but they need time to grow. SloPo seems to have come into its own.

I planted some basil seeds on 6th March, and another lot on 20th April. What a difference six weeks makes.

Basil growing

The problem is I have plenty of poems at the pre-germination stage and I want them to look more like that 6-week young basil!

I enjoyed reading an interview with Julia Cameron in the Sunday Times last week, (apologies if this is behind a paywall) on dealing with social isolation (“As westerners, we have a hard time sitting and doing nothing”). I remember reading The Artist’s Way and struggled to follow its advice. There’s something about ‘free writing’ that feels to me like the opposite: I feel restricted, I regress to cliche, old reminiscences, boring language and prosaic nonsense. An advocate might say ‘yes that’s the idea – not to think, just write’. But sadly it doesn’t free me up. I guess I could adapt the daily free writing to something else: word games around a theme or something that at least begins with a structure.

Next month I’m going to be following Adriene Mishler’s monthly calendar which will have a meditation element to it alongside the yoga. Meditation isn’t something I’ve ever got into, but these days I’m suitably chilled to give it a try.

Quick submissions update

So far I’ve managed to stick to my resolve of not entering any single-poem competitions. (Although I did try the Poetry Business Pamphlet competition again.) Having had nothing really appear in magazines for months, I’m paying the price for submitting very little in the second half of 2019. I did have a poem long listed in the National this year, which I was chuffed about (once I’d got over the initial BWWAAA how did I manage to miss out on the money?) I’m very pleased to have a poem forthcoming in The North in the summer, and one in Stand. I’m currently awaiting responses to nine poems from three magazines. That’s it for now.

Wishing you love, health and slo-po.

Blog/

Just a notelet…

Having just enjoyed reading through my Monday morning digest of other people’s blogs, I can see quite a few people are blogging more often, and I’m wondering why that doesn’t seem to be the case for me. I haven’t even updated my ‘Eastbourne Diary’ blog since the lockdown, and yet there’s plenty to report about the garden, and the moving around of furniture and other household tales. I think maybe I’m trying to do more individual reaching out, and consequently the blogging has slipped down the ‘to-do’ list.

A couple of weeks ago I had the thought of writing to friends, to ask how they are and tell them what’s going on in our little world-bubble. But I confess my handwriting is poor, and after 20 years of RSI it hurts to write longhand. Then I remembered how much I’d enjoyed making ‘Foot Wear’, my little A6 sized pamphlet, and thought I would revive the quaint art of the ‘notelet’ – a sort of cross between a card and a letter. I have a large stock of good quality A5 paper, so I started painting sheets of them, just random background paint, the more sloshed-on the better. When they were dry, I flattened them between the pages of my OED, then set about trimming and pamphlet-binding two sheets together into little A6 booklets. But what to put in them? I decided on a kind of mini-magazine – there was space for one poem (something I liked and/or felt was appropriate, but not one of mine), one ‘topical’ prose extract or flash fiction, a recipe and a knot instructional (I’m big into knots at the moment). It seemed a bit dry, so I got out my copy of the fascinating British Poetry Magazines 1914 – 2000 and photocopied a few of the poetry magazine covers from times past. And added a postcard. The notelets were all slightly different – I tried to choose the elements according to the person I was sending to.

British Poetry Maga zines 2014 - 2000

When it came to writing in the notelets and sending them out, I wondered if I’d gone a bit crazy. I could picture some of the recipients opening and thinking ‘oh no, Robin’s lost it’. But in a good way I hoped!  In actual fact I’ve had some really lovely responses, including a handwritten card and letter, and no-one seems to have been weirded-out. One friend said, ‘it’s fascinating to see what people get up to during a lockdown!’ I’ll take that!

making notelets

 

Blog/

Tending seedlings & taking comfort from ‘wee granny’

I hope you’re well in body and spirit. If you’re anything like me you’re trying not to overdose on news and focus instead on Spring!

Last week’s Hastings Stanza poetry workshop via Zoom went very well, in fact I was convinced enough to then sign up for a Zoom-hosted writing session with the Sansoms next week. Something in the diary! This last week I’ve been reading rather than writing. A couple of hundred pages through The Mirror and the Light, I’m not as gripped as I was by Wolf Hall. But I’m into it. Meanwhile, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is compelling in a macabre sort of way – many, many parallels with today, both in how people are reacting to it and in how authorities are trying to deal with it. There’s also some unexpected humour.

A happy distraction at the moment is vegetable growing. I’m going to have more seedlings ready to plant out than we can accommodate, so I’m hoping the neighbours will be happy to have a courgette or two in the communal garden. Failing that I could offer them to other houses in the street, although I know many of them have communal gardens managed by agents. Maybe I should put them on a ‘help yourself’ table on the pavement outside. Although people aren’t out for strolls that much at the moment of course.

courgette and nasturtium seedlings

I’ve been keeping a ‘lockdown’ journal, just for my own interest and to remind myself (hopefully in years to come!) how we (hopefully!) got through it. Reading other people’s blogs I get the feeling the initial euphoria of it all has flattened out to more a sense of restlessness or powerlessness, even sadness. I know ‘euphoria’ sounds wrong, but I mean that initial excitement in terms of ‘it’s really happening’ and ‘no-one in the world knows how this is going to go’ and ‘we’re all (kind of) in it together’, plus getting used to all the changes and rising to the occasion. As Mat Riches says in his recent post, “apparently, we’re meant to be using this time to learn Sumerian or how to perform brain surgery and recreate Citizen Kane in stop motion using only Lego minifigs or repurposed Barbie Dolls” – but for many people it’s enough to get through the day and not worry about the family they’re not seeing or the business they’re losing.

Although I’m also fighting a creeping sense of sadness, I’ve so much to feel grateful for. Last Thursday was our youngest granddaughter’s 2nd birthday. I had fun making a card telling a story in which we all played parts, and with WhatsApp we were able to share the candle-blowing-out/cake cutting. Regular runs out with Nick make me feel that my body isn’t atrophying. The sun’s been shining and there’s beautiful scenery where I live. I watched the Queen’s message on TV last night and was strangely moved. What she’s been through. I’ve never considered myself a raging royalist but I have the upmost respect for her and I found her words comforting. In the same vein, the little video of a Scottish ‘wee granny’ that popped into my Twitter stream midweek was (and still is) a highlight for me. Do watch it if you haven’t already, you will feel better afterwards.

For once I’m actually grateful to be subscribed to so many newsletters, as companies and organisations are making great efforts to reach out to customers with new services, suggestions or just moral support. I’m not saying I’ve taken them all up, but sometimes just reading them helps. Here are some I’ve been impressed by:

On my desk I have a list of people I want to keep in touch with and am thinking along the lines of something in the post. Not that I want to overload our valuable posties. But I just feel there can be something very warm about a letter or a card, perhaps hand-made, with a person in mind. More personal than an email, less stressful than a phone call. For many of these people I only have postal addresses anyway. Another project!