Tag: drafting

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Flogging old drafts – ‘do I still want to say this?’

digging out old poems to recycle

No, not flogging in the sense of selling, although who knows? Maybe there’s a market for it – poets could sell their old given-up-on poems to others who might be able to make something of them.

But what I’m talking about here is old stuff that you rediscover years later and think ‘hmm… maybe there is something in this.’

I don’t know about you but I have tons of folders on my computer, actually it’s sprawled across two computers, both of which are current, just to add to the mess. ‘Poems Archive’, ‘Old poems’, ‘Old bad poems’, ‘Poems to work on’, etc. There are also folders which date from various ‘poem a day’ exercises, courses and self-styled retreats, going back seven or eight years.

When I find myself trawling the current ‘working on’ folder and finding nothing to inspire me, I sometimes open up one of the old folders for a peek. But I think the trick is not to do it too often, because you want to surprise yourself with stuff you’ve forgotten about.

Sometimes I just need reassurance. ‘Wow! look at the tat I was writing in 2009’ or whatever. Or to see how fruitful a certain retreat or course had been. In March 2015, for example, I took myself off to Standen for a three day retreat. When I looked at the folder of ten poems I started or worked on while I was there, I see that two were subsequently published – after a lot of work though – in Prole and The Interpreter’s House, and one eventually came second in the 2016 Stanza competition. On the other hand, the May 2013 ‘poem a day’ folder only contains three poems (!), none of which made it to publication.

But more exciting is to find poems I just could not get to work, but when I read them again now I’m thinking ‘I still want to say this.’

So after today’s hunt through the various rejected-by-myself piles, I have found seventeen poems worth revisiting, on the basis that each of them have something, however small, going for them. Yes, they are riddled with tired phrases, poor line breaks, too much ‘telling’, portentous last lines and the rest. But that can all be worked on, and it will be fun to do so. Most importantly, they make me think ‘yes, I still want to say this.’

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To Liverpool, 28 drafts later

Liverpool

It’s wonderful how software like Illustrator allows non-designers like me a chance to play around with layout, typefaces and graphic design. I really value how digital has made good quality print projects possible for amateur creatives. We can all be publishers now. Producing your own zine, poster, wall art or whatever is cheap and easy.

Perhaps this is what gives the handmade or hand finished object extra appeal. I haven’t seen the magazine Coast to Coast to Coast yet – it’s only on its second edition – but when I came across a tweet asking for submissions, and read about it being hand stitched , I knew I wanted it – and to be in it, if possible. The magazine editors are Maria Isakova Bennett and Michael Brown. I knew Maria’s name from her poetry, but she is also a fine artist, and the magazine is designed to be a work of art, a beautiful artefact in itself. (Fuselit, edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, is another handmade, limited edition magazine which I have a few copies of, and they are small things of great wonder.)

When Maria emailed to say they had accepted my submission I was excited for several reasons – firstly obviously to have a poem in the magazine and alongside the work of many fine poets, secondly because this particular poem has been in development for A Very Long Time, and lastly because the launch event is at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, it means I get a good reason to go visit.

“The greatest team in Europe…”

When I was a teenager I worshipped Liverpool FC. My girlfriends and I were happy talking about Kevin Keegan all day. I never saw my team play at home, because a journey to Liverpool was inconceivable – at that time I lived in London and I’d never been north of Derby. But I recorded each season’s match results religiously in my diary, an early version of which also bizarrely contained a ‘Club News’ section, written up in my best fourteen-year-old’s sports journalist style, even though no-one read it but me!

diary extract

Although I’ve only been twice to Liverpool, the thought of going up there in December to hear some lovely poetry, in an art gallery, to stay the night in the city and to take away a handmade piece of art fills me with a ridiculous amount of joy. Ironically I don’t follow football any more.

So what about the 28 drafts?

The poem features a fur, or an alleged fur – depending on how you read it (perhaps it was always destined to appear in a tactile/textile magazine?) Anyway, the first draft was in 2011, and looking at the computer folder I see it has had 28 drafts and six different titles over the last seven years. This has to be a record for me. I know I workshopped it at least three times, each time resulting in my thinking it rubbish and putting it away. I submitted it several times in the early days, but stopped over the years as I lost confidence in it. But I couldn’t give up on it entirely. This year I got it out again for more redrafting. It felt much better – as if I’d had to grow into the poem. And now it’s finally found a home, and I’m absurdly grateful.

Hurrah for the handmade and the labours of love!

Writing/

‘Poem a day’ update

magnetic poetry

magnetic poetry

I’m about halfway through my mission to write (or at least start) a poem a day. I wish I could say it’s been easy.  I started on the 6th February, so by now I should have about 26/27 poems I think. But alas – some days I’ve been unwell or just haven’t fitted in the time, although on a couple of days I’ve managed two. Here’s a summary of what I’ve got so far:

18 complete first drafts.

2 started but nowhere near complete.

1 in outline plan only, nothing written.

3 days gap when I wasn’t well.

Of the eighteen complete first drafts, looking at them now I would say five I am quite pleased with so far even though they still need work (although one of them is a ‘funny’, more for performance than publishing) and another 4 have potential.

On the whole I’m very pleased because I think these kinds of ratios (of useful-to-useless material) are what I produce anyway, but by making myself write more frequently I’ve concertina-d them into a shorter space of time, which was partly the object of the exercise.

 

(Picture: Surreal Muse on Flickr)