2010...how futuristic that seems

No resolutions for me. I beat myself up on a regular basis as it is. I'll be glad to just get through with no major illness, having written a little and still in possession of all my loved ones.

2009 was a great year for female singer songwriters. Bat For Lashes and Florence + The Machine are high on my most often played list. Long may they wail. I have discovered Amazon wishlists finally for all my booky wants. This is keeping my mind clearer from the panic of forgetting which books I would like to read. I have developed an engrossing new pastime of doing Jigsaws. This is quite embarrassing but I don't have enough followers to worry about widespread exposure. I have been drawn to finish one featuring Siberian Tigers. Consumed all my free moments. Given me eye strain and my dream fragments on waking are now jigsaw shaped. Then I am told it's Chinese Year of The Tiger, and suddenly it all feels ok. I have, however, just discovered that you can get Victoria Frances artwork as jigsaws. This will invariably turn me fully into an addict within the next month or so.

Ah, the creative ways I have found to distract myself from the business of writing! The MA new term starts next week, and I am grappling around for something to workshop. Prose poems I think. But are they any good? I honestly don't know, but best find out now. I also need to write an 800 word travel writing essay in the hope of winning a 10-day safari to Zambia. Worth a punt. I even have an idea! Shock.

I am going to set myself one writing target for the new year - to draft at least one new poem and prose poem every two weeks. I tend to work in flurries, writing 3 in a week and then nothing claiming it's just the way i work best but I want to get serious and write regularly regardless, I should be doing this for classes anyway, but I have been able to rely on my 'back-catalogue' to prop me up in quiet weeks, but I don't want to have that dependency this year. It's lazy. I also must submit more work. I keep saying I will and then I don't. How long will I keep making excuses.

Cost-Benefit Analysis on poetry?

(Copywrite R. Allen 09)

Throwing the obscure and redrafted poem into the bear pit this morning was pretty useful. I had been convinced everyone would prefer the latter as it went a lot further in addressing the narrative problem of the first attempt. But in the end, there were those who preferred the more obscure version. It was decided that by redrafting, the new poem has lost some of its lyricism and flow, despite having more clarity in the meaning. I had also taken out some imagery and they wanted this back in, the answer to this being I'll save it for another poem. It seems that in trying to meet the reader half-way I had sacrificed some of what makes my writing appealing, yet in return I'd delivered accessibility and gained readers that struggled with the original. In truth, the first version was more 'me' but it was refreshing to see people openly understand my writing for a change and I think I prefer that feeling than the feeling that I've successfully scratched my own head.

I will redraft (version 12) at some point, to try and get it to flow again like the original and to perhaps take out the words that were hang-overs from trying to tie up the narrative. Maybe I'll write every poem with a CBA in mind - what am I losing but what am I gaining? Is something lost, lost forever. If I hadn't redrafted I wouldn't have seen the possibility of getting a second poem out of it - pouring all of my arsenal in to one was perhaps a waste of resources.

This was a new method of writing and drafting that I have not tried before. I usually try and be a bit more organic (hate that word) but for those of us who tend to the obscure then I think it's a good idea to find a method for making sure the story is there and not clogged with ideas.

All sorts of busy

This week I have been focusing on writing more accessibly. This is because it has been levelled at me that I sometimes disappear off into obscurity and risk losing the reader. This made me quite sad for a while. I took it really personally and at the same time thought sod-off I'll write how I damn well please! But then once I had simmered down I realised that the critics were probably right, at least part-right, and that some of my writing would benefit from being less puzzling. I worked on one particular poem, writing out in long-hand next to the poem what the story was I was trying to tell. I then compared it to my poem and did realise that a lot of the images/lines I had used were surplus to requirement, and more importantly muddying the water. So I took it all out and rewrote the poem in a very dry obvious accessible way. At this point it was too dry and so i tried to take it back to where there is a little mystery. I have no idea how it will be viewed now. perhaps too obscure still? Perhaps I went to far and now it's just dull? This time I will remember that there will be people who like things that require a bit of work as well as those that don't. I'll find out tomorrow.

I have also been trying, with unknown success to juggle writing for pleasure (see above) with writing for work. I have two academic papers to write and three presentations. These are all required by mid-December. I don't mind the volume, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to separate my two brains and write for these totally different purposes, in totally different styles. it's quite a challenge. In my academic work, prose wouldn't be too appropriate and in poetry the word-hoard I have developed from my work has led to the obscurity issue. Finding a balance between the two at the moment is the challenge. As is generally finding the time to write and work and read and critique and be original and be inspired and all that! I can't remember the last time I had a thought to myself. Don't get me wrong, I love writing and I love work but the two are too far apart at the moment, yet I can't really see a way it could be any different.

I do now however have my beloved desk back at home. No longer in the garage. It's now in the living room with printer, tablet, scanner, laptop books etc. The problem will be the TV directly behind me. We also have new shelves for the books that are breeding like rabbits. This has to be it though - in a small flat, 3 bookcases and 4 shelves is plenty and I may need to have a clearout next time. Although how do you grow a library when getting rid of books. Is it like the idea of having your hair trimmed regularly if you want to grow it long? Hmm.

Another new week starts soon

A dubious 48 hours this weekend. But I have been busy critiquing work for the online conference. Since I started writing poetry, I find it hard to string together full sentences. This is exacerbated by the frantic emailing I tend to engage in: broken thoughts, quick sends. Anyhow, the intention to improve is always there. Everything I have to say tends towards niceness, and I don't think this is approved of - I get the feeling that what staff want is a bit of blood sport. Curious, how they forget that we still have to see eachother when the conference is over. The fact it's online is really just to make the dept. feel like they're doing something innovative. In all likelihood we'll get together in the pub and talk about it, as we've already done before it started. I doubt it'll get vitriolic and argumentative, requiring us to 'take it to the (online) cafe'! But what do I know? I just think I like these people. I like their writing. I like my own fragile sense of self esteem, please don't crush me - there's always hare coursing if you really must.

Flasher

I've decided to take a brief reprieve from poetry and focus instead on flash fiction. At least for a week or two. I've been anxious to get back into prose for a while but keep wriggling out of it and doing a bad job when I sit down to exert myself. But now seems like a good time with the MA residential coming up when we'll be encouraged to write outside our comfort zone. I have this horrible feeling though that if I abandon poetry even temporarily then I might lose the knack - or the poetry muse may abandon me for deserting her first! I wonder whether having a break will be useful - get me thinking differently. I was certainly running out of topics I was interested in writing about in poems. Somehow, flash fiction allows for more tangents and weird connections across ideas. I could be wrong, but I haven't mastered that in a poem yet. I also like conversational style in flash, but not in poems (where I prefer something a bit....tighter...)

The problem I am having is a rush of too many characters all at once. Too many scenarios. Too many half-heard conversations and moments to document. This would never usually be a problem, but with so much work on, I barely have time to get to know any of these characters before my confidence in them deserts me and I put them aside while I get on with something pressing like the mountain of reading for class, or cooking dinner, washing, sleeping!

Apologies, Considerations, Submissions and Cake

OK, so I haven't been true to my word to blog after every class. I have however, been writing in the journal. Which is something, right? But I should try harder. I have had an up-and-down week, wondering whether to continue with the MA. Mainly because I am the only poet in the group and I have been worried that I will be a bit isolated. I have mulled this over a lot, spoken to people - asking if it's usual for there to be such an imbalance, seeked reassurance that my learning won't suffer. Everyone has said the 'right' things. For now I am reassured. The group is clearly committed to poetry as well as their own prose and I am sure I have a lot to learn from prose writers. Maybe it will make my own prose better. So I will persevere for now.

Went to the Cake launch today, the new literary mag published by students of creative writing at Lancaster Uni. Shame they couldn't turn off the musical plants and the distracting video streaming on the monitor while people were reading. Also, the kids running around screaming. But all in, it was a nice launch and I am really impressed by the quality of the magazine and of the writing. It's well put together and presents a diversity of work from a variety of students and alumni etc. I'll certainly think about submitting to Cake in the future, and I would like to get involved with reviews.

What else, I have submitted some poems today. Back in the saddle after making tweaks and adjustments to some older poems. Scouring for cliches.

Week One Campus MA

Today was the first seminar for the campus MA. I've decided to blog after each session and I am part-time so this will be every tuesday. This could become overkill because I am already writing it into a journal, and various notebooks. Perhaps by writing about it in a variety of places, something new will come out each time. Nice thought.

Paul F. started us off by reading and discussing prose poems. What are they? what makes them both prose and a poem? Do they work?

The main conclusion was that they were all on a sliding scale and some of the group favoured those at the prose end, while others favoured those at the poem end. I like the lyrical and surreal poem end of the spectrum. As it moves towards prose, I start to see it morph quickly into flash fiction. I am more comfortable with the notions of poems, prose that is poetic and flash fiction. I haven't got a well honed ability to decipher poems that are pretty much prose. I wouldn't say I am black and white, but I like transparency. Sometimes i think I have written a prose poem based only on the fact that it was clearly nothing else. But then I read someone really good at it, and I can see where the form came from. After having a bit of a discussion about what worked and what didn't, we moved on to a discussion about the huge amount of work written from photos. This was an interesting exercise. Nothing radical and unthought of, but nevertheless it prepared us for writing our own prose poem based on a randomly assigned photo.

Most of us received Victorian sepia photos of ladies and gents, while a couple of us had more modern photos: a herding family with reindeer, and a man with a fish and a lemon. I found it really hard to be inspired by my photo of a blank looking woman (I wish I had taken a photo of it for uploading here) just looking into the distance. No expression. No background. No date. I actually would have preferred the man with the salmon. But alas, we were given half an hour to write a prose poem and then read it out to the class. Herein lies the point of this blog. It was a bit scary. We had barely learnt each others names (no cheesy ice-breakers or sticky badges) but just had to reveal our inability straight out! We all gave the obligatory intro statement about how 'mine is crap, really!' and 'i never do this sort of thing' but eventually got down to the business of sharing. This was my offering.

The blur is not from the capturing, the blur was there in you, softening your edges as a chalk over the years, till you were merely a soft-focus of heart and hair and eyes in an empty chair. You weren't the prettiest, but the last light of us reflected in the cubes of your eye - as you watched the leylandii inch away to the sky, over my shoulder, silently through the back. Those pinched needles straining to overshadow it all. The roots creeping easy round your ankles. Mary, your sepia hair was gold to me, my evergreen.

I was worrying about exposing myself as a vulnerable and pathetic writer, fearing the silent judgement of others, but really I think everyone was way too busy thinking the same thing of themselves to be worried about my nervously read botch job. It's not easy to write on demand, let alone share it on demand a few minutes later, but we all did it and I couldn't really tell you now about anyone's, other than they were all fine. There were no howlers. I can only say that it was a lesson in growing a thick skin quick, if not to protect you from others, but to protect you from yourself.