About my poetry

This post is not about bragging.

But to those who will read it, no doubt you will have your suspicions that it is a sort of act of boasting.

However, it should be said.

No poem on this blog has ever been revised or made into second drafts etc. and no poem in this blog was pained over for hours on end.

There, said it.

Most of my poems are done in less than twenty five minutes, first draft, scheduled or published online immediately without a second thought and I can only recite one poem I have ever written.

Food for thought, isn’t it?

It’s one of those reasons why I am not a member of any poetic clubs; I am not welcomed because I can push out three to five poems an hour without aching over the words I should produce.

It just naturally flows.

I was astounded to find some poets online take weeks to finish a piece, I personally couldn’t do that and I think it goes to show who is more dedicated to their craft.  They are – I wouldn’t faff around like that over one poem.

I live for the current emotion, it is the current emotions that drive the poetry I don’t want to hang on most of those emotions for weeks on end, good Lord I really would commit suicide if that was the case and at the moment I am only tiptoeing at the edge of it.

It took me about an hour and a half to write one poem once, the longest ever.

I do delete poems never to share them, this happens about twice a week, so you’re losing around a hundred to a hundred and fifty per year, because I am embarrassed to share the depths of my emotions at times.

Sometimes I preschedule poems for months in advance whilst I think about deleting them – at the moment there are seven whose future is as obscure as mine.

Nobody believes I can write that fast until they see me in action, offline. 

Then they accuse me of boasting.

But they did challenge me!

I will sit there and ask them, pick a subject and I will think about it for two or three minutes, to get my mind into the zone of that subject and how I feel about it and then the words pour out and the poem is done within minutes.

I can write a poem about anything, so long as it doesn’t feel like a lie to my heart.  For example, I couldn’t write a poem which is supposed to be a love song for Hitler – I hate fascists!

So that’s not a poem I could write.

But I could write one about cutting his balls off and feeding them to him, no matter how disgraceful that would be and inelegant.

That’s not an invitation for requests by the way!

I find it hard to write more than three poems a day, though I have been known to do up to ten.

I try to force myself to do at least one per day, if I live to a hundred imagine a future publication of all my poetic works, how many volumes could that possibly be?

Thing is, I haven’t a clue what I am doing poetically.

I have never been formally educated about it, I can’t tell a poem from a rhyme to a sonnet etc. – for all I know they could be the same thing but fancy names!

I do know what a haiku is though and I used to write them.

In fact talking of sonnets, I have been seriously thinking about reading a book to learn about those.

One of my dreams is to be patient enough with my poetry that I could actually write a poem as long as Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti and Edmund Spenser.

I have often thought about creating a large poem which is a story like Edmund Spenser’s Fairy Queen – that would be amazing if I could do something like that.

That would take me months, could I do it on an emotional level? 

I have often thought about challenging myself to do it!

I originally wrote the first chapter of a fantasy story in rhyme, with that very intention; but I couldn’t hold it throughout the story – it’s still in progress after nine years, but I haven’t added a thing to the project since 2015.

It’s about gargoyles protecting the heart of a young maiden who lives in the house they protect.

It’s a dark fantasy and very macabre, it’s sort of like Edgar Allen Poe meets Hans Christian Andersen.

I have a couple of online friends who have made the suggestion that I should go on stage and read my poems out there, but I won’t do that.

Why?

Because hilariously as it sounds, I don’t actually regard myself a poet yet!

Yet this is probably what I am best known for.

At the moment I am having a very poetic night – I am thinking about poetry a lot and I am frustrated that a book I have ordered from EBay is two weeks late in the post and I had to put in a complaint about it.

I want to finish the book and do the essays in it to learn what I am doing.  Unfortunately the library is fed up with me re-borrowing that book, I’ve had it a total nine weeks this last borrowing session and it’s the second time in a year I did that, having it for about eighteen weeks in total for the whole year!

I wish it would come soon!

It’s where some of my poems I’ve posted on here has been inspired by, such as “Grief”, “Brent Cross Shopping Centre” and “Lessons from life”.

Anyway, if that’s bragging I apologise!

Thanks for reading…

Reasons behind lack of posts

Why is this blog not updated regularly?

I am always writing something; researching, taking notes, adding to my worlds and even drawing and painting things that I imagine – it is not that I am not doing the work, because I honestly never really stop doing it.  But I do not constantly concentrate on writing novels or even short stories. I am more focused on the world building and planning. Although that in itself may come across as I am not being very serious in my craft, I beg to differ – I believe that perhaps I take my craft way too seriously!

I make map after map, draw landscape after landscape and scene after scene.  It is sometimes difficult to determine where I will place a scene, because I often do not know, so I store it.  I believe I am more of a hoarder of ideas, a great big vending machine of millions of ideas and I hoard them away in boxes and books all over my house, but I am painfully indecisive.

There are times I sit back and wonder which character in which novel should I get to do such things?  I can never really make up my mind and when I am desperate, I tend to do the most insane things to help me decide.  I go onto random.org sometimes, I arrange each character or novel to a number and I put it on the random generator and it tells me, sometimes, in fact most times, I ignore the generator as I just can’t imagine it being them!  Then, years down the line, a completely new character in a completely new story comes along and that tiny snippet I did on the 5^th August 2006, belongs there, with them.  It is weird.

I also sit back and say to myself that surely my readers are not interested in what I get up to day to day?  Surely they are not interested in where I get my inspiration from or who has influenced me?  Surely they do not want to hear me rant about the latest time wasting book I read or the one I just fell in love with and it turns out, you do actually!

So discovering this, I have learned I have more to say on my blog than I actually realised.  I always felt my blog had to have some deep creative meaning behind it.  I had to always be original and concentrate on short stories or poetry to keep it alive and really I don’t.

That’s very liberating because I am a chatterbox by nature and I love talking about what keeps me alive inside.

So therefore, with any luck, this tardy creative will start posting a little more than normal, once a week is something I am aiming for, but there may be more, who knows?

TASKS AND PASTS

I have this book called “365 Ways to get you writing daily, inspiration and advice for creative writers” by Jane Cooper.  I have been thinking about what to post on my blog to keep it active, I am not sure I want to post up my snippets for actual things I am planning as I find it a bit personal, but I thought that perhaps these tasks would help me show you my creative writing so you can critique me, thus help improve my style or enhance my work. 

I don’t lack confidence in my writing, because each to their own and I understand that not everyone is going to like my stuff, but I do want to be more involved with my blog and I do want to know if my writing does need more improvement.

I don’t want to worry about grammar and punctuation at the moment, because the priority for me is to get writing and be more active in the creative community than be a pedant, because being a pedant (and coming across many other pedants) was what made my writing stop for several years.

I have many friends who are artists and not many that are writers and the artists tell me that the worst thing that any artist can do with their creativity is to try and make it too perfect before it’s finished, because then you lose the heart and soul of your work and nobody will like it then; writing is not different, many writers like to look at themselves as a form of artist and visual artists like to consider anyone who is creative as an artist too!  Actors = performance artists, writers are verbal artists, painters are visual artists, singers are music artists, you get the picture – if you are creating something or trying to show something in a new light YOU ARE AN ARTIST!

One big thing I learned recently is that my writing from 2002 is completely different than the writing I did in 2008 and though you would think that I had been writing that time and had obviously improved my craft, you would be wrong!  I became a pedant and people who read my work were also pedants, they were grammar Nazis and they were not interested in my genre and they were going on about honing in on my style of writing before I actually wrote the stories I aimed to write to the extent, I found I lost my heart and soul and so did my stories.  I became a show don’t tell writer who turned into a tell don’t show writer and I didn’t know it until only last month, when I was revising three neglected stories to revive, two of which came from before 2002 and were rewritten in 2008 and 2016 – that is how I could tell that I had lost my way. 

I also sat back and wondered about why I had lost my passion to research, read and write?  I blamed a lot of things and people for it, but ultimately it was because I had lost heart and I was no longer giving momentum to those three things that used to bring me joy every day.

I lost contact with several of my favourite forums and journal sites because of some spiteful bullying I endured at the beginning of 2009 from a scorned ex – that broke my network big time, I had developed decade long relationships which were broken down very quickly with his childish games and I just didn’t want to be anywhere where his energy had been at the time.  This caused me to go into what I call “Creative Isolation”.  I had only two creative friends who stuck by me after that event which spread across thirty websites!

But anyway, the blame still lies with me.  I allowed this to affect me in such a way that I created this creative bubble around myself, thus my writing suffered due to lack of oxygen and lack of oxygen made me lose momentum and once momentum is gone it takes will power and a lot of pushing yourself to get it back again, but you can get it back again. 

This is why I mentioned the above book.  I am going to do tasks in the book and post them on my blog for you to critique, I may not respond for a few days at times, as I often forget to check my mails and comments, but I will get to you in time.  I take my craft very seriously, sometimes too seriously that I forget sometimes that it is supposed to be fun.  I know the book has 365 ways, but I will not do one task per day, I may do many a day or my own random tasks whenever I can.

Another post may follow tonight, dependant on what’s going on with the family tonight; We’ve been pretty busy lately and it’s not just me who appears to be sick either, so bear with me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be silent, be silent

 

Be silent, be silent you drive me mad

Says my enemies to me in their mind that’s bad

Be quiet, be quiet they shout and plea

In their minds every day, directed at me

Yet I still talk, I still move on

I still continue because I grow strong

I won’t quit and I won’t stop

Not until their minds go POP!

Until they realise it isn’t me

It is their selves the silly things

They focused on me so much they ache

And so a spell they do create

Against me, their obsession and they can’t see

That the one who tortures them isn’t me