Creative Intention Setting — April Check In
My to be read pile
Hard Things
Submitting to Journals - 1 acceptance
Writing a poetry collection - 20 poems
Read more poetry - Ad hoc
Go to more open mics - 3 (1 new)
Get feedback - 0
Spontaneous poetry - enthusiasm waning
Get paid - invested in myself
TikTok - BIG NO
Posting Socials - 4 personal / 7 OV
Self- promotion - 0
Finish the book - 0
Networking - Yes
Poetry Slam Competitions - 0
Writing down all of my ideas - getting better
Organising my drive - I give up
Poetry collection / Submissions / Feedback
This month I have done an audit of my poems and I have about 20, which together would form a cohesive poetry pamphlet. Some of them are in very rough shape and aren’t ready to be written yet, and some of them are near completion (when are they ever finished?! Asking for a friend).
I’m due to get feedback on some poems later in May. Once that’s collected and verified, and I’ve done some last revisions I will start submitting to journals.
In March I submitted three poems for consideration in Written Off Publishing's upcoming anthology Ey Up 3: An Anthology of Northern Writing and I’m pleased to announce that one of them was accepted. The anthology will be out in November.
A collection cannot be complete without feedback or submissions, so I’m slowly chipping away at it. Poetry takes time. I’m learning patience.
Read More Poetry
I think that I’ve been reading more poetry but I feel like I haven’t finished anything. I bought Sylvia Plath’s Ariel which I had as a teenager but has got lost through the years, as well as The Penguin Book of Sonnets, and the Selected Poems of Edna St Vincent Millay. I pulled out All the Men I Never Married by Kim Moore - a collection I can revisit over and over and still be surprised and delighted by.
I continue to dip into the Nikki Giovanni collected works but it’s a giant tome and will take me some time. It lives on my bedside table and I try to read a couple of poems each day after finishing morning pages and before looking at my phone.
Finally, friend of the Orange Verse, Jonathan Aylett published his first collection, Goldfish, and it has everything from the pacy to the poignant and a very accomplished villanelle. He’s the featured poet at JUICE BOX this May.
Spontaneous Poetry
I’ve lost the enthusiasm for writing a poem every day in my page-a-day diary. I do it when I can, but my poetry mind is very much focused on completing the collection.
I did write this poem after seeing Ocean Vuong in the glossy pages of a magazine. There was an urgent, awed, jealous wave that rose up inside me and the poem made its way onto the page with some minor revisions before posting to socials. This spontaneity is fun. The diary is starting to feel non-spontaneous and is now lacking energy.
Writing Down All of my Ideas / Organising My Drive
I’ve lost count of the amount of notebooks I have littered around my desk - all of which have different purposes - so that I have a place to organise my thoughts and compartmentalise my tasks better.
I’ve come to realise there needs to be distinction between:
new poetry ideas
ideas for the Orange Verse (blog posts/social posts/workshops)
admin (submissions/money/applications)
It’s a work in progress but having things on paper maybe seems to be working better for me instead of trying to get my Drive organised.
I have to embrace the mess in the here and now and try to make better future decisions.
