Category: writing and writers

saturday morning

desk detail
I’m currently staying with my sister**, who I suspect is frustrated by my inevitable late arrival at the breakfast table on weekends. She knows I’m awake; she hears me call “I’ll be down in a minute!”; but the clock ticks on and the minute turns into an hour.

I think what we’ve both failed to appreciate is my desperate need for validation.

It’s the weekend. I write my blog. If I’m lucky, someone clicks the “like” button. If I wait a bit, maybe someone else does. A bit longer, and maybe someone else…

How can I possibly leave my computer to go and have breakfast when there’s the chance that there are people out there in the world beyond my screen who are liking me? It would be rude to abandon them.
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critical moments

poetry book
For reasons that I won’t go into here, I have just spent the last two days writing a formal “critical review”. I can’t say I enjoyed the experience and I was delighted to take the opportunity to sneak out to watch a firework display last night. As the local secondhand book shop was having a late night opening, I decided to pop in on the way home and delay my return to my desk even longer.
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facing up to fiction

cornfield (maize) after harvest
Several lists of “rules for poetry” have been doing the rounds this week, perhaps in response to these 25 rules for editing poems from Rob Mackenzie for Magma Poetry.

It’s hard to disagree with anything Mackenzie says, particularly as the list is followed by the rider “good poets are always ready to break rules whenever a poem demands it.”

That said, the “rule” that caught my eye was:

15. Consider the poem’s “truth”. Not the literal facts (although those may be important at times) but the emotional resonance. Is the emotion genuine or just received wisdom?

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focus

I am feeling pleased with myself: I have written just over 4,000 words of good quality original prose since Friday lunchtime.

I am particularly pleased as I’ve been dithering over this for ages and I spent most of yesterday having a day away from the screen. It seems that writing, like many things in life, is dependent on how – or perhaps if – you focus.

raindrop

modern manners

I’ve been to several poetry readings in the last couple of weeks, including an anthology launch where I was among the readers, and one by the elderly New Zealand poet C.K. Stead.

eagle owl head shot
The launch lunch for The Apple Anthology (published by Nine Arches Press) was a fairly casual event, with a number of readers, and a varied audience eager to sample the cider, sandwiches – and inevitable apples.

The other events, though, were more formal and I was disconcerted to see people in the audience tapping away at their smart phones and laptop keyboards when I thought they should be listening. (That’s why I chose the photo of the owl, an eminently educated bird, with those marvellously disapproving eyebrows I can never hope to match however much I frown on modern youth.)
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