In Search of Coherence

Here's my dilemma, poetry-wise. I'd like to publish a fourth collection, but I'm not sure who with. I have ideas about that, but am not ready to act on them at the moment.
That's problem number one.

Problem number two is that I don't actually have a book of poems to show to anyone right now. My last full-length book was Camper Van Blues (Salt Publishing 2008). That's four years ago, and I really ought to have another book's worth of poems ready to publish. But I don't, because I've been mostly writing prose fiction since then. And the rest of the time I've been working on various short translations - mainly Anglo-Saxon poetry - and of course my biggest project since CVB, which has been my version of the Middle English poem Gawain and the Green Knight.

I now have about 15 pages of Gawain, cobbled together in a vaguely finished state, and think another hundred and fifty lines should bring it to a close. But finding the time to write those lines isn't as easy as it sounds. You don't just write something like that in your lunch break. It's about finding a rhythm and a feel for the original that can be translated into the version I'm writing, to make a coherent and powerful whole, and that takes time. Well, it takes me time.

So Gawain has to sit on the back boiler until I can find time to re-read the original and get back into the rhythm and mood that inspired me in the first place.

Beside Gawain on that back boiler sit various translations from the AS, plus a gaggle of self-conscious stand-alone lyrics that might or might not be publishable on their own merits, and some rough ideas on how to fit them all together, none of which have any coherence right now.

I also have my long poem On Warwick, which was published by the lovely Nine Arches Press in pamphlet form in 2008, but which I'd like to see as part of a collection.

Basically I can't decide if Gawain should be published alone - it's very short though, even for a chapbook - or in book form.

If it goes into a book, along with On Warwick, then I have a full collection ready to show. But if it doesn't, then I don't have enough for a book.

What needs to happen now is for me to finish Gawain, write more stand-alone lyric poems, polish up my Anglo-Saxon translations, and get the shape of this fourth book right. I have a list of possible victims publishers, places which might take my career further forward and help me with poetic direction. But will any of them have me?

I suppose that question is academic until I've done the actual work. Perhaps I need a poetry retreat?

Tricky Fourth

I can't put it off much longer. Camper Van Blues, my third poetry collection, came out in late 2008, in an absolutely gorgeous hardback edition, but alas, it's now spring 2010 and I really ought to be putting some new poems together and considering how my fourth collection will shape up.

I doubt that it will be ready to publish within twelve months. I've been working almost exclusively on prose for the past six months, and new poems have been a little thin on the ground. But mid-late 2011 or sometime during 2012 would suit me fine as a publication date. That would give me a good year to build up a core of individual poems for my fourth, without putting undue pressure on me to spin them out too rapidly, but equally it won't be so long since my last collection that people have entirely forgotten who I am.

Besides, I'm sure poetry books must sell better if the poet isn't constantly chucking new collections out to a less than enthused readership.

Looking Back

I've written a handful of poems in recent weeks about my childhood and teenage years: Proustian reminiscences, holiday snapshots, family portraits, that kind of thing. It's a well-worn genre within poetry, and that fact alone makes me worried. Is it the poetic equivalent of a mid-life crisis to suddenly start writing poems about one's youth?

They're not desperately bad, these poems. One has just been accepted at Poetry Review, and I'm fairly confident of placing a number of others in magazines over the next year. They are honest poems, written - thanks to a general lack of it in my family - without sentimentality. They appear to work well in a stand-alone lyric sense, and easily earn their place in my fourth collection.

Yet somehow I'm uneasy about having written them and about wishing to write more, which I definitely do. There seems to be a positive wellspring there, looking back at my past with older eyes, and any gush of new, publishable poetry must surely be welcome after twelve years in the game.

But am I really the sort of poet who writes 'nostalgia'?