Disappointment? Keep plodding, be a dandelion ...

The book stores will not stock my books, on the grounds that they are self-published.

So I decide to submit to publishers. I earmark a couple and conceive differing manuscripts - ones, which I hope will fit the feel and vision of the respective publishers.

The first open window period is with Uhlanga Press - an admirable little enterprise, some of whose ventures have already received awards. I create a longlist, then a shortlist, then make a final selection of 30 poems. I print a draft, read it aloud to my willing beloved. On his suggestion, I add a few more poems, inserting them where we feel they work best. The manuscript is almost ready - 38 poems, in a sequence that's fluent and pleasing. Who will be my editor? ... is the next question.

Then I discover that the publisher - Nick Mulgrew - has posted a public letter on his website: his open window period is cancelled, due to lack of funds and iffy health. I write back with understanding and good wishes.

I realise that my lovely manuscript would not exist, if it weren't for Uhlanga.

Before I gathered and selected my poems, I had looked up the meaning of 'uhlanga'. Google told me that it is Zulu for the reed marsh out of which our ancestors emerged. It appears to be a more geographically (mythically?) rooted word than ubuntu, but, too, carries the meaning, as far as I can tell, of 'humanity'.

I guess I'm back in the primal mudscape.

What next?

I create the contents page anyway. I paste in the poems that still need to be added. Each poem is on a separate page. None is longer than a page, it's a gorgeously compact manuscript.

I'll ask the prospective editor for his favours anyway - I need this thing edited, whatever happens.

And I'll keep plodding with my bare feet through the reeds in the mudbed. Poems don't need to be published to exist - I've known that for a lifetime! They don't need book stores to give them the nod. One way or another, I'll get them to the readers that need and want them - and if I stand in the wind like a dandelion and let them blow where they will. That's kind-of my contract with God anyway, with Life ... or however you conceive of the Mystery that inspires a human bean to emerge as she does, no matter what.

Work in progress

Photo: Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

First reader feedback

I had the privilege the other day of receiving my first reader feedback for the first half of Greater Matter. So many questions now to tackle! Is my natural bent for occasional 'archaic' usage and, indeed, behaviour - which I tend towards in moments of intimacy and/ or crisis, and which is therefore never publicly seen ... unless glimpsed now and then, through these poems - something to be true to or something to censor, that is to say, alter, in the service of what readers expect of or can relate to in a 'contemporary' woman - such as I, in my heart of hearts, am not?

The feeling of soul straddling eternity, but body bound to one here and now ... and yet even that, not. Mind in this body is capable of so much movement between places and times. Is it that my poems simply don't adequately yet convey this?

Is 'unnatural' (Germanic/ Old English) syntax such as I spoke in my most extreme moments to God as well as to Norman in crisis something to share with readers, or will it simply cause them bewilderment?

What IS quality writing? WHOSE standards do I apply?

How can this record of my journey best help the greatest number of people in need of such help?

And I thought I could complete this manuscript by March this year! :-D

Stepping stones

Third draft of third section done by an all-day fire and mist clouding all but the nearest leaves outside.

Stepping stones to the heffalump

... getting there slowly ...

I am very grateful to the kind people who are offering their precious time to read the third draft critically. I look forward to their feedback. 

Otherwise, mulling. Not sure this poem should be in or out ... if in, WHERE? Questions of rhythm, sound echoes, and of course the story step-stepping poem by poem through it all.

  

PS. Totally tangential mull. Why PanMacMillan didn't take on The Griffin Elegy is a puzzle to me. I guess there are simply too many writers and too many stories and too many poems, all of them obviously far more appealing and more saleable than my stuff. Ah well. We soldier on. True to self and all that. I can see I'm going to have to home-birth all my books. What a business. I've experience birthing a human, but a heffalump? Not to rush it. Be tortoise.