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

Selfie

My tortoise journey with poems

The adventure with my book continues. Flow (Poetree Publications) is busy proofreading it and Mike (Max Design) is working on a cover, a draft of which a few of my private readers have already shown thumbs-ups to: thank you.

Books are written, printed, published, launched, marketed, sold and, alas, pulped every day. Millions upon millions of them. Written, printed, published, launched, etc.etc.etc.

Only one of those millions upon millions is my book.

Only one.

At last.

Certainly no one can accuse me of speeding.

Tuesday tidy-up by Tortoise

There is a calm. Pleasant and unfamiliar.

I've revised my Timeline at the end of my book; applied the changes suggested by one of my beady-eyed editors; and emailed the other editors saying I need their final input by mid-April, so the proofreader has enough time to work his miracles before I submit the manuscript to PoeTree.

In all my years as a writer (I made a start in 1974) I've never published anything in this way before: I have no solo publication with an ISBN number, nor anything loaded on Amazon.

I breathe a sigh of relief at my vegetative slowness: I like myself being this late. It is wonderful being a slow developer. My disappointments, failures, resentments, frustrations, hopelessnesses, madnesses, despairs, depressions, manias and resignations have made the most extraordinary compost: it is soft and warm with my failures, my traumas, my giving-upnesses over and over again, having to gather my broken bones and reconstruct my self and my life.

Upon this compost of psychic energy I am now carried forward - by the force of my own shit, you could say ... transformed over the decades into a mysterious source of quiet, something is happening, which I've been dreaming almost since birth. Or before. Who knows?

I am producing a 'real' book. A book with an ISBN number, which I will market properly and make available to online buyers.

This is truly nothing special. The book industry is a zillion ants in their antheaps, and there are only so many ant-eaters about to devour them.

And yet, like the birth of any living baby, my book has its own bright star. As it currently stands, there are 238 poems carrying the narrative - the journey with my husband to his death and beyond. The poems are like 238 survivors of the 1000 eggs the Tortoise I am has laid in the sand over the past 20 months, with the patient sun of time now finally close to hatching them.

I am grateful. Keeping close to earth.

Photo: Silke Heiss

   

Facts of Blood

The fourth draft of Greater Matter is complete. I spent this morning contacting a number of people to help me with the way forward and am feeling frankly excited.

At the last minute I decided to change the title of the final (eighth) section from Blood in Ink to Facts of Blood - the former poem was published in the latest Ecca book, Throw in your Song; but the latter poem is more permanent in its meaning. Here is an extract from it:

"[...]

see the pink lamps

of flowering wild grasses bending

on long stalks in a kind of ecstatic submission to

the sun, as it turns

iron-red the luminous trunks of pines in

the plantation [...]"

- from Facts of Blood, title poem of section 8 to appear in Greater Matter later this year.

As it happens, I've simultaneously just switched off an overnight bisque-firing of a kiln-load of ceramic parrot-broaches, ordered by the Cape Parrot Project for taking along to Ohio next week, to a parrot-lovers' indaba. Why is there a feeling of such beautiful order in all of my creative chaos? 

Some of last year's batch of parrot  broaches, photo taken in October 2018.

... 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.