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

   

... 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.