Where has all the Slush gone?

I feel almost as though I should apologize for my tardiness in failing to post poems regularly onto the Slush Poetry site. Having written and shared over 150 poems in 2012, observant followers could be forgiven for thinking I had lost my creative drive in 2013. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, I have been very busy this year, both writing new poems and rewriting a completed novel which I hope to get into print next year if I can persuade an agent to run with it. On top of that I have been running a poetry group (the Original Poets of Clapham, London) and been very busy promoting my first poetry collection, A Limited Season.

So where has all the poetry gone? It is true there is less of it. But if last year's frenetic production rate did anything, it allowed my poetry, through experimentation and practice, to find my poetic voice, something that would otherwise have taken far longer. And now I am able to write poems that say much more efficiently what I want to say, and say it in a voice that those closest to me would recognize at once as mine. The result is a steady flow of poems of, I think, a good and improving quality. I can take my time with them because I am confident they will mature slowly into what I want. And I am finding that the editors of literary journals recognize in the latest poems something distinctive - that is, they are accepting them much more readily than before.

Which is why I am posting far fewer on the Slush Poetry site: quite simply, I want to keep my poems under wraps so that they are all the more attractive to journals and, in time, to publishers. So I apologize for sharing less, but here's what I will do: I will share all published poems once the publication they are in has been sent out. Fewer poems, but all the best ones.

In the meantime, here is a small sample of my latest poem:

In snow

Much is explained

by the propensity of men

to sign their names

in snow

All that lay

en lettres anglaises

the dexterity of fletchers

and other trades

or the pleasures

men know...

What is to become of Slush Poetry?

I have announced that Slush Poetry as we know it will come to an end at the end of this year. However, that is not altogether accurate. What will be brought to an end is the series of news-related poems that have been appearing on the Slush Poet blog, and its curtailment is not a recent decision but the fulfillment of a scheme conceived late last year.

What has been known until now as 'Slush Poetry' was always planned to be a one year (or, more strictly, a year and two days) project to chronicle what I hoped would be a remarkable year, 2012, a year in which there would be a Royal Jubilee and the London Olympics at a time of great economic, political and environmental turmoil. That is, something to write about. Its aim was to capture the zeitgeist of the year, rather than attempt any historical record, and it was always going to reflect my own views and interests. In fact, it is probably more a portrait of me at that point in my life than it is an objective record of anything else going on.

I have been amazed and delighted by the following the blog and my related Twitter feeds have attracted, and I am very grateful to everyone who has visited the site, commented on poems, corresponded, retweeted or engaged in any way with the project. I even feel I have made some friends, albeit ones I will probably never meet. It really is quite humbling.

I have been pondering two things: what to do with the current collection, and what to do next. Now I have decided.

The current collection will end when I post the last poem on New Year's Day. No promises, but it will probably have an Hawaiian theme because I will want to capture humanity's last moment in 2012. (For the same reason, the collection began in Samoa, which was first across the date line in January.) After that, is it too much to hope that I might find a publisher for all or part of it? I will be trying to. It even has a new title: The Year of Wringing Hands.

As for what to do next, the Slush Poet will go on but on a different blog site. The new site will (if all goes to plan) present a series of images combining photography with poetry, surface beauty with lingering thoughts. Imagine seeing a poem hung in a gallery surrounded by white space, that's where I'm heading to. And this new space now has a name: Ma Pottery [sic].

So wish me well and come along for the experience. I can't do this without my friends.

Slush.

In the vale of Slush poetry

I am almost three months into this project, writing as the Slush Poet to chronicle 2012 through the medium of poetry, so now would seem a suitable moment to pause, to set down my thesaurus, my rhyming dictionary and my fountain pen, and to take in the view. (That in itself is fanciful: I write almost exclusively on a computer using Google Docs, with frequent nods to Dictionary.com and B-Rhymes; but that's okay, we'll call it a metaphor.)

I am breathless. I keep falling behind; by the time I've wrung a poem out of my fickle muse, the world has moved on and there are new news events to versify. Today I am up to date, tomorrow I will begin once more to fall behind.

What can I see from my resting place? Poetry surrounds me, as does life itself; but what I'm most concerned about is the trail of poems I have left behind me. So far, I have written thirty-four poems, most of which I have published on the Slush Poet blog site. That's about one every two days. I've tried to vary the form, the timbre, the length, the voice. I want the poems to be enjoyable as a continuous sequence capturing the essence of, if not the year, at least my year, 2012 as I lived it and as it touched me.

But are the poems any good? I think some of them are. I've had a lot of encouragement from readers, not just from my friends but from people I previously didn't know. Some of the poems have had a better reception than others, but that doesn't mean the others should be omitted. Would you really want every day to be your birthday?

Who am I kidding? We all know it takes time to craft a good poem, a long time to craft a great one. It takes more than two days. So, why go on? Perhaps because the pressure to produce a poem every few days is what I need to make me grow. I'm realizing that deadlines (even self-imposed ones, maybe especially self-imposed ones) are a creative spur. Without that pressure to produce not just another poem but a different poem, would I really be so varied in what I write?

So where is the Slush Poet heading next? Like you, I'll have to open the papers tomorrow to find out.