Since coming back from my Arvon poetry course, I’ve written poetry almost non-stop – in a flood you might say (somewhere around 25 poems )- interrupted only by a week away at my son’s beautiful wedding in Brantome in France.
Written at such a pace, you would be forgiven for asking are these poems any good? Quantity versus quality and all that – well surprisingly for me I would say they are. I think with every poem I write I get better. I learn more. It doesn’t mean they’re all brilliant, at all – some are better than others, none is perfect, but I know from years of writing prose that the more I write the better I get. We all need practice. After all we don’t give a child a violin and expect her to play well without years of effort.
I suppose what I’ve been doing is sitting down and showing up. It’s a habit I learned from years of writing novels. Robert Peake in his essay, Making Peace With Poetry – How to Be a Poet, Jo Bell, has something to say about this, especially in his tips on finding your daily process – ‘So start. And start again. Daily if you can. More importantly find a way to keeep starting and re-starting no matter what.’
And don’t fret about whether it’s good or bad. ‘The good stuff and the bad stuff is all part of the stuff.’ Marvin Bell.
Or if its going to be published – ‘In the Zen practice of archery there is a saying that, “Whether or not you hit the target is none of your business.” ‘ Robert Peake
