22 September at Senate House in London. Saw Susie Campbell outside Poetry Library. Went the wrong way past the British Museum luckily bumped into Anna-May, sidetracked when I arrived into reading with Tami. Hall much bigger and good room for readings. Shame it wasn’t in the programme (just the name of the publisher). Like meeting FB friends-Todd Swift (send him poems on Tuesday), Greg Freeman, Clare Saponia, Tim Ades, Adam Horowitz, Dino Mahony, Jeremy Page, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs. Arrived at 11 and left a few hours later with too many books.

Here are a few I found that make sense –

1. Don’t assume that free verse, now the default mode of poetry is equivalent to the practice of cutting prose into lines. Greeting cards, advertising copy, political and cultural mantras are split into lines as well.
2. Don’t take yourself so seriously. In the age of social networks, of endless information and missinformation, “sensitivity” and the “true voice of feeling” have become the most available of commodities.
3. Don’t underestimate the importance of a sense of humour, of irony. Remember that satire, mock-epic, and burlesque are hardly inferior forms of poetry.
4. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Create your own form.
5. Don’t think you’re special.  Don’t think you’re the only one who’s ever suffered.
6. Don’t think what you have to say is important. The way you say it is what’s important. What you have to say is rubbish.
7. Don’t think you don’t have to read. You read in order to steal. Read more, steal better.
8. Don’t write to please others, write to please yourself.
9. “The mastery of any art is the work of a lifetime…poetry is an art not a pastime.” Ezra Pound
10. Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be brown and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention needs to death. Frank O’Hara, 1964
11. Be honest. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I’ve sorted poems out to make a sequence but have never written one from scratch so in May I started the journey. I was reading about The Black Death in “The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England” by Ian Mortimer and it struck me how people were the same then as now. The main idea was to pick a current news item, write a poem about it and preface it with an item about the Black Death. Then I got distracted because I could also write a poem about what happened during the Black Death and preface that with a current news story. Or are they the same? Anyway, they all follow the same form – my (still unnamed) 3 line verse form in 4 stanzas. In August 50 poems later, I started to send them out. So for 4 magazines have rejected them, 2 have accepted and 8 are outstanding