I’ve been wondering what sort of person wrote all these cruise poems. Yes, my name’s on the title page but after months of shaping, sanding, rearranging the deckchairs, I’m not sure the writer is quite me anymore.
Maybe I’ve become a version of myself invented by the poems: the watcher leaning on the rail at dawn, tasting toothpaste and late night cocktails; the one sitting in the ship’s theatre, amused and uneasy as the magician pulls doves from a hat while the sea keeps rolling on outside. Someone half in awe, half embarrassed by the spectacle of travel, by the buffets, the sunsets, the endless sense of being entertained.
I read them now and see a person who notices too much. Who studies the choreography of other people’s holidays, who feels both tenderness and guilt in equal measure. A traveller who wants to observe without being seen observing. Someone quietly comic, quietly appalled, sensitive to surfaces but listening for the undertow.
After spending over a year with these poems I stopped writing anything new for a while. Maybe I’d been too long at sea. And when words finally came again, they were different: sprawling, loud, full of interruptions and were another version of myself.
That’s what writing does. It builds a persona that can stand where you once stood, looking out to sea, while you move on. So if you read these poems, imagine that person on deck, attentive, conflicted, balancing between wonder and unease. They’re there, somewhere in the poems. But they’re not the real me anymore, who ever that is.
I was going to share an earlier version of a poem that didn’t fit into my cruise collection, but then I remembered: most literary magazines consider any version of a poem that’s been publicly posted online — social media, blogs, or open forums — as previously published.
That includes early drafts, even if the poem has changed since then. What matters isn’t perfection or version, it’s public availability. Once a poem is visible to anyone online, it’s technically “published.”
There are a few grey areas though:
Private or limited-access posts — such as online or in-person workshops, peer critique sites that require login, private emails, newsletters for subscribers only, shared drafts in Google Docs or Dropbox, or poems read aloud at open mics — don’t count as publication.
Deleted posts still count if they were ever publicly visible, though some smaller or more flexible journals might make exceptions if it was a brief share.
Revisions don’t reset the clock. Even if the poem’s been reworked, it’s still the same poem if it keeps the central image, subject, tone, or phrasing. Only when it’s no longer recognisably the same does it become a new piece.
Most editors won’t go hunting for your poem online, but some might recognise it. Editors tend to read widely. In the end, the system runs on good faith — they trust you to be honest. If they later discover a poem was posted publicly, they can withdraw it or reject future submissions.
So, I’m afraid you can’t see the poem until it’s published.
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. For a while, that was me. I had a comfortable poetry routine, and for a time it worked. But comfort has a way of dulling the edges. The poems began to sound alike. The spark that once lit up the page was starting to fade.
Routine, Until It Wasn’t
Most mornings I followed the same ritual: breakfast, then retreat to the small bedroom that doubled as my study. I’d put on music, quiet at first (usually Spotify) then louder with blues rock as I settled in, and draft a poem. The ideas came easily enough; poems are always floating past if you’re paying attention. Then I’d spend hours revising until I had something close to finished.
This routine held me for years. It was a cocoon, a safe place where poems steadily arrived. But after a while, I noticed I was recycling the same rhythms, the same gestures. I was producing, yes, but I wasn’t surprising myself anymore.
The Cruise That Shook Things Up
Then came the 100-day cruise. Suddenly my little cocoon was gone. No small bedroom, no desk, no predictable soundtrack. The ship itself became my writing room: a lounge chair by the bar upstairs or on the settee in the cabin writing on the tiny coffee table while the ocean rocked us forward.
Neal Pasricha writes, “Different is better than better.” On the ship I felt that in my bones. The artist Marina Abramović once quoted Krsto Hegedušić: “If you get so good at drawing with your right hand that you can even make a beautiful sketch with your eyes closed, you should immediately change to your left hand to avoid repeating yourself.”
That was exactly my situation. I was writing with the same hand over and over. The cruise forced me to change hands.
An Opposite Approach
Back home, I wanted to keep shaking things up. So I set myself a challenge: instead of labouring over one poem until it was polished, I would do the opposite. I would write 100 drafts, one after another, without pausing to perfect a single one.
At first it felt reckless, like running downhill too fast. I wasn’t allowed to hesitate, to weigh every word, or to polish a line until it gleamed. The rule was forward motion only. Some drafts fizzled slightly, others surprised me with sudden heat. But by the time I reached fifty, then seventy, then one hundred, I was exhilarated. I had built a momentum that my old routine never allowed.
When I finally circled back, I treated the drafts like old acquaintances. A quick hello, a light touch, then I moved on. Each round of revision deepened the work without killing the rawness that first sparked it. By the fifth or sixth pass, patterns began to emerge, echoes, connections, small threads that linked one poem to another. What I found wasn’t a single polished piece but a chorus of voices that gradually blended into something recognisably mine.
Drafting in bulk instead of fussing line by line gave me more than just a stack of poems. It gave me a stronger, more consistent style: a voice that wasn’t imposed, but discovered in the sheer act of repetition and return.
The Lessons of Opposites
I’ve tried this before. I wrote on crowded trains instead of in solitude. I wrote in the voices of objects, or my younger self, or even a plum tree. I started with the last line first. I scribbled in haiku when I was used to free verse. I used to do front of house work at an arts centre and wrote a poem the very next morning. Each experiment shook something loose.
Not every attempt worked. Some were disasters. But even those failures carried me somewhere new.
What I Learned
Doing the opposite wasn’t comfortable. My inner critic protested every step. But discomfort, I realized, was part of the point. It meant I was entering unfamiliar territory, where something unexpected could happen.
On that cruise, and in the months after, I learned this: if you want different results, you have to do something different. The poems I wrote taught me that surprise is the lifeblood of creativity, and routine, useful as it is, must sometimes be broken open.
So if your creativity ever feels stuck, try the opposite. Write in a noisy café instead of your quiet corner. Begin with the ending. Change your posture. Change your tools. Change your hand.
The opposite is waiting, and with it, something new.
Further Reading & Inspiration
If you’d like to follow up on some of the ideas in this post, here are a few books and voices that have shaped how I think about creativity in the past year:
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey: short portraits of how different writers and artists structured (and disrupted) their days.
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp: a choreographer’s take on how habits can both nurture and limit creative work.
The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker: exercises for paying attention differently and seeing the world with fresh eyes.
Neil Pasricha’s The Happiness Equation (and his TED Talks): where the phrase “different is better than better” appears. His blogs are also worth checking out.
Marina Abramović’s writings and talks (especially Walk Through Walls: A Memoir): on challenging comfort zones as an artistic practice.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott: especially her advice on “shitty first drafts,” which resonates with my 100-draft experiment.
Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland: a slim classic on the anxieties and breakthroughs of making art.
Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon: emphasizes iteration, process, and openness.
Creative Doing: 75 Practical Exercises to Unblock Your Creative Potential in Your Work, Hobby, or Next Caree4 by Herbert Lui: does what it says on the tin really
Each of these, in its own way, reminds me that creativity thrives on surprise and that sometimes the best way forward is to do the opposite of what feels safe.
You’ve just read a brilliant poem. The language sparkled, the images lingered, the last line knocked the breath out of you. But ten minutes later, you’re trying to tell someone about it and you’ve forgotten the title, or maybe it didn’t have one to start off with.
Why?
Because a title isn’t just a label. A title is the poem’s introduction, first impression, framing device, handshake or trapdoor. A title is more essential as the first and final lines.
1. A Title Frames the Poem
Think of a title as a lens through which we read the lines that follow. A title can provide emotional tone, thematic context, or narrative grounding—sometimes all three.
T.S. Eliot didn’t call his 1922 poem Sad Feelings or April Rain. He called it The Waste Land—a phrase that invokes ruin, cultural desolation, and biblical echo. That title becomes the scaffolding the poem builds on. Without it, the opening line (“April is the cruellest month”) still intrigues, but the full landscape feels unanchored.
2. A Title Can Create Contrast or Tension
Sometimes, the best titles pull in the opposite direction from the poem itself.
Derek Walcott’s Love After Love sounds romantic, like a Hallmark sequel. But the poem is about reconnecting with the self after heartbreak about pouring a drink for your own soul and saying, “Sit. Feast on your life.” The dissonance between title and subject matter deepens the reader’s experience.
Another example: This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin. It sounds archaic and biblical—until the first line (“They f*** you up, your mum and dad”) pulls the rug from under you. The title works because it sets up a tension the poem exploits.
3. A Title Anchors the Reader
Without a title, the reader may float unmoored through even the strongest imagery. A title gives the poem a name to live under. It becomes the poem’s calling card, or—if you’re lucky—its slogan.
Think of how many poems are remembered by their titles: The Road Not Taken,Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,Still I Rise,Howl. The title isn’t just packaging—it becomes the poem’s public identity.
4. A Title Can Add a Second Voice
Some titles work almost like another character or narrator. They set up an expectation the poem fulfills or resists.
In Tracy K. Smith’s The Universe as Primal Scream, the poem contains no actual scream. Instead, the title creates a mood—existential, absurd, a little cosmic—and invites us to interpret the imagery through that lens.
Done well, the title becomes a kind of ghost that haunts the rest of the poem.
5. What Makes a Great Poem Title?
Here are a few qualities that strong poem titles often share:
Memorability: They stick in your mind like a melody.
Tension or mystery: They hint at something deeper.
Specificity: They use concrete images or unusual phrasing.
Resonance: They do more than restate the poem—they amplify it.
Compare:
Love (flat and generic)
How to Love a Dying Dog (immediately gripping and layered)
6. Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Some titles simply don’t pull their weight. Watch out for these:
Vague abstractions:Reflections, Thoughts, Time—these could be anything.
Redundancy: Don’t just repeat the first line unless it works as a separate idea. Overt explanations: If your title gives away the poem’s only surprise, rethink it.
7. How to Find the Right Title
There’s no formula, but here are some strategies to try:
Literal Description
Describes exactly what the poem is “about” on the surface.
Example:The Thought-Fox – Ted Hughes A poem literally about a fox entering the mind, but also about inspiration and the act of writing. Effect: Grounds the reader in a concrete image that unfolds symbolically.
Metaphorical Title
Uses metaphor to hint at emotional or thematic territory.
Example:The Whitsun Weddings – Philip Larkin Refers to real weddings witnessed on a train ride, but also gestures at post-war British life, conformity, and fleeting happiness. Effect: Sets up a mood before the first line.
Title Taken from the Poem Itself
Lifts a memorable or significant phrase from the poem.
Example:Not Waving but Drowning – Stevie Smith A haunting phrase from the final line; gains power through repetition. Effect: Highlights the poem’s key metaphor and emotional punch.
Single Word
Focuses sharply on one theme, object, or idea.
Example:Prayer – Carol Ann Duffy The entire poem orbits this word, examining how small things offer grace. Effect: Bold, distilled—lets the poem do the heavy lifting.
A Question
Poses a query that the poem will explore, evade, or deepen.
Example:Who’s for the Game? – Jessie Pope A recruitment poem disguised as sport—it asks a question designed to provoke a response. Effect: Engages immediately; often rhetorical or ironic.
A Statement or Declaration
Asserts a tone or idea up front.
Example:They Flee From Me – Sir Thomas Wyatt Sounds like gossip or complaint—draws us into the speaker’s private world. Effect: Sets up voice and emotional perspective straight away.
An Instruction or Command
Tells the reader—or someone else—what to do.
Example:Remember – Christina Rossetti A command full of pleading, resignation, and layered meaning. Effect: Creates intimacy or tension; may feel like a monologue.
A List or Juxtaposition
Combines contrasting or paired ideas.
Example:Fire and Ice – While Frost is American, British poets like Thom Gunn use this too: My Sad Captains. The tension between the elements in the title becomes the poem’s core. Effect: Suggests opposition, theme, or ambiguity.
Borrowed or Allusive Title
Quotes or references another work, time, or tradition.
Example:Jerusalem – William Blake The title refers to a mythic idea of England’s spiritual potential, lifted from Blake’s own longer work. Effect: Adds weight, irony, or historical resonance.
Misdirection or Irony
A title that deliberately misleads or softens a blow.
Example:A Minor Role – U.A. Fanthorpe Sounds theatrical, even modest. The poem is about illness and social invisibility. Effect: Undercuts tone, adds poignancy.
Time or Place
A setting becomes the frame.
And don’t be afraid to experiment. Sometimes the working title is just scaffolding.
8. When to Title a Poem
Some poets start with the title and write toward it. Others don’t name the poem until long after it’s done. There’s no right time but giving it space to emerge often leads to better results. Keep going till you find the right one.
Final Thoughts
A title doesn’t have to be clever, poetic, or punchy—but it should be deliberate. It’s the invitation, the signpost, the spell. It’s the first poem the reader reads—even before the first line.
So give your poems the names they deserve.
You might also be interest in the following references helpful:
For a long time, these poems lived in notebooks and drafts, jotted down each day aboard a ship circling the world. They began as small postcards to myself—10-line dispatches from the deck, from memory, from wherever the sea carried us. Over the past year, I’ve revisited each one, sometimes gently, sometimes with a scalpel, trying to listen for the real voice underneath. My voice.
Some poems didn’t make the final cut into the collection. A few felt too similar in tone or subject to others, some didn’t quite carry the same voice as the rest of the collection, and a handful, let’s be honest, were probably beyond redemption. But I’m not concerned. They could be replaced easily enough by my stories of previous cruises of events I would have talked over with our little group of friends we chatted to every night.
I’ve edited every poem now. Not just for line breaks or punctuation, but to be sure each one sounds like me. That they belong to the same world. That they carry the tone I meant, even when I wasn’t sure what I meant at the time.
DAY 83: EPITAPH FOR A DAGGA BOY (CAPE TOWN)
Mark, our guide, eases the jeep to a gentle halt, and we fall quiet where old bones sprawl, brittle edges breathing dust and dried blood, sun-baked marrow, silence thick as heat.
A buffalo’s ghost still lingers here: its hooves once thundered the open plain, its breath defied the wind’s sharp reply. In its prime, a match for anything wild.
Vultures pirouette the sky above in a slow, macabre ballet of wings. Ragged feathers rasp against dry air, like sandpaper drawn across a drum.
Their shadows reel across cracked, red earth. Hyenas skulk just beyond the scrub, their laughter splits the afternoon wide open like a snapped femur, white and unclean.
Mark surveys the scene, his brow furrowed tight. “Looks like this old Dagga Boy,” he says, “couldn’t keep up.” His voice dips, softening the way it does with what can’t be explained.
“He picked a good spot by the river’s bend, golden grass, mud baths, the works,” he says. “A buffalo’s kind of retirement. No golf carts though, ja?” His smile flickers, fading as he stares down at the bones again.
“Had a decent run, I’d reckon,” he adds, leaning back with a slow and satisfied creak. “Stood his ground, maybe found love out here beneath the thorn trees, in the dry season.”
The jeep roars again, kicking up old dust. We lurch forward, heat waves curling ahead, leaving the skull grinning in our wake as if it knows something we’d rather not. Another mile, another hour slips by, closer to whatever waits in the grass.
The next step is to begin letting them go.
I’ll be sending them out in small batches, one a week, to magazines that might welcome them. I don’t expect a flood of acceptances, but I do believe these poems will find their way. Here’s a list I’m considering but of course there are many other magazines I want to submit to, and of course there are poetry competitions as well.
Here’s a list of some journals I’m considering:
Atrium – Emotionally resonant, well-crafted poems that balance clarity with depth.
Bad Lilies – Bold, contemporary, often formally adventurous work.
Interpreter’s House – Thoughtful, image-rich poems with a narrative thread.
London Grip – Accessible, reflective poems, often subtly political.
Magma – Regularly welcomes travel-based or themed submissions.
New Ohio Review – Image-rich, humane poetry with emotional resonance.
Ploughshares – Prestigious but approachable for grounded, serious work.
Poetry Review – Ambitious, layered poems with strong, distinctive voices.
Rattle – Open to narrative, humorous, and heartfelt poems.
The Fig Tree – Visual, nature-inflected or spiritual poems.
The High Window – Lyrical poetry with an international or literary edge.
The Long Poem Magazine – Poems over 50 lines: narrative, meditative, or experimental.
The North – Intelligent, place-based, and reflective poems.
The Rialto – Original work with character and clarity.
The Seventh Quarry – Musical poems with international flavour.
The Southern Review – Place-rooted, quietly observant poems.
The Threepenny Review – Clear imagery, wit, and understatement.
Under the Radar – Emotional, precise, and accessible poetry.
Wild Court – Welcomes both lyrical and narrative work.
I believe they should be published because they speak to experiences many people share but don’t always talk about: the strangeness of time at sea, the joy of small rituals, the weight and humour of memory, and the quiet ways we carry grief and love. They’re not grand or showy, but they’re honest. And sometimes, honesty travels furthest.
Publishing in magazines isn’t just about recognition, it’s about giving them a place in the world beyond my notebook. Letting them speak to someone else, as they once spoke to me.
After so long living with them, the thought of sharing them feels both unsettling and necessary, like watching something you’ve grown used to keeping close begin to take its own shape and life elsewhere.
If you’re reading this and know of magazines or journals that might be a good fit, feel free to suggest them as I’m open to surprises.
Thanks for following the journey so far. I’ll post updates as the poems begin to appear, if and when they do.
After writing and revising over a hundred poems for my cruise collection, I realised I often forgot the same basic things—especially when I was close to finishing a poem. So I made this checklist to help me decide when a poem is done. Or at least ready to be read aloud or sent out.
Poetry Completion Checklist
At each revision stage, here are some of the questions I sometimes forget to ask myself—but should:
Does the poem have a single, clear central idea or theme? Are sensory details present to help readers see, hear, and feel the poem’s world? Is the point of view consistent? (Shifting POV can confuse, unless it’s intentional and clearly handled.) Are the tenses consistent throughout? Does the poem evoke the emotion I intended? Is the structure logical and coherent? Have I checked spelling and grammar carefully? Are homophones and typos corrected? Are the images and metaphors clear, vivid, and effective? Am I showing rather than telling? (Does the poem evoke emotion through language and imagery?) Does it still feel authentic and true to my voice? Will the poem connect with a reader’s emotions, memories, or curiosity? Does the poem still surprise me? Is there a reason for the reader to care? Is the rhythm consistent, and does the poem flow easily? Is there any awkward phrasing? Are there any unnecessary words or lines that don’t add anything? Have I read it aloud to catch any clunky bits or flat patches? (Reading often reveals things I don’t see on the page.) Is everything clear enough for a reader who isn’t me? (What’s obvious to me might not be to someone else.) Am I revising to improve the poem or just out of habit or fear of letting it go?
That’s already a long list and there are always more questions. But after I’ve been through this process (sometimes too many times), and I think the poem might be finished, I still ask myself a few final things:
The Afterthought Stage
1) Would I be happy to perform this poem to an audience, at a reading or an open mic, or send it out to magazines? There’s nothing worse than reading a poem you thought was brilliant and realising halfway through that it’s not working.
2) Have I revised this poem so many times that I’m now just producing another version of the same thing? Not better, just different. Like Monet’s 25 versions of Haystacks—sometimes the changes are variations, not improvements. I’m no longer making real progress, just rearranging the same ideas. me spot what’s missing or give me permission to stop editing and let the poem go.
Every poet needs their own process and I’ve found that having a checklist like this helps me avoid finishing too soon or revising forever. In the end, it’s about finding the balance between control and letting go. And trusting that, even if this version isn’t perfect, it’s the one ready to meet the world. My cruise poems are now ready.
Some poems fight you every step of the way. This one did—from its first draft to its final line. It began with toast Frances couldn’t eat.
Not the sandwich at lunch, not the biscuits with her tea. Coeliac disease had turned her world into a minefield of gluten, and that day in Singapore, everything seemed to contain the very thing that would leave her in pain and in danger of slipping into a coma.
I started with a free verse draft, voice-led, trying to channel Frances’s experience directly. Her words, her frustration, her body’s rebellion against what should have been simple nourishment. It felt right to let the poem breathe in short lines, unforced, raw.
I was pleased enough with it to submit. A few weeks later, it was accepted. Except, no contributor copy, no proof. Just an email telling me to buy the magazine if I wanted to see it in print. I’d found the callout on Facebook and hadn’t checked the fine print. My fault entirely. But it stung. I never bought the magazine, never saw my name on the contents page. Does that count as being published? I’m still not sure.
Still, the poem nagged at me. Frances lives with real discomfort, daily limitations. If I was going to write about her experience, shouldn’t the writing cost me something? Shouldn’t I feel some of the tightrope she walks?
I remembered one of her refrains: “My body is not a battlefield.” She hated the military metaphors people lazily applied to illness. I took those six words and built an acrostic around them, weaving five haikus between each one.
It took weeks. I sweated over every syllable, every line break. The constraint forced me to slow down, to pay attention. I thought I’d finally created something that honoured her pain and the challenge of translating it into language.
I thought it was brilliant. Others agreed with me. Frances didn’t.
“It doesn’t quite work,” she said. And when I looked again, especially alongside other poems in my collection, I had to admit she was right. It felt strained: clever, maybe, but ultimately artificial. Like I was trying too hard to be poetic about someone else’s pain. Writing it was like breaking a leg; you don’t want to do it again.
So I rewrote it. In my own voice, with my own metaphor.
I played school cricket once, when I was fourteen. Scored 48 runs, half our total that day. I walked back proud, expecting a nod from the coach. Instead, he tore into me in front of the team: “Stop slogging the ball!” Despite contributing most of our score, I’d failed, apparently, to play the right way.
That stayed with me. I played safe for a long while after that.
So I wrote into that memory. Into the feeling of doing your best, getting it wrong, being misunderstood. Into the helplessness of watching someone you love suffer and not always knowing how to help. That was my way in. I couldn’t write her pain. But I could write about my place beside it.
The cricket metaphor worked because it was mine. It carried the sting of remembered embarrassment, the complexity of good intentions gone awry. It gave me a way to be honest without overreaching.
Sometimes, the best way to honour someone else’s story is to find the place where it intersects with your own. Even if that place is a cricket pavilion, twenty-five years ago, where a boy learned that effort doesn’t always equal approval.
The poem still isn’t perfect. But it’s true in a way the others weren’t.
DAY 68: TRAVEL IS LIKE CRICKET WITHOUT A BOX (SINGAPORE)
Frances is coeliac and diabetic. Travel, for her, is like cricket: the rules are incomprehensible, the danger accumulates slowly, and eventually, something hits you in the gut.
No food allowed ashore. An apple becomes a threat to National Security. We should’ve stopped at M&S, filled a bag with snacks and called them “religious relics.” Frances shrugs. “Typical. Obey the rules, go hungry.”
We walk the bay, pass sushi bars, bubble tea kiosks, Hello Kitty blinking from neon signs. Frances says, “Beautiful city, but everything wants to kill me.”
At Marina Bay Sands, cinnamon spirals from a doughnut cart, naan sizzles behind glass. She sits on a low wall, hands trembling like leaves. I pass her a fruit pastille. She chews without speaking, like someone trying to stay conscious through a sermon.
Frances squeezes my hand, once, hard— for comfort, and to stay upright. Starbucks has nothing safe. Just posters smug with gluten. She sits beside a polished escalator, face pale, breath shallow.
I’m rehearsing collapse, seeing her fall before she does, imagining the sound her skull would make on tile. We ride the subway to another mall— air-conditioned, endless, engineered to trap the weak.
At passport control, the guard waves us through with a look that says just go. Her look says what I won’t: this is an emergency.
Back on board, the buffet glows like salvation. She eats slowly. Colour returns to her cheeks like dawn.
“I feel human again,” she says.
I say nothing, but I think: God, I love her. Even if sometimes I feel I’m facing Fred Trueman and I’m not wearing a box.
During a 100-day project on a world cruise, I wrote a 10-line poem each day — small daily acts of observation, memory, weather, and whim. I used two notebooks: one to scribble down each poem, the other to transcribe the same poem in my best handwriting, as a kind of ritual, or record.
I recently opened the second book and realised, to my dismay, it stopped at Day 57. For some reason, I’d never caught up. So I did what needed doing. Using Speechnotes, a speech-to-text app, I dictated the missing poems from the original notebook and pasted them in. Where that didn’t work, I simply cut out the handwritten pages and glued them down. Now, finally, I have a complete physical record of the process: 102 days’ worth of daily poems. One phase finished. And I could move on.
Returning Home: The Shift Toward Revision
Reading back over the poems surprised me. A few had a shape, an insight, a flicker of unexpected imagery. It turned out that doing something every day, even quickly, had taught me something. So I decided to revise all the poems — in order — from Day 1 to Day 100. I hoped this would give the whole collection a more consistent voice.
I didn’t revise once. I went through them again. And again. And again — until each poem felt finished, or at least alive in its own right. This process took about 15 months.
Some poems were sent out during the process and published (in slightly earlier forms) in Wildfire Words, The Lake, Morphrog, Fig Tree, Stray Words, The High Window, Poetry & All That Jazz, The Pomegranate (London), Seventh Quarry, and Black Nore Review. These small acceptances gave me encouragement — but also made me keep working, keep returning, keep refining.
What I Learned in the Process
The revision work was repetitive but revealing. I kept catching myself doing the same things wrong:
Starting too early, and ending far too late.
Leaving in lines that were clever but unnecessary.
Getting overly emotional without clarity.
Forgetting to say what I really wanted to say.
And quite often, not sounding quite like myself.
Some drafts were just awful — others were rewrites of earlier pieces. Still, the process of revision was where the real poems emerged. “First thought best thought” is a myth. As Ernest Hemingway said: “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
What Comes Next Now I have 100 finished poems. Not just daily jottings, but poems that feel like they belong together — as part of a single body of work. The next step is shaping these into a book. I’ve been thinking about structure, tone, voice, and how the poems echo each other. There’s still work to do, but it finally feels like a book is taking shape.
And all because I went back to finish something I’d started.
I set myself an ambitious challenge: write 102 poems, one each day. What began as exciting quickly revealed its true nature – a test of creative endurance. As the days passed, the blank page seemed increasingly daunting. “Have I written too many poems about the sea?” I’d wonder, staring at the waves of words I’d already created.
But this journey wasn’t about perfection. It was about determination and the discipline to show up daily, even when inspiration ebbed. The real achievement wasn’t in crafting flawless verses, but in building the creative stamina to persevere.
After completing this marathon of words, I finally sat down to type them all – 102 poems capturing moments, thoughts, and evolution across seasons. Below are a few selections that mark points along my path.
Who knew that a simple 12-pan watercolor set could be a ticket to adventure, learning, and self-discovery on the high seas? In a moment of shared bravado, my wife Frances and I decided to embark on an artistic journey alongside our literal one. We purchased a 12 pan Cotman watercolor set, brushes, pencils, and paper, determined to have painting lessons every sea day during our round-the-world cruise.
As we packed our new art supplies, a mix of excitement and trepidation filled us. Neither of us had any artistic practical experience, but we were eager to learn together. Before even setting foot onboard, we found ourselves thinking what to paint. Should we attempt landscapes of the ports we’d visit? Seascapes from the ship? Abstract interpretations of our experiences? The possibilities were as vast as the oceans we were about to cross. We set an ambitious goal: to create a painting for every port we visited – 35 in total. It seemed daunting, but we reasoned it would add structure to our sea days and provide a unique way to document our travels.
Our lack of artistic confidence was evident, but we held onto the hope that by the end of our journey, we’d have not only a collection of paintings but also a newfound skill and perhaps a boost in self-esteem. After all, as the saying goes, “You have to start somewhere.”
BENEFITS WE EXPECTED
As we embarked on this artistic adventure, we anticipated several benefits:
1. Creativity and self-expression: We looked forward to having a new outlet for our creativity. The idea of communicating our experiences visually, beyond just photographs, was exciting.
2. Stress relief and mindfulness: We hoped that painting would provide a calming, meditative activity during our long days at sea. The thought of losing ourselves in the process of creating art was appealing.
3. Cognitive stimulation: We’d read that painting could improve memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills. As we aged, the idea of engaging in an activity that exercised our brains was particularly attractive.
4. Improved motor skills: The prospect of enhancing our fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination through painting seemed like a bonus benefit.
5. Shared experience: Perhaps most importantly, we saw this as an opportunity to learn and grow together, sharing in each other’s triumphs and challenges.
6. A unique travel record: We hoped our paintings, however amateur, would serve as a special memento of our journey, capturing not just images but emotions and experiences in a way photos couldn’t.
As we set sail, paintbrushes in hand, we were filled with anticipation. Would we discover hidden talents? Would we find painting frustrating or fulfilling? Only time – and 35 blank sheets of paper – would tell.
