Well I have done it, at last. I have started sending my poems to magazines again.
When I was younger I was regularly published in magazines, including South West Review, The Rialto, Aquarius, Pennine Platform, and others. I was probably on the point of getting my first collection, but something happened.
I lost confidence. I have since discovered, this is not uncommon among women poets. Jo Bell and Jane Commane write about it in their excellent book How to be a Poet . And I had a similar conversation about the issue with Briony Bax (editor of Ambit) at the Poetry Book Fair. My loss of confidence was ridiculous really. I had two great poets saying I was good (Michael Horovitz, Philip Larkin) and still I gave up submitting.
There were some mitigating circumstances I suppose. Looking back I was struggling with depression, something neither I nor my husband really confronted. My way of dealing it was to stop being a full-time mum and taking on a demanding job, which meant I was balancing motherhood, career and poetry. Poetry was what suffered. My poetry was increasingly taking the form of long sequences or indeed long poems and so not exactly suited to magazine submission, and I used that as an excuse for doing nothing. Then of course the longer I left submitting poems, the harder it was to get back into doing so.
But that is behind me now. I have restarted submitting poems and already in just a month I have had three poems shortlisted for publication, so that is good for my confidence. Fingers crossed the poems make it to publication.
In case you are wondering about the quote in the title of this post - it is from Sylvia Plath.
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