For
my magic realism review blog I recently read and reviewed Larque
On The Wing by
Nancy Springer. In it a middle-aged woman is forced to confront her
10-year old self. The child reminds the woman of the early dreams and
aspirations that she has abandoned. It made me think what that girl
in the centre of the photo above would have thought of the adult me.
That Zoe was confident in her ability as a poet with reason. By the
time I was 13 I had been published and was getting noticed. I had no
fear about what I wrote, no self doubts. I took the plaudits without
embarrassment or question. When the Director of the Cheltenham
Literature Festival told me that Philip Larkin, no less, had said I
was the best young poet in Britain, I was pleased but not surprised.
I didn’t realize what a big deal it was and made no effort to get
that in writing. How many times have I regretted that since!
What happened? Well –
life in many ways. My gift was too easy, too natural. It came and
went without my being in control. I can go for years without writing
a poem and trying to force it just doesn’t seem to work. I have
intermittently written several major pieces of poetry in a flurry of
white-hot words, sufficient to make a body of work, but there are
long periods of non-production. These periods were filled with
career, motherhood and all the other joyous demands on my attention.
But shouldn’t I also be doing something about placing my poetry in
the public domain?
Two years ago I had a
serious and life-threatening health emergency. I had always thought
that I had time to promote my work, but as I lay in the hospital bed
hitched to a monitor it was pretty clear that that was a false
assumption. I published one of my long poems for voices –Fool’s
Paradise – as an ebook with Amazon and won the EPIC
(Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition) award for best poetry book
in 2013. But I have not published it as a physical book.
As a poet I am very
aware that even the books of the most successful poets have limited
print-runs, so I know I won't make a great deal of money from poetry. But poetry is my first love.
But what must I do to reach out and make my audience aware of my
presence? It means going public, of marketing, of pushing my work and
that does not come easily. How I wish I had that young girl beside
me, to give me the confidence and the necessary chutzpah I find I am
so lacking now. Ironically it is not that I doubt the quality of what
I have written, I have never lost that inner belief. It is the
translation of that into some public action that is so difficult. So
here is a New Year Resolution – I will get off my insecure butt and
face this. I am not yet sure how, but I will do something.
