Complete a manuscript of publishible poetry

I have to admit this past year I really have been quite sick of poetry, poets and rhyming couplets of all varieties. This is not a good thing for one who calls themselves a poet, which I might add I only started doing because other poets humoured me and told me so, when really I just write a bit of poetry in my spare time. However over the last few weeks I’ve decided that Poetry is great and that I really should get back on that wagon wheel and start the ball rolling and produce this damn manuscript. I will have a collection I will I will I WILL!!
The main reason I’m returning to poetry is because I’ve been reading some fantastic poetry and prose In Mslexia, which features poets such as Angela Readman, who’s my new myspace friend…not in a stalker way mind (well not entirely), go read her, she’s fantastic, just the right level of cynicism and wit that I like in a poet, she also digs Doris Day, this too is important.

I also have a deadline, 31st October 2006 for the Eric Gregory award, which publishes a collection for poets under 30, I don’t ever expect to win it but it gives me an incentive, rather than let it stand on my list collecting a funky musky smell (yes I can smell it even if you can’t). So there it is. I just need a topic…nothing remotely domestic godessy or lovelorn victim, I’ve already done that and it wasn’t very good. I already have some worthy contenders, one about a tree’s revenge needs a bit tweaking and another about a wooden Buddha bought in a dodgy market in Spain. (Yes they are all a bit odd like that) Oh and one about a seashell, you always need a poem about a seashell…it’s the law! Okay maybe none of these will cut it at all, I’m just rambling cos I’m stuck at work where creativity is told to bugger off between 7am -7pm.

some new work, hopefully next week, when I have some time. they’ll be a series because I’m doing a sound installation around the theme of isolation and confined spaces or something like that.

Openings – An extract

I open the bill but don’t pay it
I never pay it
It is more than one pound
which is all the money I have in the world
till Friday
in Silver coins
but not fifties
I always feel slighty rich when I have fifties

to type up my poetry and managed 5 in one sitting. I get to read these poems out tomorrow night… but then I started playing scrabble with my friend… and its a really exciting game, I’m ahead by 9 points… I think I’ll use the game as research cos of all those words I never knew were words.

Okay so only have 8 books of poetry to get through… ooh I better pour myself a cuba libre it could be a long night ahead.

I have just bought Sylvia Plaths Ariel Restored, the manuscript as she left it when she died. She was a rigourous writer and spilled out poems upon poems a day, She also was a great organiser and had thought about their order obsessively for months before her death. With this in mind I have decided to put together something and send it off to as many places as possible until I get something back… watch out folks this could be a long one.