Poems

   It occurred to me today, as I was on a step-stool, re-organizing all my books on their shelves, that it was thirty years ago this summer that I published my first poem. I had previously attended a couple of creative writing sessions at Fanshawe College, here in London, as I'd been interested in writing short stories but along the way we also briefly discussed poetry and I found that something had been re-kindled in me. I continued on with all the other creative writing exercises but I also continued to write poetry, on my own.

My poetry collection. Almost totally (and un-abashedly) Canadian.

   Our teacher at the time, a published writer named Pam Tikalsky, had been very supportive of all my writing and had encouraged me to start sending things out. I started mailing batches of poems to literary journals here in Canada and the U.S. and soon started receiving back pretty well the same number of rejection slips. I was told to expect this, however, and so I continued to re-organize my batches of poems and sending them out to different magazines and journals. After awhile the steady stream of rejection notices began to take their toll and I was truly on the verge of calling it a day, poetically-speaking, when what seemed like the improbable happened. A Canadian magazine called Canadian Author and Bookman accepted a poem! 
   As you can imagine, I was beyond thrilled. I was so used to all the rejection language I'd been seeing that I actually had to re-read the notice they sent me to affirm that it was, in fact, an acceptance. Now it just so happened that the poetry editor of C.A.& B. was a lady from London named Sheila Martindale and I think she likely was inclined to favour London authors so I may have had an "in" there, who knows?
   At any rate, I had been published and this somewhat sustained me over the next long drought and all the accompanying rejection slips.
   Then, just about the time I was starting to give up hope again, another acceptance showed up at my door, this time from the University of Windsor Review. They had no such inclination to publish Londoners and this acceptance helped validate my writing. After this, more poems appeared in such well-respected places as The Lyric, The Antigonish Review and Dandelion.

If you look inside, you will find
some of my words...

   I also started entering poetry contests back in those days. There was a new magazine in London back in those days called Tabula Rasa and they ran something called the Forest City Poetry Contest. I entered three poems in the first contest and ended up being one of the honourable mentions. I should have been happy with this but, when I compared my poems to the ones which won, I liked mine better. I more or less decided at that point that the vagaries of having poems judged by total strangers was not for me. The following year, however, the same magazine ran the same contest again and when I looked at who the judge was that year I realized that his writing style was quite similar to my own and, for this reason, I entered the contest again. I was sitting there in the audience as they announced the prize winners and, sure as shooting, I got another honourable mention. I remember thinking to myself, as I went onstage to get my certificate and then headed back to my seat, that I had just fallen for it again and was extremely disappointed. I sat there as they went through the rest of the honourable mentions and the third prize winner. When it came time for the second place winner, my name was announced! I was shocked! All of the sudden, I didn't feel quite so bad about the experience. I was actually walking off the stage to return to my seat when the announcer stopped me because I was also the first prize winner! At this point I was almost dizzy!
   This was a high which lasted quite awhile and, truthfully, it still has the ability to lighten up a day. Around about this time, however, I stopped writing poetry. I have never totally been sure why I did this. I think at some point it felt as though I had run out of things to write about. I had just gone through a two or three year phase when it seemed as though everything I saw was a potential poem---so I wrote about it. I think I then stopped seeing things that seemed to require writing about them. 
   On top of all this, I became interested in composing music. All the time I used to spend writing poems was now being spent down in the "dungeon"---my basement---on my portable keyboard. Then as commonly happens, life got in the way and even this stopped, for the most part.
   Which brings me to the present.
   I feel like writing poetry again. It feels as though I am back in that space where things seem to need writing about and would be worthy subjects. 
   I have even entered contests again. For the last three years, I have entered the CV2 (Contemporary Verse 2) Two-Day Poetry Contest. They give you two days to write a poem but you must incorporate ten words that they give you. Some of the words are pretty innocuous, like "bunk" or "ham". Others are words I actually had to go and look up, such as last year's year's "furuncle" and this year's "absquatulated" (both of which I just now had to add to my laptop's dictionary...). The process is both daunting and fun at the same time and people are actually able to come up with awesome poems. I have liked the three poems I came up with but they were not winners--it is, after all, a very subjective kind of thing and the fact that I don't win is very secondary to the fun I had. And you get a subscription to CV2 for entering so it's kind of win-win!

...and so I did!

   So I will write more poems, just for myself and with my own words. Maybe I'll submit them places, maybe I won't but it will still be the same exercise in self-discovery it always has been and that's why I think most poets do it!