Seeking perfection and falling short

In always seeking perfection with my writing I stop before completing what I am trying to express. A year passes and I have nothing I feel that I can share. Yet give me a deadline and within a few days (with help from friends) I write something as a gift - "Poppy".

My job does take up a lot of my time. At the end of the day I do find it hard to turn my 'work' brain off. Yet poetry is not something that comes second. It will always be part of expressing myself - my voice.

As another year draws to a close my resolution is - Share even what is not perfect. What I post may have a lot of rough edges: a work in progress. It will still be another piece of my view on the world - my dreams in writing.

P.S. Time to celebrate a little. Achievements today: posted a poem and applied 'haiku' label to all my poems that could be considered as such (19 posts).




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Meeting my goals as a Poet through Toastmasters

I have posted before about Toastmasters - Finding poetry in Toastmasters and tonight I had the opportunity to do a reading. The idea of getting up in front of my club and reading my poetry is becoming easier. So I am continuing to meet my personal goal of working towards reading my poetry out to a room full of strangers :-)

Toastmasters is changing me because it is teaching me skills and it makes me feel much more confident about myself. This is not just with my speaking but also my ability to be a leader. I was 'tapped' on the shoulder to become the Vice President of Education for our club. Like my decision to join Toastmasters this is also a decision I am happy I made.

Toastmasters is helping me to find my voice. I am learning how to be much clearer and concise in what I want to say. Through Toastmasters and other things I have become involved in, I am beginning to truly value how important poetry is in order to express 'my voice'. This does not always show in both of my blogs. As I realise that time is rushing by and my posts are not growing enough. What I now understand is that my blogs were never about being discovered. My blogs and my poetry are like Toastmasters - they are all a way to voice and most importantly grow.



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Finding poetry in Toastmasters

I became involved in Toastmasters over a year ago for a variety of reasons. If you have no idea what Toastmasters is then go and read about Toastmasters NZ. It has only been in recent weeks that I admitted to someone aloud that one of my main motivations for going to Toastmasters is to build towards going to a poetry reading so I can read one of my poems out. I feel that I still have a way to go before I am ready to this meet goal even though I have already read out some of my poems to other members of my club. Also, by posting this goal here I am documenting what I am working towards as a poet.

I do not fear of public speaking and speaking my mind in front of a group of people has never been a major problem. Yet I have found that I have gained so much from being a toastmaster, which was not what I expected.

• Running a meeting;
  
• Providing constructive feedback that allows someone else to know where they are doing well and where they still can grow;
  
• Being asked something on the spot and having the skills to respond in a structured and confident way
• Sounding more confident when I speak because I'm now aware what can make you sound less assured. Such as saying "Ums and Ahs" rather than pausing and taking a deep breath before continuing.
  

Last night at Toastmasters (13 April 2010) I was the Toastmaster for the evening and the theme I selected for the session was "Thinking outside the book". I selected this theme because I wanted to share with the rest of my club what working as a Librarian is like when your job is far from traditional. When I created the program adding my poem The Idealised Librarian seemed to make perfect sense, because after 10 years this poem still helps explain why I am a Librarian. What was fascinating about adding this poem was the reaction by someone else there - "Did you write this?" and the expression on their face :-). Being able to blend my poetry into the different roles in Toastmasters makes what I do there unique. The opportunity to express myself through my poetry in such a warm and friendly environment has helped me feel that my main goal is achievable.



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Why do I write poetry? Q&A

I have been chatting with a friend Ian about keeping a blog and what he could do with his photography. You can check out Ian's photography blog or Flickr photostream. I love Ian's photos as I often find myself seeing the world through Ian's lens in a way I would never had imagined.

Ian emailed me on Sunday a range of questions that can be summed up as - Why do I write poetry? Here is my response to those questions (with only a little editing to make sure it actually makes sense):

• Inspiration. How do you come up with ideas?

Sometimes words simply pop into my head and they will not go away. Other times I see something, an event or what the sky looks like today and I want to express that experience.

• Construction. How do you go about getting your ideas down? How do you get from there's-this-idea-in-my-head to ah-what-a-nice-finished-poem?

It is easier when the words that come to me are in some sort of sequence and I go from there. But sometimes it takes a bit more work. I often know if those random words I jot down are worth working on further. I try to create the shell and then decide again if I want to do more work. Then it is a process of polishing and chipping away. The longest I have ever worked on a poem is over a couple of months but that was about a particular event that was difficult to write about because I was telling the story of other people I know. Though there have been a couple of times that I have found the draft of a poem I wrote years ago and came back to it.

• Editing. Do you edit as you go? Do you write in one go, then edit after?

Most of the time I try to get my thoughts down in one go but sometimes things stick out as I type them up. I have scraps of paper all over the place with bits of poems that will never been complete and others that were the 1st draft. Yet now I find it useful to type things up directly when they come to me. I have even resorted to typing them in my phone as a text.

• Style. How do you feel about formal styles of poetry - haiku (whatever it is), limerick, sonnet, pentameter etc, blank verse, ..? (Have you tried them all?)

I like experimenting with particular styles, to see how far I can go and to challenge myself. However more often I just write what comes to me and the poem tells me how it should be structured. I know that I need to teach myself more styles so I can simply write a poem that ends up being a particular style. Oh and limericks are evil and for some reason I find them impossible to write. I have only successfully done so once and that was when I wrote something about the work I do as a gift to a colleague.

• Why do you write poetry anyway? Aren't there enough starving poets in the world already? (Not intended to be provocative. I'm sure you have a serious answer to this.)

Have you ever read the blurb on my blog? That sums up why I write poetry ;-).

I do not expect to make a living out of poetry but I would love to be recognised as a poet in the same way I am a librarian and you are a teacher. I have thoughts constantly rushing through my head and quite often those thoughts are abstract and hard to explain. Poetry allows me to take what is in my head and create something that is no longer part of me. It is hard to explain but I often find myself wondering how I came up with a poem. Recently I have actually asked myself "where did that come from and did I really write that". I can not actually memorise my poems as I often feel like they are separate entities. What I enjoy most are other people's reaction to a poem and what they read from it. It makes me look at one of my poems with new eyes.

Now I am putting the challenge to Ian to answer similar questions in regards to - Why do you take photographs Ian? I have pasted slightly edited questions to better suite taking photos rather than writing poetry. I think these are the sort of questions that anyone who has creative pursuits may find worth answering themselves. I especially think Graeme should also answer these questions as well in regards to the photos he takes (be careful what you say :D)

• Inspiration. What inspires you to take you camera out to take a shot?
• Construction. How do you go about composing a photo as you take it? How do you get from there's-this-idea-in-my-head to ah-what-a-nice-finished-photo?
• Editing. Do you edit as you go with digital images? Do you take a lot of photos, then edit after?
• Style. How do you feel about particular styles of photographs - black and white, portraits, abstract (Have you tried them all?) {ok trying to sound clever and come up with some eg with little success}
• Why do you take photos anyway? Aren't there enough starving photographers in the world already? (This is intended to be provocative ;-). I'm sure you will have a serious answer to this.)
• Is there a photo you have seen that someone else has taken that has inspired you and how you take photographs?

Finding time

I finally found some time tonight to delve into the blogs I am currently following. I have family staying right now so I go through the guilt of ignoring them so I can instead spend time getting lost online. I will try to post while they are here and I guess this will be a test of how much of blogger I have become.

I have set up a couple of things within my blogs like my twitter @ally_cat feed. I have also set up a basic Flickr account and from this I have added a poetry slideshow feed into my blog of writing that contains images I created with poems contained within. I loved creating those images and I think it is time I create some new ones, as I have found they make a great screen saver at work: they are my personal signature.

I loved changing the template to this blog and everytime I look at it I feel the warmth of the colours. Thank you again Graeme for letting me use one of your images which fit perfectly to the colours I had already picked out :)

Looking back

I have started looking through poems that I wrote over the last 3 years or so. It is an interesting thing to do, as it allows you to look at a piece with fresh eyes. I think the most interesting part of looking back is that you get to decide if something is worth working on further to enhance your thinking a couple of years down the track. Or instead I have found, with some pieces, I scratch my head and wonder: what was I thinking.

One of the pieces I just posted that falls under a "re-discovered poem" is Faceting a Friend and next is Roller Coaster Ride. There are other pieces on my list, but they need more work before I put them up.

Arguing with a brick wall

I will involved in a discussion through a Facebook group "Guy Who Threw His Shoes at Bush" about whether it was respectful or not to have done so to a leader of a country. In case you do not know, the name of the man who threw the shoe is Muntazer al-Zaidi and he is a journalist. The reason I bring this up is because it had my creative brain thinking - well at least 1 or 2 of those who were posting did. Not because I thought wow that is something I had never thought about before - it was more the fact that not only did they have a completely different perspective from me but they had long, very long, reasons to back it up. From the beginning of what became a very heated discussion I found certain flaws in their argument, not because I disagreed with them, but simply because they put something on a pedestal and then proceeded to insult anyone that disagreed with their point of view. Which is how I come to call this post "arguing with a brick wall".

I wrote a poem about it, which of course once I posted it was ripped to shreds: called Into the Wind. Though in the end that was more amusing than anything else, as truthfully this poem was a 1 in the morning sort of creation. I admit it is not one of my best poems but I felt like everyone was hitting their head against the wall and in some cases simply throwing up their hands and walking away: so I 'had to' say something about it. To the one that commented about the poem, it is full of "predictable lefty dogma" with "Utopian touches". I did respond to their feedback, which included thanking them for their feedback.

While tweaking the poem, with the help of my friend, I was reminded of another poem I wrote a while back and then recently re-posted when I made some changes to it called Walk the Line. I started this post because I realised I should share what brought about this poem. Like Into the Wind, this poem does not have to be only stuck and centred around my initial thinking. Others may read them and get a completely different image from them. I will not be unhappy or upset. I spent a little too long at University pulling a part too much literature, which in many ways took the fun out of it all. That is one of the reasons you can not really find much information on my blog of poetry about what inspired each poem. I want others to decide what they think it is about. I would also love to know what others get from what I have written and what imagery came to mind when they read it.

Walk the Line came into my life after I encountered a blog called Baghdad Burning, whose author called herself Riverbend. I found this blog when the book, which contains many of the earlier posts came across my desk. It was about her life after the US and other coalition forces arrived in Iraq. The last post was after her family left Iraq in October 2007. One of the main reasons that this blog has left such an impact upon me is because Riverbend has an amazing ability to see from many perspectives. She strives to not be 'anti' and shows true sorrow at all the lives that have been lost on all sides of this war.

I mainly read the book of the posts and then the 2nd volume that was published because the writer who brought the posts together also added information along the way about events that were occurring while Riverbend was posting. The 1st volume in 2005, won 3rd place for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and in 2006 it was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Burning.

The most amazing thing about the thread was that someone else also posted a poem called Saracen, which is raw and beautifully written.

Portfolio - 1

There is a certain amount of damage I do to my writing by trying to maintain a blog of poetry. By posting over 40 poems I have taken away from what I could strive to have 'published'. Not that I am saying that many of those pieces are ready, but there are few that I believe have potential.

The question I need to ask myself is should I stop posting when I love doing so? I want to not just call myself a poet, I also want to know that it is not just a dream I once had many years ago that I never grew out of. I know that my poetry has grown; but it is not hard to move on from the darkness and anger of ones teens, it is called growing up.

This post is not - this is how you create a body of work to submit for publication. The post is trying to figure out where to go from here. Where do I separate what I post from that which I put aside to try and have published?

Where to from here? I have grown fond of my blog of poetry and I do not intend to stop. I just have to find time to write more. Then I need to resist trying to share with all of my friends in such an open forum.

Though truthfully only 2 of my friends have felt comfortable pulling my poetry a part, at least in this forum. The thought of telling me how to change my poetry scares most people. So I am lucky that I have 2 people in my life that have found ways to teach me things, while not losing sight of the core of what I write. Thank you to them. I will prod both and point out I posted my thanks so they know that it is them that I am talking about. I have other people in my life that have the ability to guide my writing, they just have not done so via my blog.

If anyone stumbles upon this seemingly hidden blog and knows the answer to the question: how does one maintain a blog of poetry while at the same time grows a portfolio of work that has the potential to be published? - Can you let me know.

Twitter and poetry

I find the more places I feed my writing into the more I try to think of things that fit into the arena I am feeding into. Take Twitter as an example. I have 2 twitter accounts: one for work and one for non-work tweets. I feed my personal twitter account into my livejournal and I know I have friends there that I am connected to. I also have to admit it is much easier to write a few tweets a day then it is to write one post in my livejournal. Whether any of the tweets mean anything as a daily feed - well I guess time will tell. One of my friends that I am connected to through my livejournal has begun to follow my my personal tweets.

Back to how Twitter has made me think about what I am writing - well I created a twitretry. I have to admit is is pretty bad compared to my other poetry. But writing a tweet that is a cross between it and poetry was a lot of fun. Maybe next time the twitretry will be a little, well more, um poetry like :-)

The term twitretry was coined by Neal Barber - thanks Neal

The challenge of Sonnets

I mentioned in a previous post how poetry challenges that a friend had given me. I went on to talk about the limerick challenge I gave myself and linked to one that I had written called The IRR within DR. I wrote this as a present for a friend and so the title can really only be understood by people who work in the sort of job I do. If someone really wants to know what it means ask :)

I also mentioned Sonnets though until now I have not posted either of the Sonnets I have written so far. They are both in the style of an English Sonnet and the one I posted on my blog of poetry is the 2nd sonnet I wrote and this is called Endure. I am still not sure if or when I will post the first as it needs other sonnets to go with it before it is complete.

I have found sonnets much easier to write than limericks: though I think this may because I over think limericks. This experience has reminded me how little I know about poetry and that I need to spend more time reading the work of other poets. However so many times I find myself looking at poetry that is nothing like what I write.

Poetry Challenges

A comment left by a friend was the first stage of the eventual 3 challenges that I would undertake. The first response I made was to outline the haiku challenge and I then posted next some of these haiku. Now to clarify something before someone comments that the haiku I have written are not actually traditional haiku: my response -- I was given a structure and style to follow and I believe based on that structure I have succeeded. As for traditional haiku, the main problem I have is that I do not understand Japanese. I see that as a challenge to give myself - learning to understand what is required of a haiku that is not written in Japanese.

The other two challenges brought about the poems titled Change and Swinging Moods. I found all three challenges a fantastic way to take my writing in directions that I had never thought to do so before. It has been a while since I have challenged myself as my friend sought to do so and the next challenge I gave myself was to write a sonnet. About 24 hours later I had completed my 1st sonnet. Is this perfect, well I did surprise myself and what I did write I have not posted as it is I believe one of a series of sonnets that only time will allow me to finish. The 2nd sonnet I have written may be posted when I am ready.

The other challenge I found myself putting my hand up for is a limerick. I have never found limericks easy to write. I believe my main issue is that I over think what I am writing.

After experiencing all these challenges I believe I will keep writing sonnets, not sure about limericks and beyond that I will just have to wait and see.

What CC licences I have selected

Across this blog and my blog of poetry, I have chosen 2 types of Creative Commons licences. The second choice I made was whether I would apply a CC licence across the whole blog or on each post within a blog.

The blog Behind Dreaming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and has been applied across the whole blog.

While the blog To Write is to Dream... has a CC licence applied to each post within the blog. Some posts have had a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and others Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

The choice of applying a licence on a single post instead of across a whole blog comes down to the fact that almost all of the posts within my blog To Write is to Dream... are poems that I have written. These poems are each works by themselves that I have chosen to make available through a blog. I started applying a single CC licence across my whole blog of poetry but ran into problems with a few poems where I want to know if someone else wants to remix them. One of these poems that made me glad that I have more than one option when it comes to CC licences is It is not fair.... This poem was difficult to write and I posted it on the blog because I did not want to hide it away any longer as I felt it was something I had to say, especially if it takes me a few more months until I am ready to work on it again.

The last issue for me is still really a question I have to find the answer to and it is around the area of a CC jurisdiction. I am Australian who is now living and working in New Zealand and I have no idea how long I will be in New Zealand for. I posted my 1st poem on my blog of poetry on August 3 2008. The chose I made was to apply an Australian CC licence on both my blogs. My question specifically is what jurisdiction should I apply to my blogs while I am living in New Zealand if I am Australian? I will see if I can find an answer to my question about jurisdiction and will post it here.

• To read about what Creative Commons is read my post Creative Commons: Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally or go directly to the Creative Commons site.

To Write is to Dream....

I have realised that it is almost 2 years since I created my 1st post on my main blog To Write is to Dream. My main blog is where I post many poems I write, which I want to share with my friends and family. By placing these poems in a public forum has meant I also need to think about when I am truly ready to share each poem with the world. Working on To Write is to Dream has been both a challenge as well as something I have never regretted doing.

So many times I have wanted to comment and go beyond the original intention of the main blog. The reason I have only commented a few times is because in the beginning I made a decision about what my blog of poetry would be. To go beyond that would only take away from why I created a blog of poetry. This decision was to leave it to you to decide what impact my poetry has left upon you. I never wanted to tell you what to think, I just hoped you would tell me what you think about what I have written.

Nearly 2 years after I began this journey I now know it is time to share with you why I started this journey, what I have learned and to look into what is yet to come.