Just as you think nothing is happening – all submissions of Creation and Destruction [the novel about the gods] are sitting there mouldering. Three publishers have said they like it so far and have the whole manuscript but nothing more for a while… my new drama resources have been very slow starters and bought by only a few teachers… everything is mired up, or so it seems. I feel as though all my many projects are sitting in one of those old children’s toys – a kaleidoscope which needs a thorough shake-up because everything has fallen to the invisible bottom of the tube… Just then something totally unexpected happens after all!
I have written poetry all my life, since my school set a competition for the school magazine when I was twelve and my poem was chosen. Thereafter there wasn’t a school magazine in which I didn’t have a poem. I’d got the bug. It was helped by my inspirational English teacher, then called Mary-Rose Bateman, though later she married and became Mary-Rose Farley, who I visited and kept in touch with until she died about three years ago. ‘Batty-B’ as she was called in school parlance, spotted some ability in me and encouraged it. She invited me to put any poem I’d written into her pigeon-hole; she would read it and comment helpfully. She’d set me tasks too: a sonnet – Shakespearean or Petrarchan – a villanelle [difficult] and so on. These were the stepping stones of my craft and I remember her with gratitude to this day for her support.
Poetry is my go-to comfort blanket. I write my way through bad times. Sometimes this means that the poem is pretty bleak but never mind, I have shaken the mood off and written my way through the trauma! But there are happier poems too of course and even some funny ones.
So it’s poetry that shot to the top of the kaleidoscope tube this time. The poetry library in my home-town, Penryn in Cornwall, held a competition to find the poet laureate of Penryn. Before you laugh out loud you should know that there is a very large society of poets in this area many of them very good, well-known and much published. I belong to the famous –reputed to be the best in England – Falmouth Poetry Group. We’re a mixed bunch, but what I like about the group [headed by Penelope Shuttle who has many publications] is its kindness to those who need help or advice. Nobody squashes the lacking-in-confidence and many newcomers flourish through the regular helpful feed-back they receive.
I’ve belonged to the FPG since I moved to Cornwall in 2001 and before that belonged to a group in Tunbridge Wells. In Cornwall apart from attendance at the FPG I have boosted my confidence by going to open-mic sessions. And I enter competitions. So following my latest compulsion, which is to ‘get my poetry out there’, I entered the poetry library competition.
Turning up to the grand finale at the Famous Old Barrel pub last Thursday I looked around – the place was packed – and recognised many other poets I’d met at open-mic sessions in Falmouth. My spirits fell. Lots of good writers. What made me think my contribution would be any good? I’d only entered at the last minute, thinking I might as well. The subject had been to write a poem about Penryn. It hadn’t inspired me but as I thought about it in those last few days I realised how much I did know about the town – the second oldest [by a few weeks] in the whole of Cornwall. I’d walked every inch of it and its surroundings, discovering much about its history as I did so. I loved the woods, the estuary, the lakes. The poem flowed out…
Just as I was thinking of leaving and walking in the dark up to my home by the bottom lake, hearing who was third [a poet friend of mine] and second [a regular open-mic reader and a student at Falmouth University] like a dream I heard my name read out.
So there you go – the first Poet Laureate of Penryn and environs, crowned with a wreath and lauded and heaped with little gifts and a certificate. I’ve already sent two more poems. It shows how a bit of appreciation can fire up both spirit and creativity.