The Literature Festival, in association with Independent Northern Publishers, offered a series of writing workshops.
Only a tiny percentage of poems sent in to magazines ever get published. Often the poems submitted fall down at the final hurdle simply because of a lack of self editing on the part of the poet. Is your first stanza the true beginning of the poem? Do your potential readers really need that explanatory last line? Michael Standen of Durham-based
Other Poetry magazine offered the inside info on the pitfalls of magazine submission.Michael Standen's recent collection of poetry,
Gifts of Egypt, was published by Shoestring Press in 2002. He is also the author of several novels, as well as Months & Other Stories, a book of short stories from Flambard PressThis report comes from Rowan Ferguson, a participant in the workshop:
Sharing his own experience as a poet and editor of Other Poetry with the group, Michael Standen's workshop on editing your own poetry explored structural issues of form such as the use of punctuation and rhyme as well as the underlying questions of expressing ideas through poetry and selecting the right image to achieve this successfully.
Michael demonstrated his own editing process, showing one of his own poems through the various stages of its evolution. Everyone had the opportunity to read one of their poems to the group and discuss their ideas and how the poem might be edited to achieve its creator's aim. Inevitably with such an involved subject, the group could have spent twice as long working through the different elements which make up the editing process but we all came away with ideas to develop.
The subject matter of the poetry shared in this way stretched from subtle evocations of mood to a beautifully expressed metaphor for the role of the royal family in modern Britain. This range and variety in itself ensured an interesting discussion.
Thank you to Michael for a stimulating workshop (despite his cold!) and to my fellow attendees for sharing their work.
Rowan Ferguson
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Last update: 1st November 2004