working at writing always pays off

I've been writing poetry for years. Most of it isn't very good. I guess you could say I had a talent that I didn't spend much time developing. It's taken me years to understand, like really understand, that if you want to get better at writing, like really better, then you need to work at it, like really ... you get the picture.

For the last couple of years I have been working at poetry; reading, writing and performing. This year I wrote a poem, To Touch and Taste a Comet. I was trying to do something in that poem that I hadn't done before and then it dawned on me ..  perhaps, at last, I was getting a little bit better.  

Not long after I wrote that poem a fellow poet and friend told me about Cordite Poetry's call out for submissions to their issue, DIFFICULT. I gotta say that up until then I hadn't ever considered submitting to Cordite because frankly I knew my stuff wasn't good enough. But after a couple of years of working on technique and voice etc I felt finally I'd written this poem that the good folks at Cordite Poetry might possibly consider publishing. So I sent it in. 

Today Cordite Poetry's issue DIFFICULT  goes live and I'm so fucking pleased to be able to say my poem To Touch and Taste a Comet is  among the 50 or so poems available to read (for free!) in the issue.

because success deserves a little applause .. photo supplied by Pamela Boutros

And now I'm returning to a draft poem that isn't going so well .. sigh .. it seems we're only ever as good as the poem we're working on, like really working on ..

C x