The Best of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap

 

Well, that’s it, done, if this job is ever done. I mean ever done to perfection. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but, anyway, I’m finished.

Proofreading. Proofreading your own work involves fighting a form of blindness, the eye skating over the familiar lines; line after line of over-familiarity causing the eye not to see.

I won’t complain, it’s a new collection, the first in years. I’ve been writing all the time, but more or less in isolation. I don’t submit work to magazines or competitions, not since starting the Poetry and Miscellaneous Blog in 2007. And with that, I’ve been largely absent from poetry circles.

That’s not a great choice really, like many things, there’s an amount of self-promotion needed to succeed in the world of poetry, involving networking, having a strong presence in that world. That’s okay, not my strong suit though. Introverted by nature, I’m not a natural when it comes to mingling. So the blog was my solution, and continues to be.

And readers of my blog (there are some) know, all to well, it’s a mixed bag. A photographer discards the majority of his/her shots to publish the best. And that is best in poetry too. But keeping a blog alive requires a flow of posts, and so, for better or worse, I throw it all up there, and being digital, I don’t have to duck any rotten tomatoes coming back. Poems do require time to ferment, ideally as long as you can wait, tweaking bits here and there, re-reading, refining, planing away the bumps.

Anyway, the job is done. The Sound of Water Searching is at the publishers. It could be called ‘The Best of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap’, which after the many years of the blog’s existence should be a good collection. If not, expect my next blog to be on snake-charming earthworms.