Margaret Fieland: Poetry and Prose

I’ve gone over the chapbook again and am feeling better about the order of the poems. I’ve also been working on some of the poems themselves. Now I have to actually organize it into a document, with a table of contents, etc. Ack!

I’ve also been working on submitting my poems to various journals — I’m making progress, but it’s slow going. Still, I’m on vacation next week so hopefully I’ll find some time to work on my various writing projects.

I actually got started organizing my chapbook yesterday — bit the bullet, used my son’s computer and printed a bunch of candidate poems out, and started looking through them.

Ack! Writing a poem is hard enough, but organizing a group of them into a coherent whole — even when I do have an idea of where I’m headed — is *really hard*

I actually am working towards putting together a collection of my poetry, and a number of the poems I’ve written recently are intended for it. I have an idea in my head of where the collection is going, but I do really need to print the candidate poems out and see where I stand.

Of course, part of the problem is that I don’t yet have a printer for my laptop. When I have had to print a few things I’ve either used the computer at the library or the house PC, but that won’t do for the number of poems I’m going to have to print out for this.

So, yup, buying a laptop printer has to go onto this weekend’s list of things to do.

Now that I’ve been part of the LSS writers forums for about a year and a half, I feel I’m beginning to get the hang of critiquing. It’s becoming more clear as I read a poem what I think works and what I think doesn’t. I’m hoping that this will help me in my own revising.

I certainly have plenty of poetry to revise. I’ve started on revising the poems from National Poetry Month, as well as the batch of new poems I’ve written since. Since I intend to keep writing, and some stuff goes through many revisions, this is necessarily slow work …

I had three of my poems accepted for Silver Boomer Books’ upcoming anthology, “From Freckles to Wrinkles.”  { bounce, bounce}. Now I get to obsess about the contract, which I mailed yesterday. I *so* don’t trust the post office …

So how come, you might ask, is my blog right now black, yellow, and blue.

Well, it’s ’cause I  figured out a while back how to download another Wordpress theme, and I was so psyched that I decided to use it.

Do write and tell me what you think of the colors.

One of only two poetry-only bookstores, it turns out, is Grolier Poetry Books in  Harvard Square, within shouting distance of Waltham, which is where I work. I rarely get into Cambridge or Boston — maybe this will give me the push I need.

Not that I, as practically a charter member of Book Junkies   Anonymous, need another excuse to buy books…

I did manage to submit a couple of things over the weekend as well as work on some poems but I’m still struggling with how to divide up my time  …

Of course, the basic problem is that days are just too short…