Progressing with Poetry

It's a month since I began my Creative Writing MA with Lancaster University, and so far I've been entirely delighted with the course.  Although I'm the only person out of the 23 participants to be doing poetry only - the majority being concerned with fiction, some with poetry as an add-on - sufficient of my fellow-students are interested in poetry to make their comments worthwhile.  My tutor, Eoghan Walls, seems to be a charmer who can spot both virtues and vices in what I produce: he has the admirable ability to encourage the one and coax me out of the other.

Publication is no longer entirely elusive.  25 poems of mine are out in the ether, 17 in submissions to magazines and eight in competitions.  I have little hope of the competitions, which are something of a lottery, but my guru Eoghan tells me I need to put pieces into them so I am now trying to do so.  Morale was raised at the end of last week when Patricia Oxley, editor of Acumen, responded within a few days to say she was shortlisting two of the ones I'd sent her, for publication in January.  So they've at least got beyond the first hurdle.  I was quite surprised to get her response so rapidly: another editor has still not responded to my letter of 13th July!  We'll see how the others get on...

Meanwhile the anthology of poems I've been working on with other members of the Brighton Stanza group is reaching completion, with a launch next Monday in Brighton.  It's been a great experience, bringing the work of 26 poets together.  I have a real sense of achievement and am looking forward to the launch immensely.

When I went to a life coach, about ten years ago now, to explore what I would do with the rest of my life, I vividly recall him saying "Sometimes you just have to jump"- meaning that if your gut is telling you to do something there are times when you should ignore the workings of the rational process that is holding you back.  I took him at his word and jumped by pulling out of the security of the legal profession ahead of the normal retirement date; I jumped too when we moved to France; and I feel in some ways that there's been another jump with my venture into the world of poetry - although, since I've been writing it on and off since I was a teenager it's less of a jump into the unknown than a return to the start, with the wish to do it properly this time round.

Antony Mair