Editing the poems in my diss I consider what work I want them to do, how I want them to feel, what I want them to be. I draw inspiration from the way Chang assembles threads from different places and weaves them together; artworks, quotes, metaphor, images, life experiences, characters from culture and literature, birds and animals, and her own statements of thought, are combined in relatively short pieces of writing and cumulatively build an overall effect. The poems feel, to me, consciously considered, carefully arranged, and it’s this level of mindful sculpturing I want to undertake in my work.

My prompt for you today is to take one of your ongoing drafts and consider how you can build complexity within it.

What is the poem saying and what other ways are there to say or show that; go deeper into your subject/theme - what else do you unearth? What influenced you while you were writing or thinking about it that you haven’t included, and can you include it/them? Are there other pieces of art or thought that speak to your subject and what would happen if you brought one or some of those in? Is there scientific research or are there facts you could include? What other images or metaphors could you find or create?

Collect as much of this as you can and then play with working it, in different combinations, into your poem. See what this does to the work, what dimensions it suggests, what you like and don’t like, what you uncover or reveal. Have fun.

Here is Chang’s Grass, 1967 from ‘With my back to the world’

Here is Chang’s Poppy Field from ‘Tree of Knowledge’

You can find more poems by Victoria Chang on The Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets

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Of course our patterns cannot always stay the same.

Elsewhere as physical state. As mental state. As location. As non-location.

When the generalised anxiety became too much to bear I gripped the wooden sides of my small boat and crooned to the night sky, fortunately on this occasion the birds answered, bringing small drops of solace and relief which fell from their wingtips as they passed above.

Driving from Manchester to Leicester all the grass in all the fields I pass is dead and brown. Are you not terrified? Do you not wake in the night dripping with dread? Does your heart not burn with grief?

When I saw my friend who I had not seen for many months I was reminded how everything is and isn’t. In the shape of his face I saw was, is, and will be. All our shared memories were in a jar of honey I held in my hands; I considered dipping my fingertip into it but the lid was screwed tightly on.

I always see the same girl in the mirror. Even when I squint, or peer surreptitiously from the corner of my eye. Even when I try my hardest to be quick, unexpected, to catch her off guard, she is there waiting for me with the same hair and nose and eyes and cheeks and chin always so familiar and always so deeply surprising.

At the open mic I held my contributor copy in my hand, read my own words and felt something with no name. Perhaps at that moment some of my atoms had chosen to switch places, or some of my cells ate up some of their neighbours. Perhaps the bird migrating endlessly through my body paused for a short while to wait out a bad weather front, or to enjoy a dappled morning.

When a friend and I watched an old sitcom we noticed that all the adverts her subscription brought us were hyper-feminine. We considered the pink clothes, perfect hair, and pristine razors like historians. Once, I thought there was only one world. Then, I learnt there are many. Now, I am reminded world is subjective.

The more I think about the nature of poetry competitions the more I am convinced of their randomness. When I googled truly random AI offered me radioactive decay and quantum mechanics, followed by pseudo-randomness, classical mechanics, and the philosophy of determinism. When my foot went numb I stood up and walked randomly this way and that about the living room until feeling returned in a thousand small pains.

While trying to title a poem I write so many possible yet unsuitable titles that they outnumber the lines of the poem. Often, I count the things I am doing. Often, I count the lines of my poems. Often, I count the shades of my grief, but I know so few numbers the same ones loop around and around.

Almost everyone I encounter in bird hides is interested in birds. Only one woman sits removed while her partner leans the voluptuous lens of his camera against the sill of the open window. Eyes to a screen, portal to elsewhere. Look up, I want to say, look at all the perfectly ordinary birds doing perfectly ordinary bird things and notice how astounding that is.

One day I became a taxidermy representation of myself, stuffed with a million million infectious particles each wrapped in their own little protein coat and very much enjoying the weather, thank you for asking. When I forced my voice through the thick of my throat it was small and distant, I had to listen very carefully in case I missed anything I had to say.

On the bus, in the street, moving through shop doorways, opening vehicles, posting letters into mailboxes, visiting libraries, sitting in parks, staring at maps, not looking where they’re going… all these lives like night skies full of constellations. How often do you think about it?

I thought, I just want to be happy. But there was nothing making me unhappy, nothing but the plants pushing their tangled vines through the thicket in my skull.

When I order a lime soda at the bar I wonder about the outcome. Few drinks offer this level of possibility. Everything from the glass to the price to the nature of the lime hangs in the balance. For several long minutes anything could happen. For several long minutes I am uncertain whether I am a person or a weather front. For several long minutes the bar tender thinks several things I will never know.

In the nature reserve I consider the nature of reserves. The nature that is us partitioning off the nature that is not us to save it from the nature that is us. The sun on the water is too bright to look at directly. The lakes are so low the waterbirds can barely be seen from the hides.

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My hope is that this club grows into a warm, lively space where we meet regularly to talk about everything we love — and maybe don’t love quite so much — about contemporary poetry collections. There's so much we can learn from each other’s poetry and reflections, and so much connection to be had through discussion spaces. Last month was such a joy and I’m so excited to see this community grow.

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And yet, I consistently find spending time reading the most difficult thing to do. Not because reading itself is difficult, quite the opposite: reading is joyful. But I do so little of it. Why? And how do I prioritise it?

I think there are two things at play here.

I’m busy. My ‘day job’ is largely evening and weekend work with some day shifts here and there, and the time around it gets eaten up by gym (I have to maintain a level of fitness to do parts of my job), climbing (honestly one of the biggest ways I keep mentally well and regulated), and then writing (poetry, MfA, Substack, & all the admin for events, workshops etc). Add in a partnership I’m conscious of earmarking quality time for, a birdwatching hobby, and seeing a couple friends here and there, and there’s not a huge bunch of space left for the kind of downtime where I’m just floating around and could spontaneously think: oh, I’ll pick up a book for the next couple hours.

So as the space and time doesn’t necessarily naturally arise on its own I need to be more intentional with reading. And I do intend to read, it’s there in my mind that I want to make time for it, I want to do it.

And then I’ll manage it. I’ll pick up, say, a pamphlet someone’s recommended, and really enjoy it (or maybe enjoy it not so much because it’s also fine not to like everything we read). I’ll finish it, put it down, go on with my life, and suddenly it’s three weeks later and I haven’t read anything else except a few poems doing the rounds on Instagram (facepalm).

This is frustrating. And the first thing going on is that reading is labelled in my mind as a ‘leisure activity’ rather than something I do as part of ‘work’. So there’s a little internal reframing to work on because I also don’t prioritise leisure activities so what tends to happen is I hit a point where I have to stop doing things and then either escape out into nature and birding or disappear into a comforting sci-fi series (either way reading doesn’t get much of a look in).

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The second thing going on is the lovely myth of productivity we’re all de facto enrolled in as punishment for existing in western culture at this time. I want so much to untangle myself from this myth, particularly since discovering my neurodivergence and becoming more aware of how tying myself to productivity essentially hurts my wellness. But it’s pernicious, and over the course of my life I’ve sewn it into my bones, into every cell of my being.

Reading, while there’s clear outcomes from it that I definitely want i.e. more time reading poems, discovering more poets I love, benefitting my practice etc etc, isn’t productive. At the end of a reading session I don’t have a draft of a new poem, a Substack post to publish, an event ready to advertise; I haven’t produced anything tangible.

And even though I know, logically, that producing something all the time isn’t what I should be focusing on (or hanging my self-worth on), when I’m faced with a little block of writing time (poetry, MfA, Substack etc) I’m feeling the pressure to keep all those things moving by producing something I can see or touch or send out into the world; working wins out over reading every time. Reading is always relegated to ‘later’ even though I know it’s endlessly informative, and will bring me both joy and learning.

To try combat this, in the context of working on the MA dissertation part of my MfA and at the suggestion of my supervisor, two months ago I made a reading tracker. I now have a pretty piece of paper with lots of boxes in for each month, and every time I spend an hour reading something for my diss I can colour in a box and feel a little spark of (dopamine) achievement (free hack for all my ND friends reading this).

What has this revealed? That my reading habits are actually exactly as bad as I feared.

I want to change this in myself; I want to reframe reading as a crucial, important, valuable practice that I make time for rather than hope time appears for.

How do I do this? I’m not sure. But I believe we can’t change the things we aren’t looking at, and by spending more time with this I’m bringing it further into my awareness, slowly cultivating that change.

And the tracker has helped a little: I do want to colour in those boxes, and enjoy it when I do, and it’s given me some concrete evidence to help motivate my change.

I’m also opening the conversation out, because I’d love to know if you experience, or have experienced, something similar, and what you’ve done about it if you have. Or even if you just don’t relate to this at all! Drop your thoughts in the comments.

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This one’s for when you want to write but there’s no lines thrumming round your head, words stuck in your brain, or half-formed ideas to pick through… but you want to write!

We’re gonna mess around with words and sounds till we find a way in.

Grab a dictionary, any book, or perhaps a random word generator if you’re online. Flick through and pick a bunch of words at random: you can choose the first ones your eyes land on, or skim pages and pick ones that appeal or stand out to you. Make a little list of these words, you only need a few.

Then, pick one word from the list and start branching off from it with similar words: rhyming (inc slant rhyme), words with similar chimes, alliteration, sibilance, consonance, contextual resonance… let your mind jump from word to word and see what emerges.

When you’ve got a couple beefed up lists of words go through and start joining some together; which ones fit well, or suggest further themes, logic, or sentences; can you add other words to create lines that are gorgeously rich in similar sounds.

Keep playing till you land on something that excites you, and let the creativity take you from there.

Happy writing :)

As always feel free to share thoughts or pieces of writing in the comments!

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This poem appeared on Superlative Literary Journal in January 2026 as one of their monthly featured pieces. Superlative are a wonderful, friendly, and supportive journal and I highly recommend you check them out if you haven’t already.

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This month's read was recommended by Nic, and chosen via random spinner - I think we’ve hit a win though because everything I’ve heard about this book is good good good!

My copy arrived the other day and I’m just about to start reading… with just under two weeks until our next meeting there’s plenty of time for you to grab a copy and join us.

If you’re a paid subscriber to Poet Notes then you don’t need to do anything, just keep an eye out for a post on here with the meeting link, usually a day before, and join us on the day.

If you’re not a paid subscriber then you can join The Poetry Book Club by taking out a subscription to Poet Notes at £4 a month - this will also get you 20% off all workshops and events I run, and access to the Poet Notes back catalogue which has an ever growing raft of craft exercises, poetry workshops, and writing prompts.

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Or, if you’d like to give it a try you can buy a one off ticket for £4 (plus Eventbrite fee) through Eventbrite.

Book a ticket here

Can’t wait to see you there!

This is a generative workshop so the focus is on you doing lots of writing, ideally you’ll leave with a bunch of drafts you can take away and work on later.

There are four sections, with an example poem and curated prompt in each.

Warm up with a freewrite

To bring yourself into the room, into your creativity, and onto the page, lets begin with a 5-minute free write.

For this freewrite we’ll use the prompt I know / I don’t know. Begin each sentence with I know, or I don’t know, and switch between them. Be as literal or poetic as you’d like and see where it takes you. Try and make it earth/environment/nature themed if you can as that’s what we’ll be writing into.

Here’s an example: I know fish sleep with their eyes open. I don’t know what it’s like to be driftwood. I know my body too is water. I don’t know how it feels to have scales in place of skin. I know…

Let yourself depart from truth and sense; let your creativity drive you. If you depart from the initial prompt, great, if you return to it twenty times in a row, also great - we’re just getting warmed up.

Part 1 - The earth is a living thing

In this section I invite you to consider a poem by Lucille Clifton, ‘The earth is a living thing’.

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I can’t remember exactly where I saw this recently but feel like it was probably a social media post, or maybe a reel, about happiness or gratitude… At the time I just kind of shrugged it off; I’ve been having a kinda tough few months and cycling in and out of some negative thinking so it wasn’t a vibe that hit home.

But it’s been percolating this morning as I’ve been at the boulder gym making my way through a bunch of climbs and then my workout. Along with some thoughts about the narratives surrounding productivity and progress, how challenging life feels at the moment, and how all this ties in together.

I think productivity and progress often feel like they should go hand in hand, one should naturally lead to the other, but it’s more complex than that and the oversimplification can be harmful.

In fact I think most of the narratives around productivity and progress are harmful, particularly if you’re neurodivergent, but probably for neurotypicals too. There’s the constant drive to ‘be productive’, the need to progress, the myth that if you just try harder, keep pushing through, streamline your productivity, then the big reward is just around the corner. There’s a whole conversation here too, around how capitalist narratives have tied self-worth to productivity, but I don’t want to get into now cos we’ll be here all day… Suffice it to say we get caught up in these narratives and it’s largely a false economy, we spend our time and money and energy constantly trying to get somewhere that isn’t where we are, and run ourselves into the ground in the process.

And I think in focusing too hard on one particular kind of progress, i.e. wealth acquisition, career etc, there’s the potential to actually miss all the other ways progress can show up in our lives.

I’m trying to build a career in the arts, this is what I want to do with my life.

I’m struggling to achieve this, therefore I’m failing.

This is my kind of thinking: narrow, black and white, single focus.

But life is more nuanced than that, and requires more complex thinking.

I’m trying to build a career in the arts, and I’m also trying to improve my personal poetic practice, look after my mental health, improve my climbing, sustain myself financially, look after my physical health and condition my body for an active job, care for myself emotionally, and nurture the social and play aspects of my life. Existence is multi-faceted; people are multi-faceted.

And progress is multi-faceted.

This is more holistic thinking, looking at the bigger picture and seeing how everything connects… this is what I’m trying to teach myself.

I’m a sucker for looking at the one thing and hanging my entire definition of success or failure from it. But then, although I have a pre-req for this kind of thinking (it’s common in neurodivergents) I don’t think that’s only me… that mindset is encouraged by our social narratives around productivity and progress.

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There’s been a lot these past few months that hasn’t gone my way, that feels like set backs. Missed application and submission deadlines, rejections from places I have managed to submit to, and recently a job in the arts sector which would have been an absolute game changer but for which I didn’t even get an interview. It’s gutting; neurodivergent burnout and financial strain are my constant companions, there’s nothing wrong with climbing instructing itself but for me as an autistic person the level of social interaction - particularly with high energy children - that it requires is a high tax on my capacity; this job would have meant I could swap out two days of instructing for two days working in an arts context - less intense environment, a job that feels like I’m heading in the right direction… what a dream!

Wanna hear another? I'm currently applying for some funding to expand my creative practice into lino printing, something I’ve wanted to do for absolutely ages but remains a dream because I don’t have the time for the practice and I don’t have the money for the materials. Just the thought of actually getting this funding and being able to concentrate on artistic development… oh my!

These potential futures are gorgeous and once I start thinking about them it’s so easy to get caught up in in this bubble of hope, then when the bubble bursts (as it so often does because, let’s face it, this is the arts sector and everyone’s after the same few jobs/opportunities/funding etc) it can feel devastating to land back in the same old difficult life that feels like a constant grind with little payoff.

And it is difficult, and it is a grind, because that’s what happens when you want to build something but still need to meet societal/financial demands and you’re neurodivergent. And I think the idea of the ‘grind’ has also been romanticised, turned into something we’re encouraged to take some kind of pride in when really it’s bad for our bodies, bad for our mental health, and bad for our overall wellbeing. Is this a joyful way to live? Exhausted and always running to the next task? I don’t want to grind.

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When I first got into climbing just over 10 years ago I sucked at it. I was 21, I wasn’t into fitness, and I’d spent the previous seven years partying hard and dealing with anorexia. I was not strong and my body didn’t have a foundation for building upper body strength. For those first couple years I was the weakest climber everywhere; I wished and prayed to just be able to break into the 6’s… if I could just climb 6a! Then I climbed 6a, but I was still the weakest climber and I still found it really stressful; if I could just climb 6b then I’d be strong, part of the crew, etc. The I climbed 6b, 6c… if I could just break into the 7’s! All these years later and my project grade is 7b+ and I still catch myself berating myself at the wall for not being strong enough, not being good enough, not climbing hard enough. What’s happening? I’m constantly raising my own bar, which in itself isn’t a bad thing if I want to ‘progress’ which I do, but the thing that needs to go hand in hand with the bar raising? Recognition. Recognising how far I’ve come, the progress I’ve already made. Why is it so easy to shrug that off?

This morning I've been thinking about the last few months, the things I’ve wanted and haven’t got, the energy I put into growing this Stack and writing poems and turning up at work for all my shifts, and that phrase, "a previous you really wanted to be where you are now" kept coming back to me as I was doing my workout, and I started thinking: “at what point do I stand back and look at the progress I have made?”

Realistically I’m still very, very far away from the idealised life with it’s little house in the countryside and several books of published poetry and an income from writing that means I can choose when and how much I undertake socially demanding work (and yes there’s a whole other conversation here about how the journey is the destination, but I’m not going to get into that now). But where did me of a few years ago want to be?

She wanted a job, any job that meant she could pay the bills; she wanted to work in a climbing wall because she thought it would be fun and didn’t know then that she’s AuDHD and a socially demanding role would take it’s toll; she wanted to get into route-setting; she wanted to publish more poems; to get a first in her undergrad and get on to an MFA; to move out of a terrible, terrible house-share that made her miserable; she wanted a car; she was lonely socially and romantically; she wanted to be able to climb 7b; she wanted to get out into the poetry scene and start building a career…

I work at a wall, I route set, I climb 7b, I’ve had a few more poems published, I got a first in my undergrad, I’m doing an MFA, I live in a friendly house-share in a better part of town, I have some great friends who I see here and there, I have a wonderful and supportive partner who’s caring and kind and aware of my capacities and boundaries and meets me where I'm at, I go walking and birdwatching when I can and those things fill me with joy, I run this Stack and over 100 people find enough value in what I do here to subscribe to it, I host The Space Poetic and The Poetry Book Club and a series of workshops and clubs and there’s joy and community in all of them…

I am living exactly the life a previous me wanted so badly.

Yes it’s difficult balancing creative work, career building, paid employment, neurodivergence, fitness, health, social etc etc. Yes there’s things I want to do like artistic exploration that I currently can’t. And yes my day job hella burns me out.

No where I am now isn’t the epitome of my dreams. No I don’t make enough money from writing to drop even one day of employment.

But is it good? Has there been progress? Hell fucking yeah. Across the board there’s been so much progress, and if I only focus my narrow thinking of one definition of success then I’m liable to miss all of that. Even my tiring job has it’s good bits: my teammates (and friends!), the route setting, the days I get to spend doing maintenance work instead of instructing...

We're always changing the parameters for success in our lives and that's absolutely nutty, but maybe it’s also just a part of being human in contemporary society and the work is in cultivating awareness of that, and of how we define progress or success, and in intentionally building in time to stop and recognise how far we’ve already come.

The journey is lumpy and bumpy and wiggly and winding; sometimes, oftentimes in my experience, progress is lateral.

What have you got/done that you’re not recognising because you’re too busy looking at the stuff up ahead and being low key pissed at yourself for not reaching it yet?

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In case you’ve not come across it before, anaphora is a technical term for repetition, specifically a repeating refrain at the beginning of a sentence, line, or stanza. The Poetry Foundation has a definition here.

I think this can be a really great technique for exploring complex perspectives, in ‘The Moth’ Sofia Fall repeats the word/instruction ‘forget’ to raise a plethora of memories, both large actions and small details; the combination of the instructional tone and the repetition propels you through the poem, and the use of ‘forget’ rather than something like ‘I remember’ or ‘remember when’ adds nuance and a bittersweet quality that deepens the work.

Today’s prompt is to write a draft using anaphora; I’m particularly interested currently in using ‘yes’ as a refrain: what could you say yes to or celebrate that you wouldn’t usually? Or how can you turn ‘yes’ on it’s head, use it in a contradictory way to add nuance or depth?

I’m interested too in the effect created when we make subtle changes to the refrain throughout the poem, but I’ll leave you to play with that if you’d like…

If you need some more inspo check out Nathalie Handal’s ‘Catalogue of Happiness’ which uses the refrain ‘To give up’, and ‘The School of Song’ by Chen Chen which uses ‘my song’ quite wonderfully.

As always please feel free to leave any thoughts or creative responses in the comments below.

Happy writing x

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I’m a low income writer and do my best to squeeze everything writerly I can out of the free hours around my day job, if you can afford to upgrade to a paid subscription and help keep this Substack (and me!) going, please know it’ll be hugely appreciated.

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I really wanted a place on this one - mostly because it included several months mentoring from a poet whose work I absolutely adore - but despite working at it over several sessions I couldn’t get the application finished, and then because I’d got so stressed (with work etc too) had a big shutdown on the deadline day and couldn’t work at all. The deadline passed, the effort I’d put into trying to get the application written didn’t go anywhere, and I wasn’t even in with a chance of getting on the programme.

For me, this is a familiar story, and a particular theme for 2026. Over the weekend I realised I’d missed the deadline to apply for some work I’d have loved to do with the Poetry Library, earlier this year were several residencies I drafted applications for but couldn’t finish in time… It’s a particular quality of gutted when it’s not a case of not being picked, but of not even managing to get your name in the hat.

And as increasingly it’s my peers who are the recipients it feels a little like missing the bus and then spotting my mates grinning together in the top seats as it drives past.

What is there to be done? Obviously not sulk at home or get jealous and bitter - even though I’m gutted I don’t want to cultivate that within me. So it’s a case of being gentle with myself and of practicing sympathetic joy, a concept I first came across as compersion back when I was practicing Polyamory.

What is sympathetic joy? Put simply it’s feeling happiness for the joy and success of others, even when that success is something you wanted for yourself. It’s rerouting your thinking from ‘I wish that was me’ to ‘I’m so pleased that person/poet/friend is getting to take advantage of this opportunity that’ll be really great for their development’.

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But it’s more nuanced than just giving yourself a different script; there’s work there in acknowledging your disappointment and allowing yourself to grieve a missed opportunity, and in working to connect with the positive emotion and feeling behind the sentiment you’re cultivating: it’s not enough just to say the words, the meaning comes through embodying that position.

And the other thing? When I stop to think about it I am actually pleased for these friends and peers, it’s not that hard to cultivate positivity for them because it already exists - I like these people and I’m glad they’re benefitting from these wonderful opportunities. And when I acknowledge that, it feels better inside me too - it counteracts the gutted.

I actually suspect this kind of thinking and practice is really useful to cultivate as a writer full stop, not just for someone in my position. It goes hand in hand with the understanding that being in creative spaces isn’t about being in competition but in conversation with each other, and celebrating each other’s successes alongside our own; the arts space is so special because of the multitude of voices and perspectives it contains, and when any of us are benefitting then it’s bolstering the community and landscape as a whole.

The other side of cultivating sympathetic joy is nurturing my relationship with myself: being gentle and understanding with the limits of my capacity, and being proud of what I can and do achieve rather than disappointed in what I miss. The popular saying that you can’t look after others without first looking after yourself also applies in this context: it’s a lot harder to feel happiness for others if behind the scenes you’re berating yourself.

None of this is easy, and there’s a temptation to feel frustrated with the system as well; it’s a lot of work to find residencies and awards and mentorship schemes and it’s hard to get really good applications together, and when you’ve got executive functioning struggles it’s extra hard to meet the deadlines - or even remember when they are! But being frustrated with the system won’t get me anywhere either.

Sometimes I imagine an alternate universe where I’m one step closer to achieving all my goals because I don’t have capacity and executive functioning challenges, but this too is only an exercise in winding myself up. I am the person I am, the choices available to me are: the nature of the internal dialogue I cultivate within myself, what I do with the energy and capacity I have available, and how much I work to foster a more conscious and intentionally positive relationship with the world around me.

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I’m a low income writer and do my best to squeeze everything writerly I can out of the free hours around my day job, if you can afford to upgrade to a paid subscription and help keep this Substack (and me!) going, please know it’ll be hugely appreciated.

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I’ve really enjoyed reading Sarah’s collection, and can’t wait to dig into it together tonight. We’ll be meeting on Google Meet at 6:30pm GMT — just click the link below to join.

Not signed up yet? You can join for just £4 a month with a Poet Notes subscription, or if you’d like to try before you commit, you can use your single-use unlock and see what you think.

My hope is that this club grows into a warm, lively space where we meet regularly to talk about everything we love — and maybe don’t love quite so much — about contemporary poetry collections. There's so much we can learn from each other’s poetry and reflections, and so much connection to be had through discussion spaces. Last month was such a joy and I’m so excited to see this community grow.

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This poem was first published on Ink Sweat and Tears in July 2025; there’s so much good stuff on this site - if you haven’t checked it out I highly recommend you do.

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I’m a low income writer and do my best to squeeze everything writerly I can out of the free hours around my day job, if you can afford to upgrade to a paid subscription and help keep this Substack (and me!) going, please know it’ll be hugely appreciated.

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This year I’m mostly failing to get subs out, and those I am sending are mostly to comps that flash up in my calendar at the end of the month. This is not very efficient, nor giving me very good chances of getting my work out there, but there’s so many things to fit into all the days.

Submissions are time consuming, not especially enjoyable, and often come with multiple stages and fairly complex instructions… which makes them a bit of a nightmare if, like me, you’re the kind of neurodivergent that makes following instructions, hitting deadlines, and completing tasks pretty difficult.

That being said, it’s gotta be done, and there are much worse things!

And, I’ve just sent a bunch out, which feels kinda good cos the only thing worse than doing submissions is knowing you haven’t done any for ages and your work’s just sitting around not going anywhere.

But it’s been a long process friends, and I’ve split them over several days. Saturday was reading through poems and checking I’m happy they’re ready, then making two lists: one of poems and one of places to send them. I also nominally suggested which poems I might send where but of course I changed this when it actually came to sending the subs (not sure if these were actually good changes, but it’s too late now!). Then the actual subs were split over Sunday and Monday, plus one on Friday night after work. I split them up cos it takes me a long time, I struggle to decide what to send where, and to stay on task, and I have to do a lot of checking to make sure I’ve included/omitted all the things on the instructions; trying to send too many in one day is overwhelming and ends up not happening.

Got any submissions hacks? I’d love to hear if you do! Please drop them in the comments.

Where to submit?

Not just competitions! Though a few comps here and there are good. In an ideal world I’d split pretty evenly between comps and journals.

How do you find these? I like The National Poetry Library Competitions page, which lists upcoming comps, who they’re for, when they close, and how much they charge.

And recently I’ve also been using this list of UK Poetry Competitions on Nice Weather For which lists comps by closing date and includes what to send, max line count, and entry fees.

What about lit mags and journals? Honestly most of these come from Instagram. I follow a lot of journals and mags so I see a lot of the submission call outs on my feed. Not suggesting this is the best way to do it though particularly as, despite screenshotting them to come back to, I miss most of the deadlines anyway.

Chill Subs is a good resource. I’ve only used it occasionally, and I haven’t created an account and used it as a tracker which I know is a feature they advertise, but I have found it useful when looking for journals with open subs. And they’ve got a lot of filters which helps narrow the thousands of listings into much more manageable results.

Also friends, some of my poet friends and some regulars from The Space Poetic will send round submission opportunities they’ve come across. I actually love it when friends share sub call outs and really want to nurture this more.

The Process

It’s time consuming, right, and a bit of a headache. Even with doing all my writing in a 12 point standard font and basic formatting (excluding concrete poems obvs) I still have to read back through and double check all the formatting specs cos they’re slightly different across a lot of places.

Then if it’s a comp you have to make sure your name isn’t on it… some want page numbers in a particular place… some are specific about what they want in the file name… some want you to include a line count in the top right or the top left… some specify spacing…

Some want a separate entry form attached along with your submission, while my favourite (joking, obviously) want you to fill out their online form, make payment through a separate portal, and then email your poems along with transaction/receipt numbers and other specified information in the body of the email. Trying to get all these separate points correct as a neurodivergent is - to put it mildly - absolutely fucking brain-melty.

What do you think of Submittable? Personally, I love it. One single portal to put all your deets, the poems, and payment??? Yes please!

Submissions Trackers

I have two submissions trackers, the first (below) is a simple word doc to record what I sent on what date, where to, when I should hear back, and whether I was successful. In the page below from earlier this year you can see a published outcome is highlighted in green; if I get feedback that I got into a top percentage, or if I made it onto a short or long list, was a runner up, or was highly commended, then these get highlighted in orange.

The second tracker (below) is a bit different. This one’s designed to help me keep track of which poem is where, without having to scroll through the tracker above. It also helps me easily find out whether I’ve submitted to a particular place before. As with the tracker above, poems highlighted in green have been published, and those in orange have been long or shortlisted, highly commended, or reached a top percentage. What I’m missing from this one is dates, but I think there’s only so much info I can cope with on one sheet, and if I want to look up the date I can always cross reference with the tracker above. Not pictured here is another page which lists all my poems and where they are in terms of early draft/further edits/ready to submit, but I’m bad at updating this page so it’s not actually very helpful.

Someone with better organisation and tech skills than me could probably combine these two trackers into one doc that does all the things, and kudos if this is you. But this system works well enough for me.

Feeees

Ok, I get that fees can cover admin costs, paying contributors, prize money etc, and that’s a good thing - I support that! But when it’s £20 or £25 per poem? Or even Bridport at £13 per poem, with no discount for a second poem… (ok I entered this but had to cap myself at a single poem otherwise it gets too expensive too quickly).

Considering poets are generally known for being kinda broke who is out there paying this? I mean, obviously some people are. But if you’re writing regularly and actually trying to get your work out there then you need to be sending it to a lot of places, and big fees generally gotta be avoided otherwise you’re bleeding money, and bleeding money = more time at the day-job = less writing time… ‘insert facepalm here’.

Lit mags/journals charging a small fee? Yeah, I’m up for that. Totally happy to pay somewhere around £5 along with my bundle of poems to support your mag. Yes.

Sim Subs?

What’s your take on sim subs?

Whenever I come across somewhere stating they don’t accept this I get a little groan on the go - particularly if it’s a comp. Yeah, it’s a bit more admin for the organisers if you’re emailing to withdraw a poem, and that could be really annoying if it’s one the judges particularly liked, but on the other end the likelihood of my poem getting past the longlist or into a popular journal is low, and with some places taking several months to get back to you - that’s a long time to keep a poem out of circulation.

That being said, I’m careful not to submit each poem to too many places, and there are poems I’ll only send to one place at a time - particularly if they’re places I’d really like to get work into.

The end

Very finally: I submitted to the Yeovil Literary Prize and they made me paste my poems into boxes so all the formatting was lost! This. Blows. My. Mind. I ended up having to send different poems to the ones I was planning because they had specific layouts and spacing that wouldn’t be preserved. In the guidance they say “This is to enable fairer judging on content alone” but isn’t form and formatting an integral part of poetry? And won’t this weaken poems that are designed to work in tandem with their presentation? What’s your thoughts on this?

Ok, I hope this has been interesting, and maybe a little informative. Would love to hear some perspectives and experiences on some of the things I’ve raised, or other aspects I’ve missed - drop your thoughts in the comments!

Otherwise - happy subbing friends x

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I’m a low income writer and do my best to squeeze everything writerly I can out of the free hours around my day job, if you can afford to upgrade to a paid subscription and help keep this Substack (and me!) going, please know it’ll be hugely appreciated.

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Alternatively, if you’re not currently up for taking out a subscription but would like to contribute towards Poet Notes or me you can gift a one-off amount of your choosing through Buy Me A Coffee.

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We’ll look at some great examples of ekphrastic work, and I’ll provide a series of images to which we’ll practice doing our own creative responses. There’ll be at least two image options for each writing section in case one doesn’t call to you.

As always there’ll be an optional sharing circle at the end for you to share any work or responses.

The emphasis of these sessions is on getting lots of writing done so you’ll leave with three or four drafts to take away and work on.

When: Tuesday 16th June

Time: 6:30-8:00pm GMT

Where: Online

Register Here

There are general entry tickets at £12 and concession tickets at £7.50 for those that need them; no need to show proof of concession.

And don’t forget paid Poet Notes subscribers also get 20% all workshop fees, just enter the code you received when you signed up in the discount code box at the checkout.

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READ THE POEM HERE

There are several devices at work here. Collins begins by responding to lines from a Belgian poet, Jaques Crickillon, which sets him up with a conversational framework he maintains through repetition with slight variation throughout.

The poem is sentimental, but achieves it through poking fun at the traditional love sentiment by placing more ‘poetic’ images right beside the mundane. The sentiment established early on with lines like “you are the dew on the morning grass / and the burning wheel of the sun” are later tempered by lines like “it is possible that you are the fish under the bridge” and “but you are not even close / to being the field of cornflowers at dusk”, and when the speaker brings himself into the poem he does so with lines like “I also happen to be the shooting star” followed immediately by “the evening paper blowing down an alley”.

The effect is a rich interweaving of the extraordinary and the ordinary encased in a delightfully conversational tone reflected through sentences beginning with “it is possible”, “it might interest you to know” and “but don’t worry”, among others. I could go on, but this is not an analysis piece and you came here to do some writing…

My prompt for you today is to read this poem, reread it, and read it again. Soak it up. Then have a go at writing your own poem that uses a conversational tone and an abundance of carefully chosen metaphors. It’s up to you if you follow Collins’/Crickillon’s framework, or use your own.

Have fun!

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I’m a low income writer and do my best to squeeze everything writerly I can out of the free hours around my day job, if you can afford to upgrade to a paid subscription and help keep this Substack (and me!) going, please know it’ll be hugely appreciated.

Subscribe now

Alternatively, if you’re not currently up for taking out a subscription but would like to contribute towards Poet Notes or me you can gift a one-off amount of your choosing through Buy Me A Coffee.

Buy Me A Coffee

There’s still some spaces on tomorrow evening’s generative poetry workshop - all about Birds.

I’m so excited for this workshop; birds are one of my all time fave things and there’s so much great bird poetry out there!

This is an online workshop meeting from 18:30 - 20:00 (GMT) on the 19th May; the meeting link will be emailed out later on today.

We’ll look at a bunch of wonderful bird poems, and as it’s a generative workshop the focus is on getting lots of our own writing done so we’ll be aiming to leave with at least three or four drafts each.

There’ll be curated prompts to write from, and we’ll have an optional sharing circle at the end.

Tickets are available through Eventbrite at £12.00, £7.50, or a Donation amount of your choosing. No need to show proof of concession or donation eligibility :)

Register Here

And if you’re a paid Poet Notes subscriber you’re eligible for 20% off all workshop prices; if you can’t find this code just let me know and I’ll resend it to you.

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I do hope you’ll join us; I can’t wait to write with you :)

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This workshop should take approximately an hour and a half, but you’re welcome to take as much or as little time with the poems and prompts as you like.

This is a generative workshop so the focus is on you doing lots of writing, ideally you’ll leave with a bunch of drafts you can take away and work on later.

There are three sections, with example poems throughout.

Warm up with a freewrite

To bring yourself into the room, into your creativity, and onto the page, begin with a 5-minute free write.

I’d like you to write whatever comes to mind when you first think of ‘water’. See where your thoughts take you, let yourself write without overthinking, and every time you reach a stopping point return again to water.

Let yourself depart from truth and sense; let your creativity drive you. If you depart from the initial prompt, great, if you return to it twenty times in a row, also great - we’re just getting warmed up.

Part 1 - “a book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us”

In this section I invite you to consider poems by Kim Addonizio and Robin Robertson, both of which deal with water in it’s solid form.

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I’ve absolutely loved reading my way through Ella’s collection, and can’t wait to dig into it together tomorrow night. We’ll be meeting on Google Meet at 6:30pm GMT — just click the link below to join.

Not signed up yet? You can join for just £4 a month with a Poet Notes subscription, or if you’d like to try before you commit, you can use your single-use unlock and see what you think.

My hope is that this club grows into a warm, lively space where we can meet regularly to talk about everything we love — and maybe don’t love quite so much — about contemporary poetry collections. Here’s to the first of many!

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I’m thinking about this Substack, how it’s been silent for two weeks now. I’m sitting with the desire to apologise; questioning the necessity and what's driving that desire.

I’ve lost two weeks. If you read ‘Preparing for not writing’ you’ll know I had a big chunk of work coming up at the end of April I was doing my best to prep for. I pre-wrote some posts for here, prepped my expectations around how much capacity I’d have and what I could achieve, planned when I’d rest, sought support from my partner…

I forgot to prepare for the fall out afterwards.

I actually got through that period remarkably well. And then it was over and I thought, great, things can get back to ‘normal’. Wrong. Because all that capacity I’d used up didn't just magically refill as soon as the stuff I’d prepped for was over. And I still had to move rooms in my houseshare (so our new housemate could take my bigger room and I can pay slightly less rent), finish my MFA essay (due on the 5th and sooo much more complex than I’d originally planned), run Space Poetic, contact potential dissertation supervisors, and go to my upcoming shifts.

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Unsurprisingly, I folded. Things got messy, tasks like washing didn't get done, I struggled with food and getting dressed and getting out of bed, I moved all my stuff into the new room then stayed at my partners house, I tried to write my essay and struggled to stay engaged for longer than a sentence, I went to work, I had an intense conversation with my housemate about things in our house (less ominous than it sounds!), I recognised I was close to burning out and tried to mitigate by cancelling plans with friends and reducing jobs like the printing for the Space Poetic gallery, and then my body ran out of capacity entirely and I had a shutdown day.

My AuDHD shutdowns look like waking up with a bad feeling deep, deep inside. My head is foggy and thick; the world feels impossibly, unbearably heavy. I cry, almost from the moment I wake up; everything is broken, irreparable; my life is desolate. Tasks as small as brushing my teeth feel inescapably huge, draining, any multi-stage tasks are impossible. The heaviness bleeds through my limbs, makes the weight of my body feel insurmountable. I can't access any kind of motivation, I am hopeless, unable to even approach meeting any commitment, anything world demands from me. My head is strangely quiet, I feel as if I’m viewing everything from a distance, peering out from far behind my eyes; I am both there and not there. There are things I might say, but they get lost before they reach my mouth. I cannot bear to interact with the world; the thought of trying to socialise fills me with dread. I am slow, the air is thick, plans and appointments get cancelled.

(Please note this is my individual experience, other people will experience shutdown differently and I do not suggest my experience is universal)

I lost that day. Unfortunately it was the deadline to submit an application for New Northern Poets which I had so, so, so wanted to apply for. An opportunity lost, but I had to shrug that disappointment off; this is how it goes sometimes.

After that it’s a case of re-prioritising. I need a space that feels like a refuge rather than a room I don't connect with sporting a large pile of my belongings, I need slow and I need quiet, and I need to get my essay finished. I cancel a trip I’ve really been looking forward to (hiking in the Lake District with friends over a rare bank holiday off work) and use the time to stay home and do those things. I also care for and repot my plants. These things help.

It was with a giant measure of relief that I hit submit on my essay mid-afternoon on Tuesday. And then a wave of joy because what's next is my creative dissertation; yep, a whole heap of creative writing! I did some house things, some writing, ran Poet's Nest. And since then I’ve done some working, some recouping, some slow solo time, and I feel like I’m approaching a kind of normal again. For me, at least.

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Which brings me to this Substack, which I care deeply about but have barely been able to interact with, and the desire to apologise, which I feel the need to interrogate. Because what am I apologising for? Would I feel such a need if I’d had the flu for two weeks? There's something about apologising for the ways my neurodivergence interacts with a world that isn't set up for it that feels inherently ableist of me. There's an unspoken suggestion that I could have done better, should do better next time, won't let it happen again. But the truth is it will happen again. No matter how good I get at looking after myself, spotting the signs, and managing my capacity, as a working class person also trying to develop her art and build a career from it I’m always going to come up against conflicts and time pressures because what society wants from me and I want from life are at odds and I don't have the resources not to play the game. That's ok, that's just how it is, but it means I need to be prepared for what that does to my body and my nervous system and my capacity at times, be gentle and kind to myself, and be grateful for all the wins. Did you know I used to lose a day a week to shutdowns? A whole day, every week. I’m so grateful for how much I’ve learnt this past year and for the support I now have that's brought that number down to roughly one a month.

So I’m not apologising, even though I feel drawn to. Dear friends, if you’ve been following Poet Notes for a while you’ll have come across me discussing AuDHD before, though maybe not as explicitly as this, and if you’re new here (because quite a few are) then Hi and Welcome and This is who I am, and what you can expect is big love and lots of engagement when I’m able, and some small periods of silence when I’m not.

Incredibly, during these last two weeks, Poet Notes has hit over 100 subscribers! I’m so stoked this site is connecting with people, and that you're interested and engaged in what I’m trying to build here, and so grateful you're joining me on the journey that is poetry and life and slowly building a poetry-focused life.

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Which brings me super neatly onto the final part of this post. How poetry has been a gorgeous, quiet refuge this whole time.

During April and this first bit of May I’ve written almost 50 new drafts! Amid the stress and the burnout finding a few minutes most days (not every day, I don't hold myself to doing anything except brushing my teeth every day) to sit and write has been invaluable. The page has become a soft, peaceful space to decompress, put aside the day for a little while and just be, just write, think about images and scenes and how things fit together - or don't. My writing practice has been a lifeline in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. I’d forgotten it could be like this, and I’m so grateful to have remembered it now.

Many of these poems will form the basis of my creative dissertation, which I’m hoping will also become my first published pamphlet. They’re about, among other things, birds and living with neurodivergence and the relationship with the self, and it’s been and continues to be both cathartic and joyous working on them. I’m still drafting, and even when I’ve got as many drafts as I want for this project I hope I remember this joy and keep gifting myself these pockets of time to write just for the sake of writing.

Some of these poems will likely get smushed together in editing, some will make it into the diss, and others will fall by the wayside or be saved for later projects. Whatever happens with them, the process of writing them has been the blessing, rather than the outcome (though I’m pretty happy with the outcome too) and that’s a remembrance I’d like to hold to my chest.

If you got this far, thanks for reading - I see you and I appreciate you, thank you for being part of Poet Notes.

Happy writing friends :)

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P.S. I saw a rabbit the other day! Remember when I found out about that awful rabbit disease in ‘Where are all the rabbits?’? Rabbits are returning - another reason for joy :)

I’m a low income writer and do my best to squeeze everything writerly I can out of the free hours around my day job, if you can afford to upgrade to a paid subscription and help keep this Substack (and me!) going, please know it’ll be hugely appreciated.

Subscribe now

Alternatively, if you’re not currently up for taking out a subscription but would like to contribute towards Poet Notes or me you can gift a one-off amount of your choosing through Buy Me A Coffee.

Buy Me A Coffee