Hooray!

This morning I sold four copies of my latest collection of poems. It won't exactly keep the wolf from the door, but every little helps. What I need, I guess, is a few invitations to do recitals - if you, dear reader of this blog, want to invite me to your group or meeting, I'm waiting!

But for the time being I am happy to continue writing - indeed, I probably have to do this in order to remain sane. Listening in the car the other night to a poetry masterclass on the radio, I was struck by what one of the participants said about why she wrote. I can't now recall her exact words, but they were along the lines of 'her poems make sense of the thoughts in her mind that otherwise would remain a jumble'. I think I can relate to that as personal therapy and as an act of self-analysis, but there's more. Good poetry (not necessarily a title I'm claiming for my own verse) does more than give shape and direction to the contents of the poet's mind, it will also do something similar for the reader. I think all good and creative writing can do that as a sort of co-operative venture between writer and reader, but it is particularly a function of poetry, because of its comparative brevity and the gaps and spaces a poem leaves within itself; the pictures formed by the words require the engagement and involvement of the reader for this to happen, and the poem as the reader first encounters it is as yet unfinished business.

Anyway, I'm glad therefore to have sold a few books, not really because I could use the money, but because my poems can have no real life unless and until they are read; each poem is a project shared between the writer and the receiver, and nothing I have written can remain in my sole ownership without simply dying there.