I have just submitted three poems to Magma for their latest issue on the theme of loss. At first I thought I didn’t have anything suitable but then I had a flip through and found poems on climate change, Brexit and stillbirth, all of which fit the theme. I strongly suspect they won’t publish as Magma and I seem to inhabit different poetic universes, but hey – submitting is free, so what have I got to lose? Only my confidence and sense of self-worth…
A propos of this, I’m in the midst of writing a poem on surviving rejection which considers now-famous works which were previously rejected. I’ve blogged about this before so I won’t bore you with the details, but T S Eliot’s comment about Orwell’s Animal Farm, ‘you just need better-behaved pigs and all will be well,’ is a classic. I’m still in the midst of considering Leavis (and wondering why I bother) so I’ll update you on that as and when. In the meantime the novel progresses by fits and starts, but I’ve managed 7000 words of the final chapter, leaving only 28,000 to go, which means I’m a fifth of the way through that chapter and about two-thirds of the way through the novel as a whole. Not too shabby.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 