A few last minute submissions

This weekend I managed to send off a poem to the Verve Poetry Festival Competition a couple of hours ahead of the deadline – deadline now closed but you can find out more about the festival here – and I’m still working on one I’d like to send to The Cafe Writers competition – deadline 30 November.

The winning poems from Buzzwords Poetry Competition, judged by Adam Horowitz, are now online here, including my poem The Domestic Life of Young Film Lovers.  This poem has a long, long history.  It started life as a short story from my MA course at UEA in 1996!  I took it out from my old MA file around five years ago when I was starting to get serious about poetry and thought that I might be able to make a poem from it.  I’ve read the poem at open-mics and sent it out to five or six magazines.  I’ve lost count.  People liked the poem but nobody seemed to want to publish it.  I’d resigned myself to thinking that I’d include it in my forthcoming collection but that it wouldn’t be published anywhere before then.

This year, I’ve been sending more poems to competitions after a few years of focusing on magazine publications.  I have several poems which I’ve stubbornly held on to, even though they’ve done the rounds of the magazines – and been thrown into the competition ring a few times – and been rejected multiple times. Anyway, it was a huge, delightful surprise to win the competition with a poem that had been all round the houses.

Other news this week, the next Poetry Society Stanza meeting in Trowbridge is on Saturday, 2 December, 2-4pm at Drawing Projects UK.  Old and new faces very welcome.

Wishing everyone a happy week.