Creative Writing
students on the Writing Poetry for Publication module were treated to a seminar
with prize-winning poet, William Stephenson.
William told the story of his own road to publication through poetry
competitions, literary magazines and pamphlets. He read from his collections
and took questions from the students, before going on to give a number of top
tips:
- magazines
are a good place to start: do your research first (there is an excellent
selection of magazines in the University of Chester library), and then send out
your best work to those magazines which are most suitable to your style of
writing, making sure that you read the magazine’s submission guidelines
carefully;
- keep track
of the places where you send your work with a table or spreadsheet;
- expect a
ratio of several rejections for every acceptance – do not be discouraged by
rejections: persist;
- in terms of putting together a collection, get
feedback from your peers, use your best poems, then decide on an order linked
to theme;
- when it
comes to writing be adventurous with language – you must go beyond the merely ‘poetic’;
- don’t be
afraid to make use of other kinds of language, such as scientific and technical
terminology, which reflects the world we live in;
- internal
rhyme and half-rhyme can help build tension and momentum, and can be subtly
more effective than end-rhyme;
- don’t be
afraid of writing garbage; you may have to write plenty of this in order to
eventually find a voice which is original and interesting (this is better than
trying to be ‘original’ for the sake of it);
William’s poems
have appeared in Envoi, Iota, Magma, Orbis, The North and The Rialto. His first collection Travellers and Avatars was shortlisted for the Live Canon First
Collection Prize and will appear in 2017.
His pamphlets are Rain Dancers in
the Data Cloud (Templar, 2012) and Source
Code (Ravenglass, 2013).
The seminar was organised by Dr Ian Seed.
