Roads to Joy

I’ve been thinking about collections, lately, but more precisely, collections of poems. Small collections of poems are often collated by the poet into small leaflets, or the so-called ‘chapbook’ format. Not a book, more a small collection of a few poems loosely grouped into some sort of theme.

I was prompted the other day by yet another competition to attempt to collect some of my best (well, what I think of as ‘my best’) poems from over the past few years. I hadn’t attempted to write poems since I was in my late adolescence, but of course, in any Creative Writing group, poetry comes along sooner or later. So I rummaged through my files (I guess there are about six dozen or so files scattered around the hard drive) and came up with a little batch of poems that only just now is beginning to make some sense as a collection.

Of course, I entered the competition, with no expectation of a result. That really won’t matter, to my mind, because what does matter is the kind of understanding, a kind of self-awareness that comes with the collation. The reveal that the set of poems has managed to provoke. The ‘ah ha’ sensibility that I’ve discovered something meaningful that I hadn’t appreciated before. The little possibility of a personal chapbook with its thematic progression is just there, a typescript entity of 20 sides stapled together. Possibly not even big enough for a full-size chapbook, yet, but still a set of words that mean a lot to me.

It was fun to set these efforts beside each other, to see what I may, or may not, have learned. Even more fun was the realisation that a previous effort, which collated some 50 poems, was much, much more of an apprenticeship in poetic forms than anything much else. But I’d like to think that my new collection has harvested the best of my efforts, especially because I’m still in the throes of creative delight.

A bonus of the competition entry fee was a subscription to a quarterly poetry magazine, which will be intriguing to peruse. By the time the first subscription arrives, I shall doubtless be moving along into other writing spheres, down different avenues, but for now, my joy is founded on an unexpected voyage into an interior self that feels, sometimes, like a dance of pleasing capriciousness, a flick and a click of the heels in the air.

‘Bring me sunshine,’ sang Morecambe and Wise, and so it feels, as they skip-danced off the stage.