National Poetry Month Day 20: Indie Publishing Tip #12

Writing poetry is a humbling experience. It also takes confidence and bravery to share one’s thoughts and feelings. In other words, it can be hard.

But a strange thing happens, when one starts to share one’s work and receives feedback, sharing gets easier and easier. At least that’s how it’s been for me.

I’ve realized that not everyone who reads my work will like it. That’s okay. There are poets, even famous ones, whose work I don’t care for. There will be people who misinterpret or do not understand your poetry. That’s okay, too.

And yet, if you find joy in writing poetry or like the challenge of expressing yourself in a specific format, the number of syllables used, or the picture you can paint in your reader’s mind, you keep writing. And, that’s how it’s been for me too.

Having confidence in your own work is hard when you receive rejection after rejection. But it is key to continuing to work at your writing craft.

Tip #12 on Indie Publishing Poetry is to have confidence in your work.

If you project confidence, others will feel confident in you and what you do. Where does the confidence come from? For me, I feel confident when I do the following things:

• I prepare – learning as much as possible about what I’m doing before I share it.
• I read the work of others – this is key for indie publishing as much as traditional publishing. I’m sure you’ve all read calls for submissions that include “read our previous issues” to understand what we accept. I’ve done that with many publications – The Toy, Dirigible Balloon (in which I was published), Rattle, Sequestrium, Cricket publications, and more.
• Learn new ways of doing.
• Realize not everyone will like what you write.
• Start small. Share with those you trust and work outward to a larger group.
• Retain a sense of humbleness. We are all works in progress.
• Be nice regarding the work of others.

As such, today, I thought I’d share one of my three poems in the anthology. I wrote a tanka, a nonet, and an alliteration. The alliteration was the last poem I chose to include but felt this form was a must for the anthology. No one else had submitted an alliteration poem. Since this form is accessible for younger students (my boys wrote them in fifth grade using their names as a prompt), I wrote one to include.

Yesterday’s Poetry Friday Round up was hosted by Heidi at her blog at my juicy little universe. Heidi has been writing poetry with children and shares some of their creations for this Earth Day Weekend. I love her commitment to the environment and involving our youth – sounds like someone some of you know – right?!

Thanks for hosting, Heidi!

If you’ve missed some of my tips for being an Indie Author – Publisher, you can visit my post from April 11th where I’ve listed links to each of the earlier tips. And, again, thank you Jone Rush MacCulloch for interviewing me on the process of creating and curating the anthology.

Picture Perfect Poetry: An Anthology of Ekphrastic Nature Poetry for Students is for sale on Amazon now (clicking on this sentence will take you to Amazon).

And finally, the author copies should arrive Monday! I will get them in the mail next week! Thank you, all, for your patience!