Sunday March 11th is Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday in the U.K. Post your best mother’s day poems in the comments below by Friday evening and I’ll republish the best three Mother’s Day poems submitted in my blog on Sunday.
The writers submitting the best three Mother’s Day poems will also receive a free paperback copy of my book Margaret’s Story: a Biography in Verse my mother’s life story in rhyme.
There have been some great reviews of Margaret’s Story that clearly picked up on some of the themes: mum’s childhood troubles and later ill health, the constant upheavals of army life but, for me, there was one underlying theme that pulled them all together. The deprivations Margaret suffered were emotional rather than physical. The adults in her life seemingly blamed her for the circumstances of her birth and destroyed her sense of self worth.
‘Family’ was vitally important to Margaret because she grew up without one. She was a loving mother who always put her family first but the one person she couldn’t find it in herself to love was herself. She took to comfort eating and, from being a waif like creature in her youth, became increasingly over-weight. In later life she neglected her health with a cavalier disregard for what was good for her.
While she was a loving mother and would do anything for her children the lack of self-belief was to an extent passed on. Hence, the surprise when I passed my eleven plus, Janette ‘dropping out’ of grammar school because she found the other, pony owning, girls too posh. Mum’s genuine surprise when I talked about people who thought they were better than us. “Aren’t they?!”, she said and she meant it.
She loved everyone except herself
Blame her fate on the cards life dealt.
Stories don’t end they carry on,
She’d left her mark on everyone.
Lack of belief can get passed on,
Cast it aside for love of mum.
I’ve finally done what I wanted to do
Presented Margaret’s tale to you.
They made her feel of little worth
But such as her will rule the earth.
Drip feeding Margaret’s Story on Twitter was intended to promote the paperback and kindle versions available on Amazon. In those terms it can’t be counted a huge success. If anything it has affected kindle sales and reads on kindle unlimited for the worse. Hopefully some out there will have their curiosity sufficiently piqued or decide they love it enough to buy the paperback but buying an unfamiliar author you’ve not heard of can be a hard sell.
Releasing the story first on Wattpad was a good call and won me early adapters who left enthusiastic, not to say glowing reviews, but equally there were a lot of fans who had already read the book and Wattpadders, often young and hard up, are not big spenders.
So have three times daily posts on Twitter been a failure? The short answer is I don’t really know. I am steadily increasing my Twitter following which will be a boon when I release my next book but is anyone out there following the story? If you are please comment here and let me know.
I tweet daily looking for readers but it’s noticeable some days how many of the ‘followers’ are looking to sell an indie author services rather than sample his or her wares. So if you are out there, if you are reading, let me know what you think. Meanwhile here’s a poem just for you.
Silent Reader
Why, hello silent reader
I didn’t see you there.
I’m glad that you dropped by here
To take a little peek.
I assume that you’ve passed on now?
Or perhaps you’re hiding still?
You’re not quite sure of what you’ve found
Or if it’s what you seek.
It’s nice that you dropped by here
Though you don’t say a lot.
You’re hiding in the corner
But your visit means a lot.
Every word’s for you friend
Though I don’t know your face
Shame you never stay more.
You’re welcome in this place.
Margaret’s Story started life on Wattpad where it appeared as a serial. It was updated daily and each part would end with a hook designed to lure the reader on and pull them into the story.
‘Would things get better? We’ll have to see.
Stay with me and my history.’
It’s generally accepted that poetry is difficult to sell. Given the competing media and our shortened attention spans I don’t completely understand why. Bite sized posts are the order of the day, so you’d think short concise pieces, well expressed would be popular.
The truth is that to an extent they can be as social media stars like the Instagram Poet Rupi Kaur have proved. Her self published work Milk and Honey, promoted on social media, was picked up by publisher and has become a best seller but is there a market for something longer?
I’m convinced that serialisation is an excellent and underused resource for building an audience. My first experiment on Wattpad was Summer of Sixty Six an account in verse of England’s World Cup win and the frustrations and delights of experiencing it from, of all places, Germany. It was popular with those who read it but failed perhaps to find it’s target audience.
Margaret’s Story, now available as a paperback or for kindle from Amazon, was I think more successful and certainly more ambitious. Summer of Sixty Six was free verse whereas Margaret’s Story is Sixty pages of rhymed couplets.
Dickens famously delivered all of his novels in serial form. I can’t help speculating how he would have taken to social media. I think he’d have had to adapt his style a bit. There’s no space for meandering description however gifted a writer you are.
I’d love you to buy my book but if you want to sample first the first few chapters are still on Wattpad, it’s available, if you are signed up, on Kindle Unlimited where you can read for free but still earn me a few pennies. Or, if you are interested in the serialisation on social media idea, follow me on Twitter where I’m sharing drip sized bits three times a day.
Hopefully, you are gripped by the content and will want to follow. Watch this space for the next gripping instalment.
Simply put a verse biography is a biography written in verse. If you google you’ll find more complicated ‘explanations’ but that’s basically what it is.
The academics writing about verse biography compare it to the verse novel or talk about how writing in verse impacts on the truth, or as they would put it the verisimilitude, of a biography written this way.
These were arguments that passed me by. I’d determined to finally produce Margaret’s Story, had experimented with longer form verse on Wattpad and in a moment of realisation determined this was the way I wanted to go.
More erudite Poets, I’m thinking of John Betjeman and Summoned by Bells, might frame theirs in blank verse but, inspired by Wendy Cope’s Teacher’s Tale, I determined, perhaps rashly, it would be in rhymed couplets.
The risk was obviously that I’d trivialise the story but, in point of fact, I found I could ‘cut to the chase’, eliminate waffle and keep up the pace of the narrative.
At the same time I hoped the difficult parts of story could be light enough to be entertaining. Despite the challenges of her life my mother was irrepressibly cheerful and would have approved.
The result, as I now appreciate, is a form, the verse biography, that is unfamiliar to many and so difficult to categorise or promote. Nevertheless those who’ve gone with it seemed really to appreciate it. Just hoping more readers will give it a go.
Andrew Green's Poems 