New Year’s Resolution No.2 – Write More Poetry

Following on from my first New Year’s Resolution, here’s my second one. Once I’ve posted my resolutions, I’ll be writing about Why Most New Year’s Resolutions Fail – and what to do about it.

2. Write More Poetry

In terms of creativity, writing poetry is my ‘first love’. Over the past couple of years however, it’s had to take a back seat for several reasons: firstly, most of my writing time has been taken up with the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at Warwick University, for which I’ve been studying part-time. Secondly, I had a fantastic opportunity to join the editorial committee of Magma, one of the foremost poetry magazines in the UK. I was an offer I couldn’t turn down, and I’m having tremendous fun and learning a huge amount by working with my colleagues on the magazine. The most intensive time was last year when I read thousands of poems as editor of Magma 34, which I’m very proud of. Finally, there’s been the small matter of attending to my clients’ creativity and keeping Wishful Thinking going.

So I took a conscious decision to put my own writing on the back burner temporarily – but I made a promise to myself that once the MA was over, I’d carve out some time for writing poetry again, hence this New Year’s Resolution.

The big danger of course, is that the poetry gets squeezed out by the pressures of business – what the Irish poet Louis MacNeice called “The perennial if unimportant problem / Of getting enough to eat”. So I’m making efforts to ensure that I keep my promise to myself. One of them is by posting the resolution up here – it’s amazing what a good reminder a public commitment can be!

And tomorrow I’m starting the Advanced Poetry Workshop run by Mimi Khalvati at the Poetry School. I’m really looking forward to it – as well as being an outstanding poet, Mimi is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had (for any subject) and her classes are invariably full of talented and interesting writers. So this feels like my creative ‘reward’ for all that time I spent studying strategy, marketing and intellectual property.

If you’re interested in poetry, you can follow my reading and writing on my poetry blog.

And if you’ve got any tips on finding space for creative pursuits in the midst of a pressing work schedule, please share them in the comments.

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