I’m a first class soon-to-be-published poet

My OU tutor hated my poems. She didn’t actually say she hated them, but the mark I got gave me a clue.

But that was then. When I got my poetry portfolio back recently from my uni tutor, she had written:

An ambitious and carefully chiselled portfolio, with a range of style and an impressive command of the material throughout.

Gorgeous imagery and a controlled tempo.

An absolute lesson in how to say exactly what you need to without ever quite saying it.

and gave me a 1st, whoop!

A few weeks later, our tutor emailed everyone to say that the Department of English and Language Studies had been awarded funding for an anthology of student work, including poetry and prose, to be launched as part of Freshers’ Week 2012. The anthology would be published by a local publisher to professional standards.

I thought, yay, exciting, and emailed my tutor to ask her if she thought my poems were good enough to be included. She said they certainly were, so I sent off three of my first class poems (the portfolio had four poems in it, but I didn’t think one of them was very good) and my beautiful bagel-shaped poem. An email arrived yesterday with the list of students who had been successful. Yes, my poems are going to be in a book. A book with pages you can turn and everything. Unfortunately, my bagel-shaped poem didn’t make it because of technical issues or something. Ho hum, can’t have it all, I suppose. The poems that did make it in are:

Butterfly – a poem about a butterfly eating a mouldy pear

I Found an American Psycho – a found poem, based on the business card scene from American Psycho

Inappropriate Behaviour – a poem about a man who kills himself after finding his wife in bed with another man (oh look, a suicide theme again…)

I am well chuffed to be part of the anthology.