~ Some realisations ~
(A bit of a stocktaking as I approach my 86th birthday.)
It’s 31 years since I lived in a big city, was part of its performance poetry scene, and contributed to literary journals and anthologies. There even came a time when editors would contact me, inviting me to submit material for their next issue! It wasn’t world fame by any means, but it was a pleasant degree of Australia-wide recognition in poetry circles. Not the kind of celebrity enjoyed by sports stars and pop stars – but still. Then I disappeared.
How did I do that? I remarried and changed my surname from Nissen to Nissen-Wade. I thought retaining the ‘Nissen’ bit would ensure continuity for my poetry audience. Astonishing – I was to discover belatedly – how many people couldn’t make the mental leap from Rosemary Nissen to Rosemary Nissen-Wade. (‘Oh – Rosemary NISSEN!’ some would exclaim, as of a great revelation, when I joined the dots for them.)
Almost immediately, new hubby and I moved interstate, to the small town in a rural region where I’ve lived ever since. The local newsagents didn’t (and don’t) stock much in the way of literary magazines. Although there were poetry performances in some of the surrounding towns, they meant long drives at night over unlit, winding roads; and Andrew (new hubby) and I weren’t getting any younger.
Andrew was one of the first people to enthusiastically embrace a home computer (even before Microsoft and all that), and then the World Wide Web. Things moved fast. Soon after we came to live here, circumstances had us become Apple Mac owners (back then, one tiny little desktop machine which we shared). We really never looked back.
Fast forward a few years and I was a guest at the Austin International Poetry Festival in Texas, where some of the other guests introduced me to blogging, and to MySpace, both of which I took to like the proverbial duck. Suddenly I had platforms again!
MySpace was started by musos, for musos.
‘Why shouldn’t poets use it too?’ said the British muso I met in Texas, where we found ourselves sharing a number of stages, when I asked how I might keep on listening to him later.
When I joined it, I found that MySpace was crawling with poets! Many of them have been my online friends ever since. After MySpace got sold and wrecked, we gnashed our teeth and screamed, then all moved over to a new platform called facebook, and there we’ve been ever since.
I also tried twitter for a few years, loved it in its early days, and was thrilled to be included, with some prestigious international names, in a volume of twitter poets; but I disliked what it grew into, and left.
In due course there were online writers’ groups. I decided to try and teach myself haiku, and thought it would be fun to invite other people to play with me, so I started the Haiku on Friday group on MySpace. A friend persuaded me to join Live Journal, where I started a similar group called Friday Haiku. (Some people who were on both platforms, but preferred LJ, had begged me to introduce it there too.) A little later I started Tanka on Tuesday on MySpace. When I moved to facebook, I migrated the MySpace haiku and tanka groups there as well.
Everyone assumed I must be an expert in haiku if I was running a group. Far from it! But I know a thing or two by now. I found other haiku writers and other groups, and learned a great deal over the years – enough to convince me that a good haiku is the most difficult poetry of all to write!
In the early days of blogging, that too was a way to meet and interact with other poets. There were comparatively few of us doing it then, and it wasn’t all about making money. We enjoyed reading each other’s new work, and getting to know each other as people.
Gradually the old mob from my city days ended up on facebook, found me, figured out I was me despite the name change (though many of them still refer to me as Rosemary Nissen, and that's OK) and friended me there. Most of them, however, still prefer to share and publish their poems offline. Some do both, sharing pieces on facebook as well.
I too do a bit of both now. It’s very gratifying that editors who know me of old sometimes get in touch to invite me to submit to new anthologies and such which get printed and distributed in paperback as well as in ebook form. (I rarely submit to any such when not invited, however – just because I'm so busy online that I don't go looking for other outlets.)
Enterprising young poet Sarah Temporal came to live in my town some years ago and, knowing I was another poet living here too, sought me out. Ably supported by her poet husband, Damien Becker, she began the local monthly performance event, Poets Out Loud. It has been a popular success ever since! She’s featured me once or twice, and I’ve popped up in the open sections too. I even won a slam!
But with age, and some decline in fitness, I’m becoming less available for such events. Meanwhile, the online poetry world has always sustained me.
My haiku and tanka groups ran out of steam after about ten years – or rather, I did. I’d acquired a collaborator in running them, my great friend and unofficially adopted brother, Phillip Barker. When he died from a rapid cancer, I lost the will to keep them going without him.
But there are other haiku and tanka groups on facebook, and I do participate in them, irregularly but long-term. And in the wider online world there are several international communities of blogging poets publishing regular prompts which people write to and then share their writings. As a matter fact, for nearly six years now I’ve been the official Coordinator of one of them (really part of a very egalitarian team of three who keep it going): Poets and Storytellers United, which posts new prompts weekly.
When I started blogging, I remarked to a poet friend that my readers (as shown in the statistics) were in higher numbers than the circulation of any Australian literary magazine. (He, still following a more traditional path, was not best pleased to hear that!)
But the great bonus for me was not so much who was reading as whom I was reading! I became a poet in childhood because I was in love with beauty, and thought poetry was the most beautiful thing a human being could make. Even better than making it was – and is! – reading the best of what other poets make.
There are so many poets in the world now, it must be more impossible than ever for many us to become widely famous, and perhaps that’s as it should be. Posterity was always the great decider anyhow.
Meanwhile, I recall a couple of young poets I knew years ago telling me that – in contrast to my then longing for world-wide, eternal fame – they didn’t care about posterity: they wanted to reach people here and now. That’s a worthy ambition, too. And it’s one we've got more hope to realise – given that posterity happens after we’re dead, so we’ll never know.
(Funnily enough, we have changed places. At least one of those guys gets crabby now at the thought of his work possibly being ignored by editors and so becoming ephemeral; whilst I have concluded that everything’s really ephemeral, so reaching even a few people here and now is all that matters.)
It’s borne in on me, more and more, how many truly wonderful poets I encounter online, making their work freely available on blogs. Yes, some are not so great (yet – but I find poetry’s an art where we definitely learn by doing, and with encouragement). Most of us are uneven, having off days, or perhaps making something public in a hurry to meet a deadline instead of revising at leisure. It happens. (It always did. Even Lord Byron could write very badly at times, though was glorious at others, and he left both kinds of poetry to posterity.) Many of us note on our blogs that our poems there are drafts which may be updated at any time. (We do also produce books from time to time: sometimes just as ebooks, quite often in paperback as well.)
The thing is, I also get to read many, many wonderful poems; and I encounter and even become friends with poets whom I regard as brilliant. Many of them are big names online; a number are recognised and respected in the offline poetry world as well. They don’t big-note themselves; they are in it for the sake of the poetry. That means we all hob-nob as equals, just as I have done with highly esteemed poets offline.
I am in my milieu. I get to be thrilled by magnificent poetry, and to keep learning from the best; and I have the joy of being told loud and clear when my own pieces move others.
My cup runneth over.