Working on a Book of Poetry: An Apology for My Silence on the Blog

Ordinary Time
27 November 2019
The Edge of Elfland
Concord, New Hampshire

Friends,

Once again, I must apologize for not posting very often. My job as a full-time high school teacher, and as a father and husband, can leave little time for writing. However, I have a better reason for not writing here on the blog. I’ve been rather immersed in writing poetry. Over the last year, I have written somewhere around 50 or more poems. Some of them are undoubtedly bad, but some I do think are quite good. And I’m not alone in thinking them worth reading. I’ve now had poems published in Jesus the Imagination, Black Bough Magazine, The Imaginative Conservative, and on the 5^th, I will have 3 poems published in Z Publishing’s New Hampshire’s Best Emerging Poets 2019.

In fact, all this poetry writing means I’m beginning to put together a small book of my poetry. It is a little over half-finished, and I have several more poems I hope to write for it. I really can’t believe I’m even writing these words. I have tried my hand at verse every now and again since elementary school, but I had never particularly taken to it. Then last year something changed. I can’t even say what it was. Certainly it helped that I was reading the poetry of Malcolm Guite, someone who writes formal verse but with contemporary language. It also helped that I teach not just theology but also literature at the school where I work. Still, it wasn’t until I started sharing my poems with friends and even getting some published that has emboldened me to consider putting a book or a chapbook together.

And to be clear, no one has reached out to me about this, I’m putting this together just because I want to. It could be that I won’t find a publisher once it’s done, but I’m OK with that. The key thing for me, is just to put it together.

As I continue to write more poems for this project (tentatively titled either Songs for Creation or Sight Set Free), it’s possible I’ll have less time for the blog. Even worse, if I want to submit any of these poems to other journals, magazines, or websites, I can’t post them here first. However, I will be working to share my poems after they’re published. I’ve even begun to share readings of them on my podcast and on my youtube channel.

In the meantime, I promise to keep you updated on my progress, to share my work after it’s been published, and to work to keep writing here as often as I can. In the meantime, here’s a video of me reading one of my first published poems.

Happy Thanksgiving,
David Russell Mosley