Sometimes I will ‘finish’ a poem, but I won’t be totally satisfied with the result. Something feels off. Incomplete. Forced. Contrived. Or just not ‘me’. When this happens, I sleep on it – literally. I will save the poem and return to it the next day and take another go at it…

I write for myself and while I care what my readers think of my work and want them all to love it, I have learnt to ignore all feedback that I didn’t ask for directly. This is an act of self-preservation. In the past, I have completely altered projects, or worse still, discontinued or destroyed them, based on unasked for feedback. Most of the time it was unintentional…