I See London, I See France

In the spirit of pursuing different topics, I've been working on a poem about my London experience. The idea was sparked by a contest themed around travel. I've always wanted to write a poem about London, but I've never been able to figure out how. So I'm facing that problem again and trying to hash out how to write about it. My main concern is why the story I'll tell should matter. You can write about the appeal of London all day long, but how do I make it unique to me?

I'm having an impossibly hard time figuring it out. There is one event that stands out in my mind, but I think I'm trying to tell too much of the truth for it to work out. If it's going to be appealing, I'm starting to realize that I'm going to have to lie. But lie about which parts? And still, what am I going to use as the hook?

I thought about using the place that was my favorite to visit: The City of Bath, but nothing really out of the ordinary happened that day, so the characters that would inhabit this poem would be completely fictionalized, and I'd prefer to have them grounded in some truth. So I'm thinking instead about using a night in the dorms that was particularly amusing. I just have to figure out how to get started. That's the question.

Aside from that, I submitted to two new contests last night, and I'm hoping that someone out there sends me an acceptance. I just don't get it. I have three poems in particular that I love to death and that my mentor even said she really liked, but the poems that have been accepted so far are ones that I actually never had workshopped. I wrote them in between semesters, and I did all of the editting by myself. Except for, "I'm in St. Louis to Find You." And that one was the only one I was really confident in.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the other ones too, but I hadn't thought they were on the same level. Apparently, I was wrong. Or people just prefer reading about my family and coal mines. I did have a professor that said that people would eat up coal mine poems, so I guess she was on to something there. Maybe I should just return to what I started out with. But I'm blanking on which family stories to draw from there as well.

Alas, the annoyances of being a writer.

 

Edit: I wrote two versions/drafts of a possible London poem. The second one I really like the ending, but I'm not sure if the rest of the poem works up to it well enough. Still, at least I have something on the page, and that's a start.

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."

-Robert Graves