10 ways to survive Invisible Poets

This week we reached 50,000 members. It would have been a lot more, but not everyone who has been in the group has stayed. Quite a few people have come to a sad end on Invisible Poets. Many of those who have been removed (or in Moderator parlance - 'walked the plank') for being rude and abusive, or for peddling porn, or for deceiving members with scams. These are the undesirable people we don't want in our group. They make the group unsafe, uncomfortable and cause a lot of grief. You can thank your vigilant moderator and Admin team for the lovely, creative and supportive place that Invisible Poets has become. 

There are also a lot of members who don't seem to be able to cope with the way Invisible Poets is run. Some leave the group because they think they are being ignored by other members, or they are being victimised or marginalised by moderators. This is a shame, because they are sadly mistaken, and tend to leave the good ship IP needlessly. 

Here are 10 key tips for you, on how to survive and thrive in the group:

1) Don't stand idly by and hope that people will come to your poem and laud it with showers of comments, love hearts and thumbs ups. It won't happen if you simply share your poem and sit back. Your poem won't show up on the timelines of members because Facebook has an algorithm that only makes you visible to others when you interact with them. So here's the first tip: Read other people's poetry and comment on it, or tap the Like button. That way you'll be more visible. 

2) Don't get angry and blame Admin or Moderators if your post or comment is refused. Post rejections usually happen automatically. The system is set up to reject certain key phrases that usually occur in spam and scam robot posts. Another reason your work may be automatically rejected is if you have no user picture.  Choose an image (either your own photograph, or some other image) that represents your account. That way your posts and comments will not be automatically rejected.

3) Watch the live shows whenever you can. Not only are they entertaining, they contain a lot of information and you also get treated to the very best poetry from the group, several times each week - and all for free!

4) Give more than you take. This is not just altruistic (see point 1 above) but it does mean that if you start to read other people's work you will learn more about your own art of writing poetry and will probably pick up a lot of new ideas about how to develop your writing skills. 

5) Regularly check the Features section at the top of the group page. Contained there are all the recordings of previous live shows where members' poetry is read out, poetry writing challenges, group news and other gems that might just give you some ideas for new poems.

6) Please don't post your own poems in the comments section of someone else's post.  Some people do this when they see a popular post because they think it will gain them a bigger audience. This is not welcomed in the group, because not only it is self seeking, it's very rude. 

7) If you wish to promote your own books or publications, please make sure you share poems from the books, otherwise you'll be disappointed when a moderator removes your post for breaking the group rules. 

8) Read the blog (yes, this one). There are many excellent posts on here about all things poetry, including explanations of terms, new ideas for poetry writing and a series on experimental poetry. It's there for you to learn from, so please use it whenever you wish.

9) Don't share poetry that you haven't written yourself. We do not permit people to plagiarise the work of others. It is illegal (it breaks copyright laws) and it is dishonest (theft). We also prohibit the use of Artificial Intelligence tools to create poetry. Anyone who does this is not welcome in the group.

10) Finally, please treat everyone in the group with the respect you feel you deserve yourself. Being kind to others doesn't cost anything. A supportive comment, a few kind words or a good piece of encouraging feedback goes a long way. You never know, you might meet people on this group that you'll be friends with for life.

Steve Wheeler

Founder of Invisible Poets

 

Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 5 is published!

Our strapline on Invisible Poets is Poetry Against Poverty, and that's exactly what this new publication is all about. Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 5 contains premier poetry from 130 poets from across all six continents. Showcasing around 250 new poems, the anthology weighs in at 208 pages, so is a substantial tome. 

The cover image is a photo I took in New York City (Manhattan) in 2015. It depicts a variety of high rise buildings and is evocative of reaching for higher things. And that is exactly what the editorial board wishes to achieve - high sales of a great collection of poetry so we can contribute to nutritional, health and education needs of children in crisis and make their lives just a little better. 

Every book sold raises enough money to feed a malnourished child for almost a month, or can purchase a month's supply of water purification tablets. Please be generous, and buy not only a copy for yourself, but further copies for friends, family, colleagues, local libraries, schools etc.

You can find all the links of online stores right here on the Wheelsong Books official website. 

Steve Wheeler

Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 5

Do you want to be a part of something really great? Something that is far more than just poetry? Something that will leave a lasting legacy and do some good in the world? We are about to publish the latest anthology in our charity series, so read on....

Wheelsong Books was established in the UK in 2020 as a not-for-profit organisation. Its mission statement is twofold: To give emerging poets the means to reach larger audiences and to help those who are in need. Since then, the company has published 40 books including seven charity poetry anthologies. Here are some anthology statistics: 

Absolutely Poetry Anthology 1: 170 poems 

Absolutely Poetry Anthology 2: 176 poems 

Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 1: 183 poems 

Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 2: 214 poems 

Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 3: 229 poems

Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 4: 245 poems

Invisible Poets Anthology 1: 352 poems

(a total of 1569 poems written by more than 470 poets representing 108 countries across all 6 continents) 

All the above books are still on sale on Amazon and through other outlets, including Waterstones (UK) and Barnes & Noble (USA). The proceeds from Amazon sales of these books is donated to Save the Children - a worldwide charity that supports children in crisis. At the time of writing, Wheelsong Books has donated £5350.00 ($6825.00) to Save the Children and we are not done yet! At the end of October we will be publishing Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 5.

Dear poet, this is the bottom line... You have been given an amazing creative gift ... your ability to capture your thoughts, ideas, memories and emotions and present them as beautiful, evocative words. 

You can, if you want to join us, use your wonderful talent to freely give back a little to children who are in desperate, often life-threatening situations. 

We all want our poetry to be read and appreciated by others. Publishing your work in Wheelsong Poetry Anthology 5 will ensure that you gain a new audience for your poetry, but that's not the most important aim! 

Better than that is this ... your poems will be helping to raise much needed funds to support children in crisis. You will also retain ownership of your poem, and Wheelsong Books will protect and administer your copyright for you. 

To be considered for inclusion in the review process you will need to follow these instructions very carefully:

Firstly, do not bother to submit your poetry if you do not intend to buy at least one copy of the book. We will expect you to pledge to buy at least one copy direct from Wheelsong Books if your work is published. This is a charity publication, and all profits from Amazon sales will go to help children in crisis. If you're not prepared to invest in helping children, we won't be publishing your poetry (we are dismayed that around two thirds of featured poets do not purchase a copy of the anthologies once they have been published!). Please give more than you take, because this is not about you or Wheelsong - it's about helping children who are in desperate need. 

Secondly, only submit poetry that is a) your own work and b) has not been subject to any other publishing agreement. Poetry you've shared on Facebook and other social media is fine, but please do not send in work that has been published elsewhere, and is subject to another publishing contract. That could lead to legal action. The editorial team will also reject poems if we suspect they have been either plagiarised in part or whole, or generated partly or wholly through artificial intelligence.

Thirdly, submit up to 3 poems as either plain text or in a Word file via email to this address: wheelsong6@gmail.com. Submissions by any other means will not be considered. Poetry submitted as images or photos will not be considered, nor will links to other sites. 

And before you ask: There is NO specific theme. 

Finally, all poems submitted will be subject to review by our editorial team. Your poetry will be anonymised (your name blanked out) so the editorial team can't see who you are. If your poetry is selected, you will be informed via email and a publication agreement will be sent to you for you to complete and return. Your work will be then published under your name. If your work is not accepted for publication, you will receive an email informing you of the team's decision. No correspondence other than via email will be valid. Please don't try to text or direct message us. We won't answer. 

The window for submission is now open, and will be closed at midnight (UK time) on October 4, 2024. Any submissions received after this time/date will be rejected. If there is an extension to this date, you will be informed. The editors' decisions will be final. 

Please Note: Shorter poems are more likely to be accepted for publication than longer pieces - space will be limited in the book due to resource and production limitations. Several poetry groups will participate, including Invisible Poets, Wheelsong Poetry, Pure Poetry and Safe Haven. Poets from outside these groups are also eligible to take part, so point them to this blog, and keep visiting this blog to find out news as it unfolds. We look forward to reading your submissions. Good luck! 

Steve Wheeler (Editor in Chief) 

Photo courtesy of Save the Children

How to get your poetry published

With two new anthologies about to be published by Wheelsong Books, I'm sure there will be many in the groups who would like to know how best to get their poems selected. Will your poems be chosen for publication by the panel? Well, it all depends if your poetry is good or bad poetry. If there is such a thing as bad poetry (and many would argue there is! Boring has something to do with it) then there must be characteristics that make it so bad. In this briefing, I want to show you some reasons why in the past, some poems have failed to be selected for publication in the Wheelsong Poetry Anthologies. 

Firstly, to get into an anthology, your poetry should not be lengthy. It should be comparatively brief, normally no longer than one page of text. The publisher is constrained by page count. The more pages a book contains, the more expensive it is to publish. Wheelsong Anthologies are generally between 240-300 pages in length. We like to keep the costs down so everyone can afford to buy a copy. 

Tip 1: Submit brief poems that are no more than 50 lines at the very most. Shorter poems will be favoured over longer ones. 

Most poets don't tend to read poems by other writers. This is a sure-fire way to get stuck in a rut and to keep on churning out the same old same old. If they do read other poets' work, they tend to read old, dead poets rather than living, contemporary poets. This encourages them to become obsessed with archaic language, especially thee, thou, hast and any other kind of bygone vocabulary. And when they get this wrong, oh boy, do the get it wrong! It's embarrassing, and it causes me to move on without reading. Also, if you're wanting to excel in the spoken word kind of poetry, then you'll need to write in contemporary language that your audience will easily recognise and identify with.

Tip 2: Read widely, not just the dead poets, but the living ones as well! Try to pick up ideas from the many and varied ways poets of today construct their poetry. It will be an eye opener, and I guarantee you will never regret it. Best thing you can do is buy a copy (or more) of a Wheelsong Poetry Anthology, and check out the quality, themes and format of the poems that were selected.

Next, here are a few things you should definitely avoid:

Boring poetry uses sing-songy rhythm and forced (gratuitous) rhyme. Forced syntax doesn't do any favours for your reputation. Losing your reader because your rhymes don't make any sense - or worse - because they become completely predictable - is a great way to destroy your credibility. I recently made a comment about gratuitous rhymes. I was surprised when people took up the erroneous idea that I had said rhyming was bad. I didn't say that. I said that bad rhyming is bad. There's a difference. But people hear what they want to hear I guess...

Tip 3: If you can, write poetry that is free-form, and avoid rhyming if you feel it is constraining your creativity. If you are determined to stick to fixed form poetry with strict rhyming schemes, then experiment with rhyming that is unpredictable. I recently rhymed "Avoid them" with "I Siegfried and Royed 'em". I rhymed the entire phrase rather than just the end word. Experiment. You have nothing to lose. 

Tip 4: Rhyme schemes can be as varied as you like. You can stick to the boring ABAB or AABB quatrain n schemes if you wish (good luck with that), or stretch yourself with ABCABC or ABACBCBA or even ABCABDABEDBCAEB - if it was good enough for Dylan Thomas, then you should be just fine.

Bad poetry is full of cliches, phrases that are so hackneyed the poem becomes laughable. Avoid the use of flat, uninteresting phrases like 'You broke my heart' - a simile would be more interesting: 'I am shattered like pottery on the hard surface of your indifference' seems more poetically astute. 

Worse still is the use of cliched end rhymes. How often have you seen life/strife, or world/unfurled or love/above? 

Tip 5: Be inventive with your language. You needn't address your topic head on. You can approach it obliquely, and keep your reader intrigued. Again, what have you got to lose?

Avoid preachy poems - 'do this or else' type writing. Also, avoid poetry that is self centred, and harps on about how badly treated you have been.  The best poetry takes the mundane and every day, and transforms it into something magical. 

Finally - is there a name for bad poetry? Yep. It's known as doggerel. 

How are you going to avoid doggerel? Firstly, make sure your poetry creates emotional energy. Secondly, make your poetry unusual, interesting, intriguing, exciting etc. using whatever devices or techniques are at your disposal. Thirdly, create something that no-one else has ever created before - a new rhyme scheme, a new way of expressing the mundane, a new turn of phrase. Experiment and be different! Stand out from the crowd, and you're sure to be published! 

Steve Wheeler

The Ghost of Dylan Thomas

One of Britain's greatest modern writers, Dylan Marlais Thomas had a huge impact on my youthful aspirations to write poetry. To be fair, he has an impact on just about everyone who has ever read his work. I first stumbled across his poetry as I was working in a college library. 

Still a teenager at the time, I began to read through his poetry and was utterly impressed by how different it was. I soon determined to write in my own esoteric, metaphorical and image-laden version of his style.

It was only last week, while on holiday in West Wales that I once again stumbled on Dylan Thomas - this time, as I visited his resting place. Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914 and died in 1953 in New York City, during the rehearsals of his play Under Milk Wood. He is buried in the churchyard of St Martin's in the Welsh town of Laugharne. 

When I visited the graveside, I was surprised to see that unlike all its surrounding stone burial plots, the poet's grave is a mound of bare earth, beneath a simple milk-white wooden cross that bears his name. He is appropriately buried 'under milk wood'.

I also visited his writing hut (pictured top), overlooking the sea, in which one can see his old writing desk, chair draped with one of his favourite jackets, and numerous other artefacts from the writer's tragically brief life.

Later, I had a drink in one of his notorious watering holes, Brown's Hotel, which is replete with artefacts and memorials to his name. The hotel reeks of 1930s decadence, and is redolent of raucous, smokey, whisky-fuelled nights. 

Laugharne is a magical place, tucked into the mystical underbelly of West Wales. It was acknowledged by the author himself as the town in which Under Milk Wood was set. It's said that whenever Dylan Thomas was in a fallow period, he would always return to Laugharne to regain his muse. 

Whether the ghost of Dylan Thomas haunts these places is unknown, but the power of his legacy certainly exudes a potent and evocative presence in the place. 

Steve Wheeler

Photos copyrighted by Steve Wheeler, 2024

Poetry Against Poverty 3: Ratana the Environmentalist

This is the third in a short series of reports about how Wheelsong's charity initiative is achieving success.

Wheelsong Books has a longstanding partnership with Save the Children, a worldwide charity that provides aid to children in crisis across the globe. But it's not only food they provide during a famine, nor is it just medical supplies and healthcare they supply in war zones. Save the Children are also committed to providing children with education and learning opportunities so they can support themselves, their environment and their local communities. 

You may already have heard about the Ethiopian Camel Library our book sales from recent anthologies have helped to fund. That was a classic, innovative project to provide ways for children in hard to read areas with books and literacy skills where no one else could do it. Here is another recent innovation from Save the Children: 

Ratana, 13, is on a mission to clean up Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, and she’s inspiring her community to join her. She and her friends are passionate about the environment, and have learned more about how to protect it during eco-lessons we’ve introduced at her school. We’ve also teamed up with a local partner to develop innovative plastic-collecting devices called biobars, and teach the kids how to build their own. Ratana’s making waves in her community, and she’s not going to stop anytime soon. 

Ratana says: “The biobars are very important to the environment. There was a lot of rubbish but this year, there has been some reduction. I am very proud to see that people cleaned up and also reduced pollution.”

Thanks to your support, we’re with her every step of the way.

Read more about this story here.

This is just one more great reason why you should support Wheelsong Books and our poets who have pledged the sales profits from their books to support Save the Children. Poetry against Poverty!

Steve Wheeler

Image courtesy of Save the Children

Poetry Against Poverty 2: Esther the Tree Planter

This is the second in a short series of reports about how Wheelsong's charity initiative is achieving success.

Wheelsong Books has a longstanding partnership with Save the Children, a worldwide charity that provides aid to children in crisis across the globe. But it's not only food they provide during a famine, nor is it just medical supplies and healthcare they supply in war zones. Save the Children are also committed to providing children with education and learning opportunities so they can support themselves, their environment and their local communities. 

You may already have heard about the Ethiopian Camel Library our book sales from recent anthologies have helped to fund. That was a classic, innovative project to provide ways for children in hard to read areas with books and literacy skills where no one else could do it. Here is another recent innovation from Save the Children:

Climate change champion Esther (pictured) from Malawi, loves planting trees almost as much as she loves climbing them. Every tree she plants helps shield her village from storms and floods. Thanks to our eco-lessons, she's more passionate about nature than ever.

Save the Children

This kind of greening project is begin to blossom all over the world in developing areas. It's important to educate our next generation of the crucial need to care for our planet. Planting trees helps to restore the lungs of our planet. 

This is just one more great reason why you should support Wheelsong Books and our poets who have pledged the sales profits from their books to support Save the Children. Poetry against Poverty!

Steve Wheeler

Image courtesy of Save the Children

Poetry Against Poverty 1: Lucy the Beekeeper

This is the first in a short series of reports about how Wheelsong's charity initiative is achieving success.

Wheelsong Books has a longstanding partnership with Save the Children, a worldwide charity that provides aid to children in crisis across the globe. But it's not only food they provide during a famine, nor is it just medical supplies and healthcare they supply in war zones. Save the Children are also committed to providing children with education and learning opportunities so they can support themselves, their environment and their local communities. 

You may already have heard about the Ethiopian Camel Library our book sales from recent anthologies have helped to fund. That was a classic, innovative project to provide ways for children in hard to read areas with books and literacy skills where no one else could do it. Here is another recent innovation from Save the Children:

Thanks to our dedicated community of supporters, we’re working with partners in the Solomon Islands to train beekeepers. The benefits are huge: bees are pollinating the mangrove trees which protect against rising sea levels and severe storms. 

And the honey provides a sweet new income for parents, so they can buy food for their children and pay their school fees. Pretty cool, right? Beekeeping is a sustainable, long-term solution for communities facing the climate crisis. Developing life-changing projects – like this one – is only possible because of your generosity. 

Find out how this innovative work is helping Alison – an amazing beekeeper and mum – and her daughter Lucy (pictured above) whose home was destroyed by a devastating storm.

Save the Children

This is just one more wonderful reason why you should support Wheelsong Books and our poets who have pledged the sales profits from their books to support Save the Children. Poetry against Poverty!

Steve Wheeler

Image courtesy of Save the Children

Experimental Poetry 18: Interactive poetry

We explored installation poetry earlier in this series. One of the key features of a lot of installation art is that it's interactive. You don't necessarily stand there admiring the art as if you were in a gallery gazing at images. You delve in, and engage with the art using several senses. 

Installation art is not just visual. It can also be auditory, tactile, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, and perhaps even olfactory or haptic. Interactive poetry also exploits these multiple senses to provide the reader with a participatory experience. 

In my own performance poetry I encourage my live audiences to become involved, shouting out repeated refrains, standing up or raising their hands. It brings the poetry alive and gives it deeper meaning through involvement. The audience get a work out too. We can do similarly with the written word... (even though this is a little more sedate than the ideas above).

In Gestalt psychology (the theory, not the therapy) there is something known as the law of closure. It plays on the human propensity to want to complete something that is otherwise unfinished. This can be exploited to benefit experimental poetry writing.

Method 35: Fill in the blanks. Write your poem to deliberately miss out key words. Place a blank where the word should be and ask your reader to complete the poem. The more surprising or unpredictable the word is, the better! 

Method 36: Complete the stanza. Do the same as above, but this time, an entire line is missing for the reader to complete. 

Method 37: Untitled.  Leave a blank where the title should be. Invite your reader to read the poem, and then create a title for it. Ask them to be particularly creative with this task.

Method 38; Switching words. Ask your reader to switch the position of two words in each line, or stanza of the poem. Again, the more outlandish the result, the better!

All of the above methods are great to promote collaborative writing, and are ideal for use in online poetry groups. Try some interactive poetry ideas today!

Steve Wheeler 

Previous posts in this series

Experimental Poetry 1: Found Poetry
Experimental Poetry 2: Stream of Consciousness
Experimental Poetry 3: Fake Translations
Experimental Poetry 4: Overlapping Voices
Experimental Poetry 5: Random Prompts
Experimental Poetry 6: The Movie Method
Experimental Poetry 7: Unexpected End Rhymes
Experimental Poetry 8: Calligrams
Experimental Poetry 9: Anarchic Poetry
Experimental Poetry 10: Timed Writing
Experimental Poetry 11: Paraphrasing
Experimental Poetry 12: Deliberate Malapropism
Experimental Poetry 13: Breaking Structure
Experimental Poetry 14: Speak out Loud
Experimental Poetry 15: Quantum Elements
Experimental Poetry 16: Random Interactions
Experimental Poetry 17: Installation Poetry

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Why AI Can't be Creative

From time to time, we invite members to write guest blog posts on topical issues that impact upon poetry. Here is a fascinating article on AI and poetry/creative writing by our very own Iain Strachan, formerly a computer scientist and always a poet!

One of the keys to original creative work is that it should be.... well, original. It should contain phrases that haven't been seen before - that take us by surprise and delight us. However, a program like ChatGPT will struggle to produce anything like this, because it can only really produce output that is resembles the text and poems that have been used to train it. 

I asked ChatGPT to provide ten possible completions to this line, taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "God's Grandeur" 

    It will flame out like ... 

Here is what it came up with: 

a comet streaking through the night. 

a candle in the wind. 

a phoenix rising from the ashes. 

the last rays of a dying sun. 

fireworks bursting in the sky. 

a shooting star's brief flight. 

the embers of a forgotten fire. 

lightning splitting the heavens. 

a spark in the dark, then vanish. 

the final flare of a burning match. 

These phrases are all well-known, and not exactly unexpected; they are bland and literal. Compare that with the completion in Hopkins's poem. If you don't already know the poem this will be completely unexpected: It will flame out like shining from shook foil. 

Why is it that chatGPT can't produce stunningly original completions like that? The reason lies in statistics. In generating continuations, it uses probability, and a random number generator that is tuned (like loaded dice) to be heavily biased towards more likely (and hence less surprising) continuations. Also, if it chose an unlikely continuation, it probably won't make sense at all. There are vastly more nonsensical unexpected continuations than ones that make sense. 

What can we learn from this and apply to our own poems? A lot of our writing can be automatic, sometimes creative, but sometimes commonplace. So next time you write a poem, go through the first draft and examine each word or phrase and see if you can make a better one, instead of the expected word, make it unexpected. Make it a metaphor, rather than literal. 

Here's an example from one of my poems, describing the grid system of roads in Washington DC:

Geometric city. Anonymous streets 

Labelled with letters and numbers 

????? the shops into blocks. 

Here are chatGPT's 10 boring suggestions: 

Neatly dividing 

Methodically carving 

Carefully segmenting 

Precisely arranging 

Artfully separating 

Rigorously partitioning 

Strategically placing 

Systematically organizing 

Elegantly splitting 

Thoughtfully grouping 

Here's mine: Cheese-wire. 

I'll bet you didn't see that coming! It was based not on poems I'd seen before but lived experience; how as a kid I was fascinated to see cheese cut up with a cheese-wire.

Iain Strachan

Image from Wikimedia Commons