Running With The Dogs
A Tribe Blog entry from 13th January 2024
This week I’ve been determined to flesh out the site with some more poems and get the Shop up-and-running. And I’ve accomplished just that! As promised, I’ll be taking some time this week to talk about what this site is, how the building of it is going, and what else is on the horizon. I’ll also take some time to give context for this week’s poem, “Black Dog”, just for you lovely Tribe members.
Gnashing Away
With the launch of “Black Dog” and the first products on the website, let me talk about how that system works. I’ve hooked my website into another service which allows me to print-on-demand. With the arrangement I have, they charge no upfront cost, but take a cut out of the net profit on each sale I make. The huge pro of this arrangement is that it’s great for someone who’s just starting out on a venture – like me – who both has limited capital to get physical products made and who is not yet in a position to be accurately gauging how many orders I need to make products for. The downside is that, at scale, this method is more expensive than arranging batch or continuous production with a manufacturing company. If I get to the point where it’s reasonable to shift production method, I will. But for now, this is a fantastic arrangement.
It seemed reasonable that one of the first products I should have a go at making is a print containing one of my poems. It seemed silly to try and turn “What Do I Want For Christmas?” into a print, now that Christmas has been and gone, so this was another incentive to get a new poem on the website that could accomplish this. As such, you can now find prints for “Black Dog” on the Shop page, and I’ll put some links in to them below.
I knew I wanted something reasonably small – there’s a framed version of “Purbeck – The Enduring Isle” by Elvis McGonagall at my relative’s house that looks very at home where it is, and looks good even though it’s relatively small. I also figured there would not likely be much demand for significantly larger sizes, so it seems better to let someone commission something of that nature from me directly rather than sell it as a standard product.
I settled on an 8″ x 10″ size for a number of reasons. One of these was practicalities – the 8″ x 10″ size can be shipped by the manufacturer either with or without a frame, which is not true of all sizes (looking at you, A4 Print). I did also order an 11″ x 13″ version, which the manufacturer also provides a frame for, as a test print, along with the 8″ x 10″. While I liked both, the 8″ x 10″ one won it out for me, and they were too close in size to justify listing both on the store. I do still have the 11″ x 13″ copy though, pictured below, that I am very tempted to give out as a prize for our first Tribe Poetry competition. Stay tuned on this.
A Hound Of Love
This brings me on to the poem itself. As stated on the poem’s page, “Black Dog” was originally a creation for Over To The Youth. Indeed, the featured photo I’m using for this blog post (which appears on the Tribe Blog page) is the same one that “Black Dog” was originally published alongside.
At the time of its creation, I was reflecting a lot on emotional trauma and mental health, contemplating my own experiences, the conversations with one of my mentors who works with childhood trauma, and on the wisdom of Carl Jung in his memoirs, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections”. I’m still working my way through that book, but it’s a fantastic insight into one of the forefathers of psychoanalysis, including demonstrations of his teachings as applied to himself and many of his patients.
I was getting the urge to combine all of these things into a poem. I don’t remember how, but the idea of playing with the trope of depression as a ‘black dog’ came to me, and gave me lots of dog-related imagery and concepts to work with. As a result, “Black Dog” came out almost fully formed within the first draft, and I seemed to remember there being only about a week in-between the completion of the first draft and me submitting it for publication via Over To The Youth.
And if you haven’t read it yet, here’s a link to it so you can change that:
Barking About The Book
The eagle-eyed of you will have also noticed a hidden reveal in the description of “Black Dog”. That being the title of my book, “Born Anew”.
For the longest time, I was working with the tentative title of “Born of Youth”, partly in homage to how my first published poetry appeared on Over To The Youth, and how many of the poems included in the book come from that project. However, there is a poem at the end of the book, “Born Anew”, written as a sort of lullaby, which really encapsulates the essence of what my journey in the past few years has been. I got the idea to name the book after that poem a few days before the “Black Dog” video went live, and it feels right to keep it as that.
I’m still finalising the selection of poems that will feature in there, but I can say for certain it’s at least 90% complete. There is a slight hiccup in that two of the poems which I would like to feature in there I have submitted as competition entries for some poetry competitions in the UK, forgetting that if I publish them in the book before the results of the competition are announced then I’ll break the rules of the competition (d’oh!). As there’s other work to do on the book, I’m biding my time for now, but it might be possible I have to take these two poems out and replace them with some others.
I have a few other competitions on-the-go too, with some poems I’m very pleased with. I’m hoping to see the results of some of those get published within the next month, and if so, I might be tempted to include some of those in the book too. I have some other poems, made right at the beginning of my time with Over To The Youth, that I remembered I had on paper the other day that I have dug out of the drawer too. There’s one or two that, with some tweaks, could very easily make their way into the book too. So, in short, there’s no need to be worried about not getting any new poems even if the book takes a little longer than planned to come out.
As a result, I’ve shifted on my perspective slightly from last week that the book will mark the “official” launch of the website. I will now reserve that for the launch of an original poem, not previously published anywhere else (unlike Black Dog), or if a competition entry of mine does particularly well.
So, in short, there’s plenty on the horizon to look forward to!
Howling For The Moon
Building the website has been great fun. I do all the design and front-end myself, as well as all the Shop and Tribe feature integration. I have a little bit of experience in web design, having built hobby websites and a site for my uncle’s business many years ago, so it was nice to dust off some of those things in service of a project that is more immediately relevant.
Next week is unlikely to see a new poem get released as I’ll be away for the majority of the week seeing family, without time to work on an accompanying video. I’m hoping to squeeze out a poem just in time before I go away, but I’ll be sure to provide some insightful reflections for everyone in the Tribe regardless of what happens.
Until next week, my friend.