www.alanwickes.org

By the end of 2002 my attitude towards writing poetry had changed. My motivation in posting to the Sonnet Board at the beginning was to get get some independent feedback to that age old question that plagues anyone who puts pen to paper, 'Am I any good?'  Having been assured, at least partially, that my efforts were not entirely execrable, then I moved into the next phase, 'How can I  improve?' As a writer, having fellow writers  comment and criticise your work is a truly liberating, if sometimes somewhat challenging experience. It does, however, have a secondary, and unanticipated effect, for the first time you become aware you have an audience, you have readers. This is quite different to simply writing for yourself or occassionally drumming-up stuff for occassions like Valentine's day and so on. After all, unless you  happened to be married to Helen Vendler, hopefully when your nearest and dearest opens the card she won't say, 'that's lovely (kiss) thank you, but are you absolutely sure about the trochaic subsitution in the middle of line three?'

Gaining a readership is a game-changer. It does not take long participating in on-line workshops to realise that as soon as your poem is shared by readers it assumes meanings and significances quite different to anything that you as the writer may have intended in the first place. The poem only becomes itself, 'grows-up', you might say, when it is read.
I think it was a sense of what you write taking on 'a life of its own' that underlies the last sonnet in the 'Excurions in Greeneland' sequence.

The Third Man

Whose shadows shift across the wall—
the writer in his shuttered room,
the reader who believes it all,
the hero sentenced to his doom?

Dreaming of reflected glory
the writer makes a dangerous tryst;
the reader, captured by the story,
must vie with the protagonist
to plot against the winning villain.

The girl, of course, still loves the crook
and treats the hero with disdain.
Each, by ‘The End’ is brought to book:
The Third Man’s lost identity
is what each one needs him to be.

I don't think the urge to be read is the primary motivation when you write poetry, for the most part it is simply something you feel compelled to do, a way to make sense of the world and your place within it. Getting read is pleasing though, it does sustain your efforts so it's not surprising once start to become more serious about writing and take more pride in the quality of what you produce you begin to consciously seek a readership.

So, sometime in the Autumn of 2002 I obtained a copy of Microsoft's Front page 2000 from work, purchased a 'teach yourself web authoring' book, and set to trying to build a website. This was a crucial moment for Alan Wickes; up until them he had simply been a 'handle'. Now, faced with buying a domain name, I toyed with the idea of reverting to my proper name, but at some level I felt that it was Alan not Pete who had written the poems, and fictitious as he may be, it was Alan that deserved whatever kudos or brickbats that awaited the writer in the public domain. So, it was www.alanwickes.org that I purchased as the URL, though these days after Freshwebhosting, my ISP, went belly-up a few years ago and chaos ensued, this web address seems to have been purloined by a Far Eastern Internet Shopping Site for reasons that are quite beyond my comprehension.

The original site has gone, but clearing out some old CDs a couple of months ago I did come across a copy dating from around the Summer of 2003  probably made as a back-up when we bought a new computer. The site does look very primitive by today's standards.



www.alanwickes.org homepage from 2003

The title comes from my sonnet of the same name that I later renamed 'Jannah'. The image is a 'slice' of a snapshot taken on the Plage de Saleccia a few kilometres North of St Florent in Corsica where we'd stayed in the Summer of 2002. More interesting maybe is my 'Bio' from the time - I suspect written in early 2003.

Alan Wickes was born and raised in rural Northumberland, then studied History of Art and English at Manchester and The Open University.

After a brief spell in office-work, Alan has worked in Further and Adult Education for the past 18 years. He is married, has three children, and lives in Buxton, Derbyshire, a spa town high in the Pennines.

Alan is interested in travel, particularly around the Mediterranean, dabbles in gardening and enjoys wine and conversation.

He has always read and enjoyed poetry, and was published in small magazines such as Lines in the mid-1970's. However he stopped writing for more than twenty five years but began again about two years ago. In particular he is interested in using a modern idiom within a formal verse setting. Alan Wickes contributes regularly to Sonnet Central, an on line poetry workshop dedicated the development of the Sonnet form, and recently has had work accepted by Znine, a literary magazine run by the the English Department of the University of Texas at Arlington.

What the last sentence tells you is I'd also made it into print or at least into 'on-line' print. What a big deal it seemed when I got my first submission accepted by a fairly obscure American University English Dept 'zine'. Amazingly my first triumph in Znine still sits there in cyberspace.

Soon after this Margaret Griffiths published 'Alnmouth' in her groundbreaking email based zine, Worm. Over the next few years I became a regular, Between 2003 - 2007 my work appeared 14 time in Worm; indeed almost everything I submitted was accepted. It's only recently that I've come to appreciate quite what an achievement that was. Margaret used two different associate editors for each bimonthly edition. In order to achieve objectivity in editorial decision making submissions were viewed 'blind' with the writers name removed and only included if there was agreement between the three editors. To have been chosen 14 times by such a selection process is, looking back on it, remarkable. In retrospect I could probably have built on this to achieve better recognition as a writer, but increasingly 'real-life' became ever more demanding and over time I needed to put my poetry antics on the 'back-burner'. Family life and an increasingly demanding senior role at work had to come first.

Even so, I made it into actual print for the first time in Aesthetica in March 2004 and had a bit of success in competitions, winning Ware Poets national sonnet competition twice, in 2004 and 2009., Cannon Poets awarding first prize to my poem "Parting Shots" in November 2007.

What I really started hankering after was to publish a book.