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Apr
3rdFail?Ok, so it’s the third day of April, and this is my second post. Technically, I have failed the ’30 poems in 30 days’ challenge. Although that challenge doesn’t specify one a day, just thirty in thirty days, so I could still catch up. Anyway, failing so early on kind of takes the pressure away, much like turning thirty and realising all the things you told yourself you were going to do before you hit that age aren’t going to happen. Or they still might, you just won’t have put an arbitrary time limit on achieving them. Anyway, point is, as I said on the Pen-ultimate site today (which also had a big gap in it yesterday), my reasons for taking up the challenge were to encourage a regular ‘fast and loose’ writing regime, not add another self-flagellation stick to my arsenal if I miss a day, which may well happen again considering the month I have ahead of me. So, today’s, or rather yesterday’s poem, is one I started in a workshop I delivered recently for the Heritage Lottery Fund. The exercise, taken from fellow Pen-ultimate member Frisko (I think he adapted from someone else) is to to use the phrases ‘I was…’, ‘I am…’, ‘I will…’, ‘I can…’ at the beginning of each line of four four-line stanzas, and fill in the blanks. As the workshop was on heritage I tried to make it vaguely about that but I only got as far as ‘I will…’. As you [...]
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Apr
1stEntering the frame
Just about slipping this one in before the day’s out because I need to have posted something on the first of this month, as I’ll be attempting to throw up something vaguely poetic every day for the whole of April. This is part of NaPoWriMo, an initiative which has so far attracted around 170 websites to publicly commit to posting a new poem every day for thirty days. It’s a bit of a daunting task, especially considering everything else I have going on this month, but I’m hoping the threat of a daily deadline will be a healthy thing that will push me to write what needs writing. Also I’m doing a stint on Something Every Day for a week in June so I figure this will be good training. My first post is a bit of a cheat as I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but still it’s not been seen or heard by anyone but the editors of Inc zine who are publishing some of my work this month. I’ve submitted a few short poems, plus they asked me to write something in response to an illustration (below) by Barnie Page who will also feature in the zine. I had two attempts at this as I didn’t like the first one I wrote, but in the spirit of ‘resisting the urge not to leave traces’ I’m including them both and letting you be the judge. The Girl In The Picture or Blue Period – Version 1 [...]