I thought I should maybe probably write a little post to cover my tracks.
You’ve probably noticed that after only a few weeks of the poetry challenge, I gave up. Well, there’s a good reason for that, I gave up cos I’m shit. You see, my plan was to read the week’s theme on a Sunday, then spend the week thinking and planning before finally writing and publishing the poem on Friday.
Instead, I read the theme on the Sunday, then spent the week pissing about before half arsing a verse or two on the Friday afternoon before my nap. It all just felt like I wasn’t achieving anything. I wasn’t learning anything and I certainly didn’t feel like I was improving.
You see, I got into this poetry lark after reading The Ode Less Travelled, a book that takes you through all (most of?) the different poetic forms and rhyme schemes. But since reading it, I’ve not once used any of those forms. Something I only realised after reading How to be Well Versed In Poetry by E O Parrott whose collected verses showed me what an amateur I was as well as teaching me more than a few things.
So I decided that I would stop doing the challenge and relearn what I thought I knew.
I’ve spent my time writing a few dirty limericks and generally pissing about with my other poetry books as I try to get my head around what I should be doing. Should I, for example, be making more effort to write in proper form and metre? Would that improve my poetry? Would it make for good practice? How do you even go about starting to write a poem? Now there’s something I thought I knew but it turns out I’ve just been making that up too.
Anyway, that’s what happening. I’m still writing but I’m not publishing too much. I really want to save some of my stuff for other sues. I’d love to put a chapbook together but I don’t have enough poems, and I never will have if I keep publishing everything I write on social media. I’m also working on a new magazine style website and could do with a bunch of poems for that too.
Thus ends my excuse.
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