Poetry

Even though I've submitted my second TMA the course continues to rumble on and I am knee deep in poetry at the moment. Glorious bonkers poetry.  Now it just so happens that I used to write poems horribly naive poems of teenaged indulgence.

It is weird putting poetry to the forefront of my mind again, I feel like I'm squeezing back into skin I've not used in an awfully long time. I've started drafting three different poems this week and it feels like I've been working muscles I've not used in aeons.

I was tidying up my office/geekspace at home yesterday to tidy away some xmas decs when I paused at my poetry shelf. (Yep studied literature long enough to amass a shelf of poetry) and flicked through some old favourites. All the annotations that I used to make and it was weird, I was that person am I still?

I'm certainly fond of poetry, in a free verse ignore the rules kind of way but I'm not sure if it is who I am now.  The course book lists some ways of generating poems which feel clunky and I'm not sure if I'm generating anything worthwhile.

But on the flipside, it's fun and it is a different way of working, if I could write prose in the same picky way, contrstructing and crafting on a micro level it would drive me mad, but in a 12 line poem it is something else.

Well here's a draft of a poem I wrote today.

Between Two Nowheres

There is a rock, cragged old granite,
Fissures deep and wider than two fingers.
Heavy it dominates the plain.

The sky is open here, a dialogue
of weather converses with the land
Shaping and changing it like opinions
And reasoning win arguments.

Place a hand on the ground flat
Palm down, absorb the resonance
Slow throbbing vibrations, a gong
Last hit millennia ago still reverberating.

There is a path, nothing official
No signs or stiles or steps
Just the memory of a thousand feet
Taking a thousand more steps.

Happy New Year

I think that is is fair to say I really sucked at blogging last year, hard to explain, but the mojo just upped and left and that was a bad thing.

Having said that I've been writing quite a lot since september for my OU course, it is just that it hasn't really been visible to any one but those I've been brave enough to share my work with.

I love writing, I feel that when I reach that zone, I can come up with stuff that entertains and is interesting.  Time as ever is the enemy, I never seem to have enough of it or I seem unable to settle.  I need self discipline and I know from experience I need this in all areas of my life.

So what do I need to do to counter this? Control, that is what I need and I'm taking control of myself this year and giving myself a bit of a talking to on one level and then setting myself reasonable boundaries and rules to help me make the most out of this life I've been given.

I may blog more about that at some point but I feel it's important for me to get into my head what I'm doing first and then share later if I feel that is is appropriate.

I've just submitted my short story to the OU for marking and I'm pleased with it, having never written any science fiction before I wanted to write something that felt honest and authentic, I don't think it's perfect but I do think that it is reasonable if not without flaws.

I hope that my tutor enjoys it, I felt like I've had a rough trot of late with the OU but I'm tenacious and I don't go down that easy.

The next unit is poetry and I have some reservations about the methods that the Big Red Book is suggesting but I'm swallowing the grump and giving it a go.