Year of Poetry Update Week 5

Pewter dip pen - a gift
from a good friend

I nearly didn't make it to the end of week 5.  Followers on Facebook will now that I was driven to hospital earlier in the week - delirium, vomiting dehydration and migraine.

Maybe I should call the blog Hard Poetry, where we poet HARD (referencing The Weekly with Tom Gleeson).

Surprisingly, despite the day lost to illness.  I did manage to rack up 14 hours of work.

This week was, perhaps understandably, the slowest in terms of poems crafted.  Indeed I thought I was going to have an abandoned poem, but I persisted, backed off, read Vagabondage by Beth Spencer and the words flowed again.  

I had one of those shower epiphanies that requires you to rush, still dripping down the hallway and scribble a page of poetry while the water soaks the carpet.

If the poetry was slow, the study got interesting and more hands on with a focus on the rules and history of rhyme. 

My close reading this week featured Eileen Chung's Ritual (a pantoum) and Beth Spencer's Leaving this House (free verse).  

On to the stats, here are this week's with the overall project total in parenthesis:

Total time: 14:10 (86:52) hrs


poem writing = 6:30 (34:30) hrs
close reading = 3:00 (22:50) hrs
technique/theory =  2:40 (20:18) hrs

reflection = 1:10(8:24) hrs


Poetry written:


7 poems completed
1 poem abandoned
1 poem at 2nd draft stage


General thoughts:

Concerns:

Nothing new here in terms of threats on the horizon.  I do think that the program helps with self defeating talk though.  It gives you a sense of achievement even when the different portions of it aren't all working well.

Hopes:

From last week - I'd like to get one poem in particular out of this lot published and I will work on it in the coming week.I had no time this week and so thought it best to nut out the drafts before I move on to more polished work.