Year of Poetry - The End (Part 1)

Well.

Here we are at the end of the Year of Poetry Project.  In this post I'll go through the week's achievements and the do another as a post mortem.

This week being that strange period between Christmas and New Year's where one loses track of days, I managed to avoid writing until Thursday.

To be fair though, one of those days was without power due to violent storms and with an inside temp of close to 30 degrees I spent it lying in the coolest spot I could find in the house.

I also got one more rejection this week leaving only one other poem out in the wild trying to find a home.

The Writing...

I won't lie.  With the end of the year and the end of the project approaching I was finding it hard settling down to start any writing.  This combined with late nights and even later mornings really curtailed the time I had for a solid mental workout.

But I returned to the teaching/learning obtained through this process (peaks and troughs) and forged on.  This combined with me taking up a short morning meditation practice seemed to improve things and today I finished on a high, shaping a poem to a nearly final state.




The Study...

I made a conscious decision to let the study taper off this week in favour of further close readings as I think I tend to get more out of seeing poetic techniques/decisions in action (though the study has been very useful). Thus my only study was more reading of William Stafford's You Must Revise Your Life.


Close Reading...

Figuring I should finish off the year with an Australian Poet, I flipped  through this year's Best Australian Poems  and settled on the last, an Australian/American poet called Billy Marshall Stoneking.  

I thought One Last Poem, a fitting title on which to end the project and through one of those weird quirks of life discovered that he lived in Central Australia at the time I was growing up and sadly like a number of artists this year, left us in July.

You can read the poem here.

For the Statbadgers:


Total time: 10:08 (457:08) hrs


poem writing =6:50 (214:48) hrs

close reading =1:10(87:15) hrs

technique/theory= 0:38 (105:13) hrs

reflection = 1:30(40:04) hrs



Poetry written:

1(42) poems completed


2(21)poems in draft


Poems Submitted:

0(27 in total) poems



Poems Published:


0(9) poems



Live Performances:
0(2)


Interviews:
0(1)


Rejections:

1(16) poems