I am flabbergasted – one of my poems has now reached the short list for the Fish Poetry prize. This is startling news and I have to keep pinching myself. Just to reach the last 20 something poems out of thirteen hundred seems too good to be true.
And yet, I still have not fully mastered basic tools such as trochaic feet…though I think I now have the measure of iambs. My difficulty seems to be that when I read something out loud, I manage to subtly manipulate what I have written to make it fit.
I tried the One Stop Poetry prosody exercise set by Gay Cannon this week and managed a halfway satisfactory first draft (see my post ‘Minor Key’) , but could I tell if I had utilised trochees…could I heck!
Gay very kindly pointed out where I had and where I hadn’t and kindly said that what I had written worked because of the subject matter. I thank her for her generosity, however, I know that I still can’t reliably count this skill as one of my poetic tools…yet. And so I accept that I have much to work on.
Thanks to the One Stop Poetry site for continually stretching my expertise and for coming up with such challenging and inspiring prompts and exercises.
rules, damn rules and poetry – what makes you such a good poet is that you don’t HAVE to abide by the rules – you can use them as a framework and then smash them to bits if it gives the result – top 20 eh – fantastic – I predict ‘trouble’ of the sort it is nice to have following shortly…..
Lesley I just love your rebellious nature…