by David Riley
It's certainly a challenge, having to write a poem every day for a month. It could be any sort of poem but I decided when I joined in I would do all mine with 14 lines. This means I didn't use the prompts thst appeared on the NAPO site periodically, giving suggestions as to a form to use if you were stuck for ideas. Oh no, not me. I was much stronger than this. Juts manly jaw.
Plus I had a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and easily mistake it for Reynard. I'd come across a writing exercise which suggested using other poems as inspiration for your own in a particular way. That'll do then. Sorted. I just needed 30, 14 line poems and Robert is your mother's brother.
That was the theory and it worked. For a bit. Then I started to scrat around for suitably inspiring stuff (doing this hand to mouth, as it were, makes it trickier than I thought it would be). Plus I wanted to do stuff of my own, without the need for this method. It was do-able and it was done...but...
This became a bit of a treadmill. There was no time to revise poems among other things. Also, I tend to write poetry in a very narrative style and need to practise changing that, which NAPOWRIMO didn't give me the chance to do; it was a matter of finish something and add it to the blog. Overall I suppose I'm fairly happy with 10% of what I put up there and they can be revisited and reworked. The rest might form something, eventually.
Would I do it again? It was good to join in with others and suffer together. As for developing as a poet? I don't think so. I need to work on certain things and this didn't allow that, so on balance, fun but not very useful.
It's certainly a challenge, having to write a poem every day for a month. It could be any sort of poem but I decided when I joined in I would do all mine with 14 lines. This means I didn't use the prompts thst appeared on the NAPO site periodically, giving suggestions as to a form to use if you were stuck for ideas. Oh no, not me. I was much stronger than this. Juts manly jaw.
Plus I had a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and easily mistake it for Reynard. I'd come across a writing exercise which suggested using other poems as inspiration for your own in a particular way. That'll do then. Sorted. I just needed 30, 14 line poems and Robert is your mother's brother.
That was the theory and it worked. For a bit. Then I started to scrat around for suitably inspiring stuff (doing this hand to mouth, as it were, makes it trickier than I thought it would be). Plus I wanted to do stuff of my own, without the need for this method. It was do-able and it was done...but...
This became a bit of a treadmill. There was no time to revise poems among other things. Also, I tend to write poetry in a very narrative style and need to practise changing that, which NAPOWRIMO didn't give me the chance to do; it was a matter of finish something and add it to the blog. Overall I suppose I'm fairly happy with 10% of what I put up there and they can be revisited and reworked. The rest might form something, eventually.
Would I do it again? It was good to join in with others and suffer together. As for developing as a poet? I don't think so. I need to work on certain things and this didn't allow that, so on balance, fun but not very useful.