Tag: poems

Writing/

‘Poem a day’ update

magnetic poetry

magnetic poetry

I’m about halfway through my mission to write (or at least start) a poem a day. I wish I could say it’s been easy.  I started on the 6th February, so by now I should have about 26/27 poems I think. But alas – some days I’ve been unwell or just haven’t fitted in the time, although on a couple of days I’ve managed two. Here’s a summary of what I’ve got so far:

18 complete first drafts.

2 started but nowhere near complete.

1 in outline plan only, nothing written.

3 days gap when I wasn’t well.

Of the eighteen complete first drafts, looking at them now I would say five I am quite pleased with so far even though they still need work (although one of them is a ‘funny’, more for performance than publishing) and another 4 have potential.

On the whole I’m very pleased because I think these kinds of ratios (of useful-to-useless material) are what I produce anyway, but by making myself write more frequently I’ve concertina-d them into a shorter space of time, which was partly the object of the exercise.

 

(Picture: Surreal Muse on Flickr)

Mags & Blogs/

Out now – The Rialto 75

The Rialto: bedside reading for this week at least.

Very proud that I have a poem in it on page 50.

Rialto-75-cover-print-1-small

The Last

They’ve been coming since posters were invented:
sometimes in dreams, to the tipping of cowboy hats

or dressed in Liverpool shirts. Each one appeared
in my diary, in code. My mother wouldn’t explain,

I couldn’t ask.  And still they would come, insistent.
They left my body as they found it: I never wanted

them to stay, or change things. It’s been a while since
I wrote a diary. I don’t know how many there were,

I wasn’t counting.  Too busy getting on with
the business of getting on. For the last, though,

I would have thrown a party, marked the occasion
in some way, worn something red, if I had known.