…And yes I did write one each day. Just about.
Sadly, as with all these challenges, day-to-day life is the greatest obstacle in writing. When you have a lot on, priorities have to be established, and when you are embarking on a project you have promised daily attention to something, every snatched moment during the day has to be given to that.
Luckily for me, a huge part of my day usually involves travel, and so I have plenty of 15 – 30 minute slabs of time to try and use to my advantage. Most of my work is still in my notebook, which has had the knock-on effect of me focusing on more ‘visual’ poems.
Tuesday was crack at a wordsearch poems, a task just as fiendish as I thought it would be. The demands of structure led me down the garden path of crowbarring in things to get it to work. The end result is something that ticks boxes, but isn’t right yet. I have faith it will work though.
Wednesday and thursday saw me take on the idea of space, and where to leave it on the page. This was quite fun, and I created two poems that may have a future in an art project. (As a side note, on thursday I was at the book launch for Clare Dyer’s new collection of poems ‘Eleven Rooms’ which I encourage peopel to go out and buy).
Friday’s one wasn’t very good. Sadly. Saturday’s was an upbeat take on this. Please don’t judge me too harshly if you’re not a fan. I had spent the day touring a brewery and in the abscence of a good alcohol poem (something I’m sure I will correct) it feel easy to dso at the time.
Sunday was all about a man named Donald Crowhurst. I was not drawn to him but something he wrote during his final days of madenss – “It is the mercy” (It turned up in a comedy sketch written on a BBC test card). It is a fantastically chilling line, and I could not do anything but write something around it. Doing a bit of research, or rather combing through the wikipedia page for a good nugget of infomration or two, I discovered the recurrance of the number 243. I took this and the aforementioned line and wrote a quite made piece to suit his probable mental state.
What is now yesterday saw me go to London to attend the London Book Fair, as part of a quest to make inroads into the publishing industry. I had forghotten how intimidating Earl’s Court can be, and the experience of all the exhibitors and people was suprisingly overhwhelming. I spent the train trip home trying to get my head around it poetically, and came up with suitably allegorical imagery.
I must admit, these longer catch-up sessions tdo have a certain appeal beyond the practicalities of writing about writing every night. I may blog about my work tomorrow, I may give it a couple of days. My priority however is to keep the poems flowing.
