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Sunday, May 03, 2009

A NaPoWriMo Meme

I don't generally do memes, but January has posted a list of questions about NaPoWriMo, and I thought it would be quite useful to look over my thirty poems and find out the answers.

1. Number of poems written in April - thirty on my blog, and I think there were two more, but I haven't dated them, so they may be from late March.

2. Number of poems you'll keep and revise. I'll keep all of them. Computer space is cheap, and they're my babies, however ugly. As for revising, I'm not sure. On glancing through, there are about ten that I can see myself revising or polishing in the near future.

3. List the titles of your top three NaPoWriMo poems: these are chosen not so much for their current state of completion, but for their possibilities.
Digging for Spain
The Scientists
Song of the Moth

4. List your three least-favourite NaPoWriMo poems - As I said, they're my babies, even if some of them are too sickly to survive to adulthood.
If I have to choose, then
Fifty Kettle Weather
The haiku from day 27
At Halswell Quarry

5. Favourite line from one of your NaPoWriMo poems.
From The Scientists:
The scientists have equations in their veins. Cut them and they leak solutions.
The final word in the line was originally "numbers" but I replaced it as I had repeated the word elsewhere. That was serendipitous, as I loved the double meaning in "solutions"

6. Notice any patterns? Too often, I fall back on nostalgia. I'm boring even myself with that. It makes me feel as if I don't have a life worth writing about, now. On the other hand, maybe things do need time to ripen and compost before they make good poems. I didn't write poems about our trip to the UK at the time (2007) and I'm finding it's just starting to come through.
It was towards the end of the month that boredom drove me towards experiments with rhyme, strange word associations etc.

7. What surprised you most about writing a poem a day? I'm not sure that I was surprised about anything, because I have done it once before. If I was surprised at all, it was probably about the strange things that started to come out towards the end of the month. And maybe that I managed to finish it.

8. Now that you have momentum, what's next? Our small poetry group has a book planned for later in the year, so I have plenty to do revising, selecting, and possibly writing new work. I have a sequence of poems on a single theme half started that I want to get back to. The side-bar of my blog desperately needs updating! I also look forward to getting a few non-poetry things done.

Thanks for the questions, January!

1 comment:

Kay Cooke said...

My blog reading has dropped off of late, so I apologise that I didn't catch up with your last few poems - but what I read from your month's effort was really impressive. You certainly must have a worthy batch to work with now. Must be a satisfying feeling. Congratulations!