I begin with an apology my friends. I had a little hiccup in my blogging output at the start of this week when things simply got too much and I didn’t have the energy to string together two words to form a sentence for you, so I had a little rest and began again yesterday.
The reason for my loss of energy is largely because I have fallen behind with my studies and I have two deadlines looming. I have also got some other work to do collating comments on a survey which is taking large chunks of time, so time and energy for my blog was severely limited.
I also had a very busy couple of weeks with church which has been BRILLIANT. In the last two weeks I have preached and led the service at both churches (St Peter’s have a service at 9.30am and my home church of St Paul’s have ours at 11am) and preparing for them has been great fun, but taxing too. I hope you can understand why my blog had to take a back seat!
And it has all been WORDS. Words for my preaching, words for the liturgy last week, words for prayers, words for poetry, words in my music notes, words for the survey work I’ve been doing, words on emails and application forms…..Usually I am a wordaholic but earlier this week I had hit my limit.
However, it’s not over yet and there’s more to come. My biggest worry at the minute is that I have a deadline coming up on Monday where I have to hand in my assignment for my creative writing course. It’s poetry this time, and I can honestly say that I don’t think I’m cut out to be a poet. At all. I have been struggling with so many aspects of it – line length, rhyme, rhythm, theme etc – and I have almost given up on the whole thing so many times it’s getting to be laughable now.
The task is to produce 40 lines of poetry in any form and to write a reflective commentary on the process and pitfalls I faced whilst producing it. So far, the commentary is going to be the easy bit! “I can’t find my voice, I have drafted and redrafted dozens of couplets and stanzas trying to cobble something together, I have had feedback from the student forum (helpful) and from my husband (not so helpful – “it doesn’t even rhyme!”) and have realised that my creative talents lie in other directions” etc.
Until this evening.
We had a meeting at St Peter’s church tonight, and I took the chance to have a look round the building afterwards. It isn’t an unknown building to me, but I was desperately looking for inspiration from somewhere, and it being a 150 year old building I thought I might be able to pick up something.
And I’m glad to say I did! I can’t publish it here yet because of anti-plagiarism software the tutors use to check submitted work. I can fail the assignment if they see that it is online already, even though it is entirely my own work. How you can plagiarise yourself I don’t know, but them’s the rules I’m afraid.
I do feel better tonight about my workload now. Apart from cracking the back of the poetry assignment, I have managed to catch up quite a lot of my music coursework too in the last few days and I have even managed to make a start on the blanket I have taken an order for a couple of weeks ago. If only I didn’t distract myself so many times through the day I’m sure I would have been able to do even more, but hey ho, I’m only human and I can only do what I can do!
So there you have it. All these things going on in the past couple of weeks reached a bottleneck over the weekend and things are a little better now. Just in time for the next weekend!
Mushy Cloud 
You do seem weighed down with words at the moment.
I have noticed in your blog that you express things most clearly when you talk about your faith. Maybe there’s a possibility for crossover there with your poetic work?
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I prefer free form for poetry. I find all that metre and everything far too restricting when it comes to creativity. I leave it to the likes of Dylan, who referred to is poetry as his ‘craft and sullen art.’
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Oh my word, I am so glad to have got the poetry assignment out of the way! I didn’t really enjoy doing free form – it felt too loose to be “proper” poem to me. Perhaps it’s because I need some structure to work with to understand it first, and THEN mess about with form once I’ve understood which rules can be broken. I’ve just had a read of your latest poetry on your blog – it’s really good and you have a solid message to share. There’s definitely a lot to be said for the juxtaposition of beautiful language in poetry with the dirtiness of politics.
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Maybe poetry is just not a techie thing… I’m with Kevin on the ‘if it doesn’t rhyme it’s not really poetry it’s a short essay!’ Favourite Poem being:
Algy met a bear,
a bear met Algy.
The bear was bulgy,
the bulge was Algy!
Classic stuff eh? Wonder whether the author had to write a reflective commentary on his process and pitfalls?
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