Definitely a better week for the creative writing, although once again I was unable to make the tutorial in St Albans. Just hope no-one thinks it’s because I don’t care!
Finished a couple of villanelles, one of which might just be suitable for TMA5. So, with the themed set of five sonnets, I have 5×14 + 19 = 89 lines of poetry ready for a severe redrafting. The TMA needs 80-100 lines, and 89 is about whack in the middle. So why did I think it’d be a good idea to add in a pantoum? The form doesn’t really work with less than four stanzas (and they need to be quatrains) because of the line repetitions, so that will take me up to 105 lines. But that’s OK, with the 5% leeway which is allowed in length.
I found writing pantoums to be great fun. Maybe it’s the engineer in me coming out, but they seem a bit more technical and not completely ‘arty’ like most poetry. It’s a simple set of rules: The second and fourth lines of the first stanza become the first and third of the second; then the second and fourth of the second stanza become the first and third of the third, and so on (as many as you like) until the last stanza. This follows the same rules, except in addition, the third and first lines of the opening stanza become the second and fourth lines of the closing one. So the first line is repeated as the last. The scheme sounds complicated but isn’t. The difficulty is getting the lines to make sense in different contexts while also making the rhymes turn out correctly. See what I mean about engineering?
TMA5 is, of course, getting well ahead, although I have to confess to jumping on to the poetry section in the course book. I think I wanted to do something different for a couple of weeks, and feel sort of refreshed by deviating a bit.
No result yet for TMA3, the 1000 word critique. Good marks or bad, it was an interesting exercise and I think it helped me pick out a few points about my own writing which should lead to an improvement.
Still reckoning on life writing for the final EMA, although haven’t made any further progress on the plan (TMA4). It needs to be in by 16th February, so just over a week to getting it finished if I want to upload it with a few days to spare. Best start doing some more work on it.
The nice man has taken away our dining table and chairs for repolishing, and we’re using the patio set. Inside, that is, what with all this snow about! It should be back next week sometime, and fingers crossed it will look a million dollars. Well, eight hundred quid’s worth at least…
philwadner 