what would you do for poetry?

                          
This week I made the momentous (well, for me) decision to choose my next university course. It took some doing, some worrying about if I was making the right choice but in the end I chose and having had a night to sleep on it (or not sleep on it in my case) I think I made the right choice.

My decision was based not on career plans or what will look good on a CV or when discussed at gatherings over a beer etc. but on what would feed my poetry.

Seriously, I based a huge bill of thousands of pounds and the surefire entry into months of what looks like the toughest course I have yet undertaken on the conviction that it will feed my poetry.

Is it, you might ask, a literature course? Is it one dissecting the poetic works of others or teaching me how to write poetry? None of the above - that happened to some extent on my present course. It is one that is called, somewhat enigmatically 'Exploring Art and Visual Culture' and for this I have eschewed a course in literature that included the Beat poets! But wait, I am not completely mad. I know that I am inspired by medieval art, the Renaissance and everything up to the modern and I know that I will learn nuances that will creep into my work and for the rest.... the literature.... the poetry of Beat generations or otherwise, well I shall keep reading and perhaps take some extra course to fill that gap in the things that are the food of life to me.

So that is my next course and in the meanwhile, I shall pop up a jpg of a poem I'm currently working on as it is visual and although it was started before some recent news it seems like a portent of its coming. The news was that my mother died last week. It was posted to me on Facebook. The poem is about receiving benedictions after a death.

It's a strange world to be sure.

Rhymes well, rhyming well, a rhyming well.

A few weeks of being away from writing anything that I can publish on my own blog as I'm collating work for a submission to my tutor - how strange that still sounds!

The inspiration for a poem about poets.

So, why have I not created 'stuff' that I am not considering for my poetry submissions and just publishing here? Well the simple answer is that I am so het-up about achieving good marks that I dare not let anything go until I'm past this latest hurdle and back into the world of preparing some other narrative forms for submission. How crazy is that? (She sighs theatrically)

This week the course has been about rhymes, half rhymes, non-rhyming poetry forms - much-heated debate about how 'well' a thing in these categories rhymes or if indeed it's a poem at all - and the wonderful world of the rhyming well.

What, you may be asking, is a rhyming well? If you imagine a stone (or in our case a word) dropped into a well, and the associated (rhyming words) rippling out with lessening force (or nearness in rhyme) as they reach the outer rings of the plop! This has brought up some delicious words and I've loved the experimentation in sounds and associations but for others it has been.... trying. 

My personal tastes in poetry are like my music tastes - eclectic so perhaps it was easier for me to be flexible about the poetry diet of the past few weeks. I enjoy things that rhyme well, include half/slant/ etc. rhyme or no rhyme at all, and I've even shared some of my more experimental poetry on my tutor group forum. 

The experimental item I'm thinking of uses the page as both white space and dynamic space. In it the words fall down the page - why wouldn't they? There is no need for them to travel only in one direction. Why would I control my words when they want to be free? In another I use a more formal repetitious format that doesn't have a name that I am aware of but it felt right and I used it. Expect to see examples of my poems creeping back here again when the coast is clear.