Tuition

I have just organised some one-on-one tuition for my poetry writing. This will occur next Thursday at 2pm. I am really looking forward to that as the number of poems is growing steadily and it would be silly if they all needed major work to get them up to publishing standards. Especially if I could learn now so that I didn’t have simple mistakes going forward.

The reality is, the last poem tuition I had was back in high school, more than 50 years ago. A lot has changed since then, especially in the way poems are written. I think the style I am writing with this collection is old fashioned but I am trying to keep it the same. Even the word length seems fairly consistent, with poems around 700 words each. I am sure I will know more when the session is over.

I am not naturally rhythmically atuned and I try and find my metre by sound, rather than counting syllables as such. I know if it doesn’t sound right, and adjust words accordingly, but for all I know that may not be enough. I am so looking forward to learning more, though I hope I don’t come away so deflated that I never write again.

My tutor for the afternoon is a person who was a lecturer in poetry at an Australian university so I feel particularly privileged to have this special time. To be honest, I don’t even know how punctuation works in poetry and I am normally pretty picky with grammar so that in itself will be worth learning.

I know when I was a journalist, we had styles we worked to at the different newspapers. For example, in one paper we would write Mr Smith said, whereas, at another, it would be says Mr Smith. If we used the other, it would not be incorrect, but it would be for the particular style of that newspaper. I am assuming there would be things like that in poetry too. I have so much to learn.

I have now finished my two Cow poems, one set in 1988 and the other in 1998. These detail specific antics of two cows we had. I think I mentioned in a previous blog how not a single idea of a poem was coming to me, except for these two cow poems. It is a bit like my blog writing. I will be given one idea, with nothing new coming in until I have written that one. I am hoping some fresh ideas will start appearing now I have written these two poems.

It is still a week to go before my tuition so perhaps I will have written another before then. Here’s hoping.