Blog 1: Composing Poems

After the end of napowrimo, blogging a poem a day every day of April, I wanted to try blogging a day but opening it up for other topics, although probably including many poem drafts! This evening I went to a Poetry MA students workshop, so I thought I’d blog about that to start. We tried group tankas, using the haikubes as prompts for words to include. The poems were incredibly lush in language due to the random words churned up by rolling the kubes.

I wrote this tanka, an extended haiku, 5,7,5,7,7, just absorbing the room’s atmosphere:

Spearmint scent, cars groan

while you chew the supple gum-

flexing your cheek muscles.

Those languid thoughts, the odd day

both wet and bright, taking turns.

I then wrote a twisted haiku inspired poem, which links into those birds dropping from the sky, I think I remember last year’s newspaper articles.

Dead blackbirds, her mown grass;

Do you think the flock was blocked?

They fell like feathered stones.

To complete my short form experimenting I pushed some haikubes into a cinquain shaped poem:

I also today went to a half hour rehearsal of the music piece for which I wrote libretto.  I am collaborating with composer Sophie Klingels Mojsiejenka, a first year student at the Royal Northern College. She’s made a beautiful thing of the narrative of it, I haven’t heard the singer sing my words yet though, so I only hope the words  sound as good as the music … will be hearing the full piece next Tuesday evening at the Rosamond Prize event set up through MMU.

My first word was duck, and this is my first blog post of this blog.