Well.

I haven't actually discussed this a lot, but I haven't really written poetry in a while. The last one I finished was "The Murdered Woman Comes Home", written in January 2008 or so, which is about when I hit the midpoint of my Modernist Poetry course in the last year of my degree. It was a great course, and I learned a lot: how to see the layers and references and assonances and themes, how densely packed the ideas were in Pound or Eliot or Auden, the discrete art of word choice and how every word radiates back to a whole web of cultural debris and etymology. One of the things I learned was that, when it came to writing poetry, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

So I stopped.

This is usually the part of the story where people scowl at the academic establishment and its crushing of my poetic spirit and tell me to keep reaching for that rainbow and overcome. And while the faith is nice, this isn't what this story is about. I chose to stop. Because all of a sudden I could see through skin into muscle and the play of veins around bone, and it just wasn't good enough to write poems that only sat on the skin anymore. I need to learn to write through to bone, and until I could give that task the time and attention it deserved -- think up dense thoughts for dense poetry -- I wasn't going to half-ass the job.

So you will understand why this took me completely by surprise.

January 5, 2010 Progress Notes:

"Little Songs"

Words today: 100.
Words total: 100.
Reason for stopping: Draft.

Books in progress: Margo Lanagan, Black Juice.
The glamour: Dayjob, dinner out with my mother, some writery business e-mail replied to.

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It's a formal Petrarchan sonnet with a music motif, a poetics terminology motif, and a dirty Greek pun. The structure complements the content. While I can't say the whole etymological level works, I know at least some of it does, including the title. It has no speculative element, period.

I would appreciate a profesional eye or three, if anyone's game.