Turquoise Monster

Last night I finally managed to make it along to a Cheltenham Poetry Society meeting, having gotten lost on a previous attempt!

The group was small but full of poetic-ness. The night opened with a writing exercise which covered Chinese style poetry and four part poems plus a bit about language. I wrote about 8 drafts some a lot rougher than others, some heavily rhyming and some short and sweet.

Also I have kept the sheet of ideas which I was working through and shall continue to work my way through them.

This has bought me up to nearly 20 poems already done for my WoPoWriMo challenge so I think it is a good job I am going for the hour a day spent on poetry rather than just the poem drafts themselves.

Then we moved onto a critic cycle where each of us would read a poem and others would comment on it. This was extremely useful as it it showed me that something Iw as trying to adapt to a page poem from a visual poem would perhaps be bettre suited to performance. Of course not everybody liked it and the absence of punctuation made people twitch.

I heard some fantastic poems and it is good to socialise with other writers other wise I find I get mired with feeling so one my own with writing

A raw Wopo poem:

My Friend

You are loud
Talking incessantly
Just calm down please
Words cascade over me
Your happy, your sad
In love, oh no mad?

On and On…
Words
Tripping over tongue
As the story is spun out

I missed which of the love interests
We are discussing today

Around you I am quiet
Or at least appear so
It is a contrast
When you are gone
Others moan I am so loud
Or that I babble so

My friend
I can only take you an hour At a time
But this is fine
We are friends With memories made

So coffee tomorrow?
The usual place?

I love writing poetry in note books rather than straight onto the computer – I do sometimes type them straight out but not normally as I write poetry when and were the idea strikes and this often means that I am out or in bed or some such. I always carry a note book with me, my laptop sits mostly on my desk.

Though I do use reporter note books with the throw away flimsy card covers, this tend to only be if I am working on something like The Little Books and know I am just going to fill them up quickly with mostly dross that will be thrown away or have been caught at a hospital with out a note book. What I favour is the more expensive notebooks, sometimes very expensive and sometimes from the pound shop. I have moods so they vary in style from beautiful embossed metallic purple butterflies to black and white photos to sparkly dragons, velvet micky mouses, abstract designs, dali and of course spider man.

These books double as a diary and note book with me working from each end to meet in the middle. One issue I am coming across is that the cheaper note books do note keep ink as nicely due to the acid in the paper – I wish I’d known this sooner but I didn’t. I do now.

I tend to write in biro – I used to write in fountain pen but stopped as it tended to mean I could use only one side of the paper and it slowed my writing speed (a lot).

Note books are not the only thing I crave to create – I need visual and audio stimuli. Not necessarily whilst writing, but within a couple of weeks and preferably just before sitting down though some of it does need to sink in for later works.

Now for the last ingredient – I am obsessed with hot drinks.

It doesn’t really matter if it is herbal tea, normal tea, posh tea, coffee, latte, hot choc or mulled wine. For writing challenges I like to pick a specific mug – this year for WoPo I have chosen the new cupcake mug I was given for my birthday. The icing lid helps to keep the tea warm if I get carried away with the writing too!

Yesterday I did not follow the writing exercises for WoPoWriMo instead I went into Cheltenham and meet up with some other fellow WoPos and gave out stickers and postcards. Then I went on to Centre Arts a local art gallery and workshop centre which I love. They hold an arts cafe every Saturday afternoon.

This was the first one I made it along to. I sat and chatted to artists and knitters and writers and looked at the paintings and drank tea and coffee and eat cookies and wrote poems.

I actually penned about 10 in the end which was amazing though I would say that I am experimenting with the shorter type of poem once again.

It was a very productive day and I recommend trying to find something similar in an area near you if you are a poet.

One raw Wopo poem

Creativity burns
Within
A fire
Inspiration lit
Skill built
Fuelled by ideas
Sending concepts
To the stars

This is the web-badge for WoPoWriMo and yes it is one of my drawings 🙂 I am still trying to write my poem so you may well be getting it tomorrow – I have decided to post something on here each day during the challenge but obviously this means the poems are going to be raw and not edited so sorry about that!

I am once again taking part in the February poetry writing challenge WoPoWriMo. After a successful MoP in January I am hopeful for this challenge but I am also running the site for them again this year so may find it a bit of a stretch!

Unlike MoP I am going to be sticking to the prompts which I haven’t done since the first year! This year is WoPo’s fifth birthday which seems nuts but there you go.

Wish me luck 🙂

I already have 48 poems – some very rough, others less so and all dark and twisted and fitting with the gothic theme so I am very happy 🙂

They will steadily be appearing on Black Monster.

Yet again this year I failed to actually sign up to the site :/ But as the poems were of a darker nature I felt that they wouldn’t have been appropriate for their area for posting poems anyway.

Later this year I hope to tie the poems in with a similar set of flash fictions and maybe a novelette.

January is always Month of Poetry as started by Kathryn Apel. The idea like most poem a day challenges is to write a poem each and everyday. I like to up the stakes a bit generally and am going for an hour spent on poetry each day instead.

Now it is 11 days into January and I have been very busy sorting poetic stuff out and writing a series of Gothic Poems for my Black Monster blog.

I like writing dark and twisted verse more suited to the Romantic era but am also very aware that there is little room for getting it published. But that does not matter I shall build them up into my own collection.

I am planning to stat submitting more poetry, I had a good success rate last year but I also submitted only a few pieces and I want to up that. I decided once before that I was bored with submitting so stopped and started this blog but I feel ready to start again. The issue I had was trying to keep tabs on who had what copy right and so on and also I simply was not producing the volume of poetry I am these days – this can be seen as a good and a bad thing!

So that is number one.

Number two is sorting this blog out – it’s been spam attacked, I have posts that have never gone live from events and things which I will back blog and so on…

Number three is to sort out my own poetry collections. These currently stand at:

Ballads of the Scientifica

Turquoise Monsters Poetry Collection

The Doomsday Collection

The Political Converse

Without and Within

And…

The Little Books of Poetry – of which the main focus will be:

1) The Little Book of Festive Poetry

2) The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry

3) The Little Book of Easter Poetry

Apart from this lot I am going to be attempting to do more performances and attending workshops and things by various local groups.