It’s Poetry Wednesday - more old stuff

Experimenting with form at university

Moving along with the theme of older poems from my youth, no longer 13 at uni I experimented with form. Considering I was doing an English/Education degree and we had an optional subject of Writing, Stories, and Myths, we were actually taught very little about form. Haiku, sonnet, rhyming couplets, etc. nothing contemporary. We explored the Oresteia and Ancient Greek forms. We were given starting lines from 19th century poets and told to expand. What we didn’t do was ars poetics, found poems, black out poems, pantoum, odd lines, 3 words a line poems, and all that sort of stuff. It was mainly take a line and write more. I was bored. Often bored. I often got snarky in my writing.

Anyways, I wrote this, experimenting on my own - well it actually began in a lecture - where I fell off my chair I was leaning back at too sharp an angle on the radiator as I actually fell asleep. Luckily no one realised that was why the careful balance of plastic chair on metal rad changed, the lack of tension in the muscles. I hurt the tendons in the back of my knees on the edge of the chair as I bumped down hard. I limped for weeks afterwards. Experimenting happened, once back in my room, with line spacing etc, to represent the gaps that were also worth mentioning. I was quite pleased with it at the time.

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Photo by Andrés Gómez on Unsplash

The Epitome of Boredom: In an English Lecture

I as am sitting there
on this four chair
	   and peacefully facing
my dreams		 drop
       slowly     into     dark
soft       compassingen
nondaylight                   nor dawn
I as am sitting                                             afar
In that place
	          here.

Well, I wonder what delight I shall conjure up for next week? So, till next time.

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