Friday, January 25, 2008

2007 in Poetry

I spent little time with poetry in 2007. Having completed Father Daughter Day the year before (but with most of it written 2004-2005), I read it through once and did some minor edits, and found a few beta readers in my target audience. The year began with it under consideration by a gift book editor, but I heard in June (after three follow-up e-mails) that they weren't interested. I showed it to a couple of editors at a writers conference in November, but as expected they were not interested in poetry. I almost looked into having the book illustrated, but decided the time was not right. So I'm letting this sit for a while.

As to writing poetry, my production this year was only seven:
- a sonnet "Yoked", on the progression of marriage
- a free verse poem "A Far Away Look", the first free verse I've tried for a while
- a light verse "Oxymoron No. 1", about reading poetry
- a light verse epithet "For One Who Died Too Young"
- a light verse "On The Virtues Of 'Good' Or 'Fine'"
- an haiku
- a sonnet "Of Bollards And Berms", about the inner struggle to purity

Several of these I workshopped at Absolute Write or Mosaic Musings.

I just didn't feel like writing poetry this year. Very few situations arose where I thought That would make a good poem and sat down to do it. I don't know if this means my poetry interest is waning, or just that the time wasn't there to do both prose and poetry, and thus I supressed, either purposely or subconciously, the desire to write it. I hope it's the latter, and that at some point in the future my desire to write poetry--and read it--will come back.

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