Well here we are in the first day of autumn, and it seemed like a good time to give the website a bit of a make-over. Hope you like it. The plan is to make it more streamlined for those who are here for info, but not necessarily to read blog posts. Let me know if you have trouble finding things – I’m hoping that the navigation menus in the header will make things much easier, but that assumes that I’ve actually set them up properly …
Today is also the beginning of my six months of immersion in work for Janus. I’m not going to tell you what my daily target is (although I can tell you that it took me pretty much the whole of February to get a run-up into it, and then only just barely), but my weekly target for this first month is:
- one new poem or completion of an older poem-start
- one bastard-edit of an existing poem or close reading of a poem by someone else
Doesn’t sound too impressive, does it? But the important thing is that it’s a start, and it is something that I should be able to do, and maintain without burning myself out, or getting completely overwhelmed. The pace picks up as the days grow shorter (usual catastrophes willing), but for now I’m trying to just work week by week, and day by day.
I did a bit of an inventory of decent poem-starts from my two most recent workbooks, and I’ve actually got roughly twenty poems to work on just there, which is quite encouraging. Some of them are almost complete, and some are just a page of notes and a couple of lines. And today I finished the first draft of a new poem, which I’ve been playing with most of the week. So as another teaser, here are the first and last lines, along with the place-holder title.
May the muse be with you!†
Silks
She straddled the ridge-cap. Against her legs
the day’s warmth
[…]
the mane, streaming in the wind.
But not before I’ve finished with him for the day.
A Dark Feathered Art 