If I can manage another poem today, I shall be a third of the way there - ten poems down in the first ten days of April, twenty more to go! I must admit that I do wonder what madness led me into this ...
But the hardest thing, I find, isn't getting the initial words down, it's moving on; the poems are very much in my head all the time and I keep thinking of better ways to express a line or a sharper metaphor for something I wrote a day or so ago. But no time for revising and refining at this point! Just for a quick note in the ideas book to come back to in May (or June or July...) before getting stuck in to the next one.
It means that there is not a great deal of opportunity to make progress on the other writing fronts at the moment without really burning the midnight oil. I have just been lent seven minutes books from my grandmother's old chapel; they span the years 1898 to the 1950s and are an invaluable resource for following up on the social history of her area - but so time consuming to work through! I think they must have been at the forefront of my mind when writing yesterday's "postcard" poem -
Writing Up Family History
To the music of memory
this motley crew
congas through my dreams,
Cinderella skeletons
tangoing through time
for their night at the ball.
I must choreograph with care,
for to watch them dance
will be to hear them speak.
(Copyright Gill Garrett 2015)
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