Sunday, July 24, 2016

I was invited to submit poems to Project 365+1 for the space of one month. I chose the month of June. June is a busy month for me. I teach full time and there is a lot of work to do at that time marking essays. I could have chosen to contribute in December when I am on holiday, but I decided to do what I never do and to commit to working on my own creative pursuits in the school term. Such things have been left to the school holidays for the last twenty years of my life.

Earlier in the year, during national poetry month I had contributed a poem a day to the Dirty Thirty project, so I knew I should be able to write a poem a day on top of full time teaching.There were prompts that had to be responded to each day on that project, so in many ways that was a far harder project to contribute to as some of the rules were very specific. I often needed to spend time editing my lines down so as I had the correct amount of syllables in each line!

What I enjoyed most about Project 365+1 was the fact that I was placed in contact with so many well informed and experienced writers. It was wonderful to read the works of so many poets whose writing I had never read before. I also found the feedback that was given to me on my work subtle and insightful. It was interesting for me to be have conversations with other writers about my work. I realised that this is something that has been lacking in my life as I am surrounded by friends who are visual artists or academics.

The frightening part was posting a poem each day that had only just been written, and written quickly in that spare half an hour I had before I had to go to sleep. It was interesting to post the poems on my Facebook page at the same time as on the blog and compare the responses from my friends, some of whom have been subjected to reading my writing for over thirty years.

It was a great project to participate in and I would love to contribute again. I saw my writing change over the space of a month, and happily the last poem I posted to the site is the poem I like the most out of the pieces I wrote that month.

No comments:

Post a Comment