Job Done! Sort of.

Poetry is an... (Photo credit: liber(the poet);)

Thanks for your patience this past two weeks.  I finished my project and have now caught up with your comments and visited your blogs.

It wasn’t an exciting project; and I say it is finished, but it isn’t properly finished, not like a varnished table, a girl at a posh Swiss school, or a gross of Maltesers.  It will never be properly finished because I will keep adding to it.

It was one of my 101/1001 tasks:

Type up and print out for folder and notebook over 150 poems I’ve written.

It started life as Type up and print out for folder and notebook over 100 poems I’ve written.  Then I wrote some more poems.  Then NaPoWriMo 2012 started…  I lost count around the 204 mark.  I had poems going back to NaPoWriMo 2011 and before, beginning in March of last year.  I didn’t dare leave it any longer.

My reason for doing it is that I want to start properly submitting to poetry competitions, anthologies, magazines and publishers.  I have been rather half-hearted up to now.  It is difficult to enter a poem in a competition when this is what the publisher will receive:

Hi Handsome/Beautiful Publisher! 

Please accept my submission for your competition on the theme, Dragonflies: Myth or Fruit? 

As you can see, there’s nothing attached.  That’s because I know I wrote something on that very subject last August, but I can’t find it scribbled in one of my 47 notebooks so it may not be typed up yet; and if it is, it’s got a title that has nothing to do with the subject matter – possibly along the lines of Kill Me Before I Die – and is hidden amongst the 800 or so poems I have typed up but haven’t put into collections yet and I can’t find it, despite wasting a whole morning on it when I could have been cleaning.* 

Would you mind including me in your comp even though I’ve nothing to show for it except this polite letter and twenty quid with your name on it?

Thanks.

I. Wannabbee-Faymos

*At this point, dear reader, you will know it’s fantasy but the publisher will not.

Sorting over a thousand poems was harder work than I anticipated – even harder than typing them up – because many of them fit into more than one category.  I managed to get it down to thirty-one themed collections.   My hope is that, when I want to submit, if I haven’t written something especially for the theme, it will be easier to find a suitable poem if I can narrow it down to a broad category.

National Poetry Month Display @ Forest Hills (Photo credit: mySAPL)

Here are a few of my collections with their possible titles:

THEME:            TITLE:

Death                  Grief Is An Itchy Scab
Celebrity            The Cult Of Self-Absorption
Forms                 Forms
Religion              Bad Christian
Britain                This Grim, Unpleasant Land
M.E.                    What About M.E.?
Pairs                    Strange Couplings
Poo                      No. 2 Cycle
Haiku                  Seventeen Syllables
South Africa      Get Out Of Africa: An Ex-expat Perspective on South Africa,
……………………..During and After Apartheid

I know what you’re thinking: with titles like that, how can a publisher say no to me, right?

Joke 400

Two drunks were walking home from the pub.  John said to Mike, “What a night!  Look at that moon.”

Mike stopped to look then said, “That’s the sun, not the moon.”

They argued for a while, until another drunk weaved past.

“Hey mate,” said John; “can you settle an argument?  That thing shining in the sky – is it the moon or the sun?”

The drunk looked up and then back at them, and said, “Sorry, pal, I dunno.  I’m not from round these parts.”