So by Sandra Horn

So. I hope you’ll notice how on-trend this is. It is the latest thing, to begin a statement or an answer with ‘So.’ It’s peculiar, but with any luck it will supersede the idiotic ‘like’, which Alexander Armstrong twitted so nicely in a sketch set in (I think) 18^th century: ‘I fear the speech of the young has fallen off sadly of late; I can remember when they would commonly use as many as six similes in a single sentence: I was like, and he was like, then we were like...’ etc.  I can’t remember the exact words so this is an approximation. 

Why bother about these things at all, I hear you ask. Because I’m at a loose end, that’s why. Bad case of the dreaded Writer’s Block. Too much time on my hands in which to nitpick and grump. The garden has been too sodden to do anything much. I’ve tried taking up knitting and I’m very proud of the sweater shown here, made of leftover yarns and bits and pieces. Not as proud as I would be if I didn’t know about all the mistakes, but the overall effect isn’t bad.  I’ve just finished it, in time for the weather to warm up.

It has occurred to me that perhaps the knitting has prolonged the Block. It’s all spatial and demands a lot of concentration. My spatial abilities don’t bear thinking about, so maybe I’ve shut down my word-making brain because I’ve been battling so hard with them there’s been no room for anything else.

Alternatively, having recently got to not-quite-the-end of the 52 poems challenge, perhaps I’ve just run out of steam.  I got as far as poem 47, Learning Your Lesson and I wrote about learning to knit, sitting on my Great-grandmother’s knee; in, round, through, JUMP him off! And she would bounce me up and the stitch off.  It was delightful and I was quite pleased with the poem, but the next one, macaronic verse, finished me. It is, in case you haven’t come across it, a form in which ‘two languages co-exist, often in alternating form, so that one implicitly comments on the other.’ I couldn’t hack it in Italian and English, so went back to schoolgirl French and English, but all I could come up with was a sorry little 4-line jingle. Depressing. After that, I couldn’t face the last four themes: 49, Everything is Illuminated, 50, Pulling Punches, 51 Year of the Goat and 52, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. They are an absolute gift, or would be if my brain hadn’t seized up.

I still hope to complete all 52 sometime. It’s been a stimulating and illuminating exercise and to some extent, it did what I’d hoped: it immersed me in poetry. There was always something to read, often new to me, as part of the exercise, and on most days of every week I was thinking about the task. It also produced extra poems not on the to-do list and enabled me to confront and write about some deeply personal things I hadn’t been able to deal with up to then.  That was a surprise.

As I went on through the tasks, I added some things I’d already written which seemed to be relevant to that week’s theme. I’ve ended up with a folder of about 70. 

I know some of them are bad or very bad, some need more work, and some are not for public consumption, they just filled a need, but I’m hoping that in amongst the dross there may be some twinkling nuggets. I’m pleased with some of them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The next step will be to subject them to members of my Writers’ Group for some critical feedback (or do I mean subject the writers to the poems?). So. We’ll see.