The Final Week or Only the Beginning

Today I’m beginning the final week of my portable MFA in poetry. As I read the instructions, she says that after this week I can go back to the beginning and start again. I have to admit, that hadn’t crossed my mind, but sitting here looking at the final week of this two month experience, I see it as a real possibility. I guess I’ll see if I feel the same at the end of the week.

The Prompts

Today I ran across a daily prompt: Three Things Challenge at pensitivity101. Today’s three words are Ravage, Devour, and Detour.

It’s Haibun Monday at dVerse Poets Pub. Today we’re writing about Mono no Aware, or awareness of the transience and impermanence of things.

Today’s Poem

Offering Colors When They Fall

Saturday while I sewed, there was one bolt of lightning, one bowl of thunder, then the sky broke and the rain poured like all the faucets were cranked all the way open, battering and bruising the poor May flowers, so new to this world, tearing them from their clusters and throwing them to the ground ravaged. I walked the yard today, observing the piles of red and pink, tinged brown, already decomposing, and though they have fallen, they are like stars in the heather, constellations detoured to the dirt sky.

Time will devour all
May blossoms fall in the storm
paint the walk pink

Poetry MFA Week Seven Review

This week felt like I made real progress. The focus on stanza breaks and how they control time during reading came up in a Critique of the Week I watched on Youtube, and then I was able to offer advice about stanza breaks at the Burlington Writers Poetry Review. Critique of the Week is offered by Rattle poetry every Friday at 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern).

Writing: This week’s work with stanzas helped me become more aware of the interplay of form and function in a poem.

Reading: I became much more aware of how many of the poems in the three collections I’ve been studying don’t have any stanza breaks. This made me even more curious about why the poems with stanza breaks had them, and the meaning of their placement.

Portable MFA Week Eight: Endings and Beginnings

This week is about continuing to revise my favorite poem I wrote over the last two months of this MFA until I have worn out the impulse (at least for now) to work on it. I would usually think that shouldn’t take long, but I’ve been looking at the revision demonstration I did two years ago and I put a lot of time into revising one poem for that, so I have a lot of work to do.

Writing: This week’s assignment is to “work toward wearing yourself out with a favorite poem you’ve written.” I’ll be journaling about the poem I wrote. Then I’ll create two new drafts and comparing the three drafts later. I’ll also be reviewing the whole eight weeks to explore the experience.

Reading: This week, the assignment is to look back at the first poem I studied, and explore how my interaction with it has changed.

This week ends the poetry chapter, but it also says to go straight to the beginning and start again. I’ve gotten a lot out of this experience and think I would continue to progress by putting more time into each step of the program. Something to think about this week.

This is also the third and final week of Playing with Poetry: Creative Writing and Poetics from The University of Newcastle Australia on Future Learn. I’ve been enjoying it.

Looks like a big week ahead.

Time is precious, and I appreciate that you spend some of your time here at Experience Writing reading and learning along with me. I set up a buy me a coffee account, so you can buy me a beverage to support what I do here. It will help a lot.

Happy Reading and Writing!