Midnight Poetry

When it's midnight on the meadow
And the cats are in the shed
And the river tells a story
At the window by my bed
If you listen very closely
Be as quiet as you can
In the yard you'll hear him
It is the pony man
(from lyrics of The Pony Man by Gordon Lightfoot, Genius Lyrics)

If you substitute poetry man for pony man, that was me at midnight on Monday just gone. I hit the submit buttons on the creative element of my dissertation (36 poems totally 6009 words) and on the critical element (a reflective essay totalling 2168 words). and with that my MA in creative writing is done and dusted and over bar the results and graduation ceremony!

This is the Way the Poem Ends

In the last week of September 2018 there was a gathering where we were able to meet the tutors who would be teaching each module. On Monday 1st October was my first 3-hour workshop, kicking off with Screenwriting. Tuesdays were Poetry 1 and Thursdays were Long Form Fiction. It's hard to believe a whole year has gone by!

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
(from T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, part V)

Forward Planning

The thing I am most looking forward to is beginning turning the 6,000 words I wrote for my Long Form Fiction module assignment into a completed novel. I've done a bit of internet research and I believe there are books that can have you writing a novel in a week with no prior knowledge of grammar and no need to have ever read a book. Personally I'd like to get mine finished in a couple of years! It was a difficult assignment to write because the goalposts were moved the day before I went home for Christmas! The story I thought I was going to write, essentially the same story as my film script, just in a different guise, turned out to need to be significantly different from the film script! So I set to and wrote a whole other story. and it really spoke to me and I want to find out where the story goes :)

But it's not the end of the poetry ... I'll be using my dissertation poems as the basis of my first full collection. I'm guessing length-wise I'll need about 20 more poems, but some of those can come from ones published on websites that therefore couldn't be used in the dissertation.

At the moment I'm reading novels and short stories featuring female Irish protagonists, especially those written by Irish authors, to get a better feel for the dialogue and the ways Irish characters tend to be portrayed. Naturally I do anticipate making research trips to London where the novel takes place, and Ireland where the girl harks from. The female character in my novel has found herself homeless in London and her story is entwined with that of a Civil Servant whose life seems to fall apart as hers seems to improve :)