(Image credit to Alvaro Serrano on Unsplash)

She's writing again!

My DYCP on libretti has been rolling along in the background of all the other creative endeavours and I have learnt one big thing over the process. Although it's true that opera doesn't have to rhyme, plenty of them do and it can be a very useful tool. Therefore, I have decided that learning more about poetry will help my writing.

I used to write poetry all the time as a kid. In fact, I earned my place at the grammar school with a poem. During my A Levels, I was writing songs regularly for my Performance Studies class. I don't know how I fell out of the habit. I guess other things took over. But not anymore!

Having the framework of creative tasks established already thanks to this challenge, it's been very easy to build poetry into my daily practice. I decided that I would try and write a tiny scrap of poetry every day in August, to strengthen the muscle of poetic phrasing and rhyming structure. This is one of my favourites so far:

"To summarise is to plagiarise,
to diminish and extinguish,
To take a wish and squish it
Into a form it was never meant to hold."

I'm letting this inspiration come from whatever has been going on or occupying my brain that day, and so some of them almost read like little diary entries. Others are much more abstract. There's no strict rhyming structure, but I am trying to use rhymes.

The next step will be to select some scraps with potential and try to extend them and actually apply some craft. I might hold off on that until September though. Or even longer. Just whenever I think I've spent enough time building the muscles.