WoPo – And the Poetry Reboot (by sarah)
Many years ago I set up a poetry writing group for a group of student writers who I met at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and so of course this manifested as a month of writing poetry and the first year there was a pledge sign up and a private forum and the website with prompts and all the social media and so on. I had guest poets and so on and it was great but a lot of work. I tried to pay others to do some of the work whilst I was pregnant with Mary but it just didn't really happen and so I scaled the event back. Then the physical group all finished university or drifted away and others couldn't do feb so I started doing it as a more year round thing and dropped the specific URL and tried to go with just World Poetry rather than a month writing drive.
But...
Turned out some people like the month drive thing so its ended up as a bit of a miss match and half forgotten project which is a shame as when I went through the archive for its tenth anniversary I realised there was a lot of writing prompts and exercises and lots and lots of awesome poets stories and of course many of the poems written from the prompts have indeed gone on to be published.
Last year the prompts when up on Instagram mainly because I was dealing with hospitals and things and it just wasn't going to happen any other way. But this means I need to think about where this is all going? I feel February just is the main thing but other bits through out the year works fine - I might even manage to do some physical meet ups this year. This has already prodded me into sorting out a little poetry outing last week at The Folk Gloucester to be inspired by Cedric Titcombes work - it is amazing and I wish I had all the money to buy some of those images - each one is a liminal space in and of itself - but that is another story for another time!
Basically I can not run the sort of this I did in the first year by myself - it just isn't possible but covid did impact us as a family in drastic ways plus obviously the bereavements so the site is a mess, stuff is spread over multiple platforms and so on.
So there will be prompts and I will share them - they may not be exactly daily (I do not want a repeat of the year the scheduler did not work) but I will try and I am also trying to get myself back out to some poetry events. I want to take part in the zooms and things but the clipping and things is quiet exhausting so like with the physical events I am reserving my energy for the ones that have asked me to perform - it is purely an energy thing - I would love to attend so much stuff but I just can't.
And that brings me onto the fact that I am just having to take it all slowly and build myself and the projects back up slowly - I suck at this aspect as I want to do everything NOW!
In summary - if anyone does want to take part here are the links - there is loads of archive material so you don't have to wait and if you meed or want the prompts in another format please just say ie there are little booklets for the older prompts and so on.
Facebook - there is also a group but it is reserved for people I know
Twitter it was under TheMonsterBlogs but twitter has broken many things including the tools that let me switch accounts easily so if anything goes up it will be just under my own account Saffy.
Lastly I feel I have failed slightly at the World part of the WoPo - I do have participants from all over the world but I had wanted lots of articles on poems from other languages and cultures etc and that just never really happened even when I had a budget to pay people to write articles - so I don't know weather I should be changing the name or not. Also on that note a lot of the prompts get used by writers for stories and things too which might be a stretch of the poetry bit but what do people think?
Events and Outings, Poems, Writing | sarah | 
Mon 30th Jan 2023 12:18 pm
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