I'm a poet!

I'm enjoying writing poetry but sending it off to be marked is difficult and painful. So I was very, very pleased and relieved to get a 96% for my TMA05, three poems about my sister and the sea, and my tutor really liked them. I only lost marks because I chose to leave off an envoi on one of the sestinas (though the limited line count influenced me) because I liked the last line so much. I've been working on a bit of prose as a starting point for another poem, but I don't know if it will work. That's the problem with working poetry for assignments, you have to be struck with the muse and you can't force it. I can't really for fiction, either, but at least I can edit or plot or something for fiction. There's always such a lot of clearing up with fiction, it's like keeping a horse, lovely to see it trot out over the field but there's such a lot of shit left in the stable to clear up... Poetry feels like cutting a doll's hair: you have to cut exactly the right amount off and it won't grow back (my sister, if she were alive, would testify to the fact that I couldn't get that right, either). Some poems have been trimmed down to the plastic scalp and discarded forever, I don't seem to be able to resurrect stuff once I've thrown it out, even though I keep old drafts around. I'm going to tidy up poems and send them off. That's cheered me up enormously, even if it now means TMA06 is due in in only ten days and has to be part of the first chapter of my novel, the one that I have completely scrapped and am now rewriting....