Overview #62: Poetry

So I started writing for this challenge at about 4 a.m. Sunday the week it began. The challenge was poetry, and the wordcount was unlimited, so I thought - well, what type of poetry represents an unlimited wordcount better than epic poetry? Of course, I'm no poet, so taking on an epic poem was really quite delusional of me. And it went pretty badly - it started off in the present tense, and switched to past tense, and then somewhere along the way I forgot what the verb tense was for each section anyway. It was a whole lot of description, similes and metaphors piled onto each other to make pointless things concrete. Some of it was real (like I google the directions from Glastonbury to Bath and then from Bath to Dinas Emrys), and some of it was totally made up (Arthur had no reason to be really hanging around Aquae Sulis), and some of it was more old-fashioned than necessary (Caledfwlch for Excalibur), but it was fun to write nevertheless, since I've been digging on Arthurian legends as of late. I structured the poem based on the typical conflicts found in fiction (self v. self, self v. another character, self v. society, &c), and I had a lot of fun with it (although technically there are seven standard conflicts; our weekly challenges only leave room for six.

So I was overambitious and under-performing, but it was good fun this week.