Student Cafe

Edit: Open University course is done - graduation is in October - and I'm very pleased with a 2.1 degree and 81% overall score on the module. Since finishing the course I've had a little break and I've been working on developing some writing projects, but now it's time to get back into the blog. I logged in to post a writing prompt and discovered this post unpublished in drafts. I actually rather liked it on second reading, so I thought it worth posting... here's the original post, including the comment. Enjoy!

I suck at poetry: I don't write it, I rarely read it and I don't really 'get it'. I can't even write Haiku with any degree of success. When it comes to poetry, there's some stuff that I appreciate (rather than 'love' or even 'like') but there's a whole bunch of popular, acclaimed and famous poetry that actually bores me. So I think it's safe to say, I am a poetic philestine.

However, the current OU course had a little section on poetry, specifcally focussing on Villanelle, Pantoum, Sestinas and Sonnets. This is a Pantoum and is a product of that section. It's not the result of a assignment or exercise... just something that sort of happened.

Normally the lines in a Pantoum are of equal length (because the 2nd and 4th lines of each stanza repeat in the next one) but this thing resisted.

So here it is... the first poem I've written since High School... a certain number of unspecified years.

* * *

Student Cafe

Here you gather

notebook in hand, hope in your heart.

Students gathered,

To chat and to fawn and to prove you are smart.

Notebook in hand, hope in your heart;

Now resolved

to chat and to fawn and to prove you are smart:

So evolved!

Now resolved

to despondence and mournful concern that you’re not

so evolved.

“Give me love and a smile; an emotional crutch.”

To despondence and mournful concern that I’m not

worth the bother.

Give me love and a smile; an emotional crutch.

Here we gather.