Saturday, 7 March 2009

Collected works

As you may know I like words. A lot. I like poetry, in particular, a lot. So it was with a mix of delight and trepidation that I agreed to help judge entries to a local poetry competition. Turns out there were lots of entries. Hundreds of them.
At first I was full of enthusiasm but by the fifth reading I was going wordblind. Or rather I was wishing I was...

Some phrases will stay with me for some time.
Gems such as:
'crawled to the door like an injured maraca'
and
'the mud and vomit they call stew, really makes me want to spew'

Whittling the entries down to a shortlist would have been a pleasant task were it not for a series of unexpected and unavoidable demands on my time and energies in the shape of interviews and electrocution [see previous witter]. Given that I need in excess of 10 hours sleep per day, these demands left me the wrong side of wabbit.

Competition assessing has been an experience which I will, in all likelihood, repeat - but not for a while. A year at least. That or whenever my eyes stop bleeding.

Note to self: Bin the diary next Feb

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