Week 183: Something remedial

Went to my first Poetry Stanza this week. Stanzas are linked to the Poetry Society, a cluster of poets in a given area. Felt like a good way to bring that into life in Hastings early on. I took ‘Estuary’ along, a poem I’ve been shuffling forward for a while. It’s riffing on something from an edition of Jessica Dore’s newsletter about grief, but it really took shape in late spring. It found a form that suits it, and I think it’s now in a fine-tuning stage. The reception to it was extremely warm. Helped me feel out some of what it needs. Helped me see where it held on to metaphors from earlier drafts that don’t suit it anymore. But/and the whole evening had me thinking just how slim a language I have for feedback. There were moments with other people’s poems where I felt what was working or jarring, but really struggled to describe it. Took me back to English classes at school: I excelled at Literature modules (essentially, critical thinking) but really stalled when it came to Language…