We met at the end of the party
When all the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
‘Have this that’s left’, you said.
— Philip Larkin, We Met at the End of the Party
Two weeks later, Writing 201: Poetry has reached its glorious end. It was a blast.
I wanted to thank all of you who shared their writing, gave valuable feedback to others, and engaged in lively discussions in the Commons and on your own sites. You’re living proof of the great things that can happen when ~1,500 poets from more than 40 countries come together.
Our Commons site will stay open for another week to give you a chance to connect with more fellow poets and, if you’re interested, to make plans for future collaborations (if you do end up starting an e-zine, a poetry group, a reading club, or anything else, really — let us know! We’d love to hear about it). After a week, the site will switch to archive mode: you can still visit it, but you won’t be able to write new posts or comments.
Don’t be a stranger once the course is over — The Daily Post offers many resources that poets will find useful, from blogging events listings that might be of interest, to posts on the craft of writing and inspiration.
I’m guessing you’ve added a whole bunch of poets’ blogs to follow in the past couple of weeks. Still, more poetry is always around the corner here at WordPress.com: just look up poetry-related tags in the Reader. While the poetry tag will give you enough verse to last several lifetimes, there are some real treasures to be uncovered in “smaller” tags, like found poetry, sonnet, or elegy.
Here’s to the written word, especially the superfluous one. Here’s to the ancient Greeks and their hard-but-so-much-fun-to-pronounce literary terms. Here’s to poetry. Here’s to you.
Photo by Andreas Graulund (CC BY 2.0)
