Poetry of EPIC Proportions!

So, since everyone (read: Dan) is just dying to know, my long-form narrative poem ("epic poem" colloquially, if inaccurately) is going splendiferously.  Maybe a little too splendiferously, since at this rate, I think I can have the first draft finished in the next couple weeks (read: early March) when I was scheduled to have it finished two weeks prior to the semester's end (read: late April/early May).  And then that leaves me with three months where I'll have nothing to do but (read: no excuses not to) read The Changing Light at Sandover for the rest of the semester.  Which I'm supposed to be doing also.  Don't get me wrong, I can tell it's a fabulously written and rich piece of work (and it's one of my advisor's favorites, so I've got to think at least that much, hehe), it's just incredibly dense.  And confusing.  Not a beach read, for sure.

I think there are several reasons for my speed.  One is that I am really excited about it and working on it is like a night of spirited drinking or a rousing romance.  It's really that exciting and rewarding for me.  The other is that I know the story ahead of time, which makes it easy to just craft pretty sentences and not have to wonder where it's going.  The third is that I really hate having unfinished projects.  If something is started, it's on my mind until it's finished.  Which is how I've often managed to churn out prolific amounts of writing in short periods of time.  Not because I actually write fast, but I will write for six hours at a time until it's finished, or at least not left hanging in the middle.  Sometimes I don't shower.  That stench is called "love."

On a semi-different note: I'm kind of glad my other class, the Trends in Narrative Poetry one, is making me challenge myself on the narrative poem.  Since I got permission to use parts of my independent study poem for the exercises, I'm thinking of ways I could tailor parts of it to fit the exercises.  There are three exercises we have to do, all narrative poems (or poem-sections, in my case): one from a first-person narrator (check, that's my whole IS poem), one from a third-person narrator (I don't think there's really any way to do that in my IS poem, so that'll just be an outside poem), and one in ballad verse.  Ughhhhhhh.  Bane of my existence.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ballad verse was perfect for the opening segment, where the narrator learns of the death of her father. I remember this past summer, when someone very close to me died, I didn't cry at all for a week.  I learned of the news, I got that horrible feeling in my stomach, and I even tried to make myself cry, because I thought...that's what happens.  But I couldn't.  And I didn't cry for a week, until the funeral, and even then I held it together.  I didn't cry until I got home later that day, and was talking a mile a minute about everything under the sun except the funeral, and Dan told me to sit down with him for a second, and he put his arm around me and then I started crying and cried for about two days.  And I thought that kind of experience could work perfectly with the beginning of the poem starting in ballad verse- a very tight, controlled form with short lines, rhyme, etc- and then, when the news sinks in, it goes into the looser and more emotionally explosive iambic pentameter, and free verse in one part, etc of the rest of the poem.  And I would not have even attempted to challenge myself in this way had it not been for the class making me.

Anyway.  World, get ready for 20-some pages of awesome coming your way.