Couple of short writing sessions yesterday and today. The middle of the poem as it stands is a complete mess, as I try my best to rework existing lines that I'm fond of but now no longer fit. Need to chuck all the square pegs out at this point I think, understand I'm now working with round holes.

Back on it today though, pulling it apart and trying to put it back together again with minimal rewriting. It's not looking very healthy at the moment. Every reworked line is weaker. My love of the sestina form is weakening too. Might just go binge watch The Osbournes and eat knockoff Oreos instead.

Might not surprise you to learn that they were premature celebrations. Reading over that first draft on Saturday evening, I realised I'd put some end words in the wrong places, knocking the whole poem out. Haven't been able to think about it since, let alone work on it haha.

Not always productive of course, but I usually at least get *something* down on the page that I can later use/edit/rewrite/turn into something else. This morning it’s a completed first draft of this sestina. Now to celebrate with a turn around the shelves of the Waterstones around the corner!

Every Saturday morning I go to a coffee shop between 7am–9am and just write. Started at the beginning of this year and it’s been the best thing I’ve done to cultivate the writing routine that I’ve never had but always wanted. Even if I don’t write during the week I have these 2 hours as a baseline.

As predicted there were doubts reading back what I’d written so far. But cracking on. Still enjoying the form, which is honestly a lovely surprise (as was the childfree afternoon). I often remind myself that when I started writing poetry it was an enjoyable hobby. Good to get back to that feeling.

Surprise writing session on the sestina this afternoon when my MIL came down unannounced to take my son to the park while my other son was at my mother’s. Admit I sat scrolling on my phone for 30 mins first (decompression?) but finally dragged myself to the computer and wrote another stanza.

I've created six two-column tables in my Google Doc, with reminders of the rotating teleutons in the thin column on the right. Almost three stanzas written now + ideas for the envoi. Need to just ride this sestina wave and see how far it takes me. I'm sure the next writing session will bring doubts!

Today I love sestinas. Can't get enough. They're now the only form I want to write in. I get like this. Whenever I get around to painting & decorating, I spend the first hour or so thinking 'I should do this for a living!' But by the time I'm tidying up and cleaning brushes I've had my fill.

Second writing session today. I had some spare time to spend on this poem earlier this week, but decided to submit existing poems to magazines instead. And paint a wall in my house that's been prepped but unpainted for too long. Is there such a thing as productive procrastination?

Is posting about this on Bluesky a form of procrastination? Something to distract me from the actual writing of the poem? Yes, definitely. But (I think) I now have my six repeating end words, and also some lines using them filled in—this feels like good progress!

Though T.S. Eliot is often quoted as insisting that 'no vers is libre...', free verse is definitely my comfort zone—but I'm determined to spend time writing outside it for this poem. Send good thoughts (and examples of sestinas).

But at least I don't have to deal with fixed metre or beat count! Because I've never been able to nail those (all the sonnets and ballads I've written are slightly off and unpublished). And don't even get me started on cynghanedd—what a skill it is to be able to write englynion.

First writing session: the journey ahead feels more impossible than possible. Reading examples of the form, each rotating teleuton sends me back to seek its origin, and I feel like the woman in the Nazaré Confusa meme. I wasn't good at maths in school and atm this feels more like maths than poetry.

Beginning my journey with this introduction by Terrance Hayes on the Poetry Foundation, where he calls the form 'a linguistic Jenga puzzle' alongside other vividly-drawn (but daunting) metaphors. www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/159599/your-do-it-yourself-sestina

This is the first poem I’ve had published about him, and is part of a collection in progress. Diolch to the editors of Gutter for choosing it for this latest issue, so pleased to be included in its pages: guttermag.co.uk/getgutter/p/gutter-32.

He died suddenly at home in Wales while I was on holiday in Iceland—his death opening a door into a surreal misery that soon widened to include us all. The afternoon he died, I'd lit a candle in the Hallgrímskirkja for the departed members of my family, not yet knowing he’d joined them.

Sometimes that’s one of the most thrilling feelings in the world, and other times I’m like “oh we’re just writing a poem now are we? But I was in the middle of enjoying this walk/watching Netflix/doing laundry 🙄”