My muse hasn’t left yet, although I have bought her a ticket to Cuernavaca this morning hoping she will join Hypatia’s there. She has been hanging around here with a brick bat and keeps hitting me behind the ear with it.

I am one of those despised creators of free verse, I even despise myself because I have not had the discipline to learn any poetic forms. I was too busy memorizing piano sonatas, I guess. Anyway, I am overwhelmed by my complete worthless ness when I read things like your triolet and sestina. After the triolet, which I really liked, I have spent quite some time trying to even come up with a pair of lines that would make something that would make sense, to no avail.

Maybe my muse is in Cuernavaca after all, and it is just a mugger hitting me.

Hello Katja, always immensely gratifying to see a new face.

Hyp, fantastic comment. Made me laugh and sigh and laugh again. And I agree – I am not a great fan of vers libre. It takes immense skill and an insanely well-tuned ear for rhythm and language, and that is frankly what a lot of practitioners of it Have Not Got. They think it’s easier than sonnets. Yes, well, jigging about in a disco is easier than ballet, but which are you going to pay good money to watch?

(I am feeling a little grumpetty and waspish about poetry today because I have recently been showered with the offerings of an acquaintance, all vers libre, and all, err, lumpily cut up prose with the pronouns missing. One must be tactful acquaintance, they have a terrible tendency to resent being ignored or insufficently praised).

Anyway, my muse swanned off when I was in my early twenties. I started to hate all my poetry – it all seemed so adolescent and hysteric – and lose sight of the point of continuing (ie, to improve). The Muse, shallow cow that she invariably is, not that mine had gone to Cuernavaca, in fact, I think she was in Whitby – what on earth is a hurachi, by the way? – came galloping right back again as soon as I had done a few technical exercises. She waited until I’d looked at said technical exercises, felt despair, had a drink, and (and this is crucial) began another technical exercise anyway.

To me, something like this that possesses a structure is more satisfying than the free verse that is so popular these days. I used to write sonnets for the exercise of the form as much s for the content. And I used to experiment with different rhyme schemes.

There was a society I nearly joined ages ago that was for poets. Each month or two, can’t remember the time frame, they would choose a poetic form and then everyone had the same length of time to write one and share with the group. That sounded like fabulous fun. But life got in the way and I knew there wasn’t going to be any time or energy anywhere for me to actually do it. That is one of my regrets in life – that I didn’t join that group. I wish I had taken my poetry seriously when I still had enough of a brain to possibly make a go at it.

Now my brain is mush and my creativity is inside a carpetbag being hauled hither and yon by my blasted muse who got tired of waiting for me to write something fit to print and took off in search of a more promising candidate. I do get postcards from her occassionally. The last one was from a canteena in Cuernavaca. She wanted me to send her money for new hurachis.