Another Morning, Another Two Hours, Another Lonely Stanza

The headline for this post sums up this morning's work pretty succinctly. I managed to work out that first stanza, and to come to terms with what will be a fairly bastardized version of the Spenserian stanza. It will have Spenser's stanza shape, and the heptameter last line, along with a slant rhyme -- I'm going to admit that I just don't like true/exact rhyme but that I'm fairly in love with what happens, sonically, when there's internal- and end- slant rhyme. So yeah. That's my deal. Or this poem's deal, anyway . . . until tomorrow, when, most likely, I will reread my work and despair, OR when I struggle with the second stanza and feel myself straining under the weight of this ridiculous challenge I've given myself.

I am, however, still fairly buzzing with good feeling over my little "win" of an acceptance from yesterday. I feel lighter for it -- more optimistic. It may be a small thing to some people, but it feels overwhelmingly affirming, to me, to have a poem accepted on its merits alone, and not because of my graduate school connections, or my small group of writing friends, although I love and appreciate both, and I feel so lucky to have had the publication credits I was granted through them.

There's just something uplifting about a triumph won from the slush pile.