I’ve just joined an excellent website
for amateur poets like me.
The help and advice that’s on offer
is great, well-intentioned and FREE.
So I posted a promising sonnet
in the hopes of some useful advice
and the thread that I posted it onto
simply burst into life in a trice.
It was work-shopped in depth by my colleagues
and over a frantic two weeks
they all of them had their two penn’orth
of “minor small changes and tweaks.”
By the time they had altered the rhyme scheme
and the metre and structure as well
my cheerful Shakespearean sonnet
had become a depressed villanelle.
And “Prue” then decided my subject
was wrong for both metre and rhyme
so she re-wrote it all in free verse
to prove how I’d wasted my time.
And “Brenda” then altered my title.
My own one she said was just shite;
and she once appeared in Rialto
so I’ve got to believe that she’s right.
Now my colleagues all think that it’s perfect
and there’s nothing remaining to do.
So I’ve just sent it off to the Bridport;
and so have both Brenda and Prue.