I have to confess to being tardy and irregular in my approach to Daily Creates, and so yesterday I vowed to do whatever the assignment was. It turned out to be ‘Pick a pet and change it’. Another photography challenge, so I initially thought, “OK”. However, after fiddling with a photograph of my cat who died within the last year, I decided that, while Marutaru the Japanese hedgehog is an amusing distraction, there is something slightly disturbing about doing this without consent, which is difficult to get from hedgehogs and the rest of the pet kingdom.
Marutaru the Japanese hedgehog superstar
So I decided to backtrack through the latest assignments until I found a more agreeable one and quickly found the writing task a couple of clicks back into the archive, ‘Don’t get mad, get DS106!’. This task invited us to consider the question ‘What if poets wrote parking tickets?’. My approach was to think in what kind of circumstances a poet might be working as a traffic warden and I decided that the warden should be a poet in residence. The next stage was to think about the kind of tone that the poet warden might adopt – perhaps slightly apologetic about giving someone a ticket and therefore the idea of a poem as a way of lightening the disappointment for the infringing motorist came to mind with reference to ‘sugaring a bitter pill’ After that the rhymes came fairly easy and once the shape of the verse was fixed, another verse followed, and finally one more. I was particularly pleased with the rhyming structure and the fifth line which in each verse is a three word phrase with the final word ending in -tions.
A Fruitful Caveat
The bitter pill of your fine
Is sugar-coated in rhyme
For I am poet in residence
To help you see sense
About minor violations
And the need for recompense
I know you feel aggrieved
If not hurt then at least peeved
Only seconds late I guess
Not your fault if I press
About your tribulations
And a ticket for your stress
So although we share your pain
Your loss is now our gain
Please be assured that
This is not a simple spat
About trivial regulations
But a fruitful caveat
#tdc1041 @ds106dc Traffic warden is poet in residence http://t.co/9x3eAuMj27
— Andrew Clay (@amclay09) November 16, 2014
Feeling satisfied with the result, I tweeted it and was pleased to awake the next day to see that I had been followed by Sixth Form Poet – a blatant piece of networked self-promotion for their book, but these little connections that come through making something are nice to receive.
ds106 for TECH2002_15 