TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING...

April is an interesting month.  For a start, it begins with a day dedicated to fools.  Or, if you live in France or Italy, to fish.

In particular, April is a significant month for poetry.  T S Eliot famously described it as “the cruellest month”, whilst elsewhere it made Robert Browning yearn for home.  Hmm.  I can only begin to wonder where on earth Browning must have been when he penned that line, if he truly thought that an English April would be an improvement on his present circumstances. 

And April is also National Poetry Writing Month.  The principle is simple enough: write a poem every day for the month of April.  Thirty poems in thirty days.  They make it sound so easy...

Anyway, this is principally what has bulldozed me into finally plucking up my Dutch courage and joining the blogosphere.  The name of this blog is in homage to the aforementioned Browning, to whom profuse apologies are in order.

Whether or not I will be able to keep up with this poetry challenge remains to be seen.  There will be daily prompts on the NaPoWriMo website, but apparently these aren’t compulsory, so I might interpret them liberally.  Or possibly not at all. 

But, here goes.  Please be gentle with me, dear readers.  I’ve never done this before…