Leanne Margaret

Introduction to Structured Poetry When I was a young writer, structured poetry didn't appeal to me. I was too busy getting the passion onto the page to stop and craft those words into a meaningful structure. But in 2011, a writing teacher introduced me to the idea of poetry structure. For six months, a group of Yarra Ranges writing students picked apart their work and put it back together again; into a range of poetry styles. I've always enjoyed rhyme, but I didn't think I'd appreciate being told how to order my lines.  But instead of being eye-rolling bored, I felt refreshed by the content. It gave me additional ways to express my words; that, to my surprise, I found intriguing rather than tedious. Since that course, I've written poetry in a range of styles – many of them made up – but I often come back to the villanelle poem. The villanelle is sometimes known as a villanesqe poem, and is of French origin. It is a six stanza poem of nineteen lines, divided into fiv

There's nothing like a shiny new project to fire me up, and you're looking at the header design for my new newsletter. Every day I brace myself, ready to trawl through my email inbox – hoping to delete as many as possible, knowing that each one has the potential to leech away my writing time. Is it an introvert thing that I find it so difficult? I want to spend my days escaping into books, poems and manuscripts. Didn't I escape the admin when I fled my last office job? Nope, admin is everywhere. So the last thing I want to do is fill up people's inboxes with: more things to tick off, more things to read, more things to do, more things to manage, more. And yet I have. The first edition went out in summer. I'm entertaining the idea that perhaps not everyone is as overwhelmed with their to-do lists as I am. And another idea I'm willing to consider, is that people have just as much work to do as I do – in all likelihood much, much more – but they're just not let