Episode 1430: Auspicious Start To The Final Chapter!

Was beginning to worry that I would never get started on my final chapter, but instead of succumbing to lethargy, I've had a good start, adding just under 700 words to my total word count. I think I'm definitely going to end up making use of the +10% allowance for word counts, as I've just decided to include another poem for close reading, as it seems to make my case about liminality pretty well, in spite of some parts of the text that I find problematic, which I, without intending to condescend at all, ascribe to the poet's youth. I'm starting to think that it is actually quite difficult to imagine any of the poems written by the CAP participants as being in the same league as the Merlion poems by the more experienced writers. Edwin Thumboo replied in his e-mail to me that he was looking to see what the younger poets thought and not so much thinking about whether they could stand alongside the earlier poems. That would be a question for the literary critics. Well, as a literary critic, I'm going to stick my neck out there and say that by and large, they don't.