In a previous update, I succeeded in buying a copy of Stephen Fry's poetry manual, The Ode Less Traveled. The exercises given throughout the chapters are placed and scoped such that it is easy to slip into doing them right as they are called for. Working through the exercises is exactly what I need to improve my skill level. I am posting my exercise responses on this page as I go through the book.

My copy of the book arrived on 2019-11-01, and it has already proven to be a good purchase. I bought it so I could improve my own poetry; I began writing verse in 2018, but all I've been doing is stringing together rhymes. Until I cracked Mr. Fry's book, my knowledge of meter was essentially nil, and although all my poems so far have used syllabic patterns, the closest I'd gotten to metric analysis was counting syllables. It never occurred to me to think about stress at all.