Firstly,
Feanor - September 1st would be the date that poetry starts to be submitted, presumably you would have started writing it in late August. So the question is really, could you get to lesson 5 by late August AND have time to write (what you feel is good) poetry?
Orominuialwen - I'm sorry to hear that, and it's entirely understandable of course. I don't expect people to think of Quenya as a priority, even in much less important situations. It's a casual club.
Lhuna and
dancing spawn look in the best position to be ready by September, but I feel that the poetry contest would end up with 4 contenders if we kept the date.
So...
The first poetry contest will be delayed to October the First. I'd been toying with this idea before as well; if the contests are to be bimonthly (once every two months, not twice a month... stupid word has two meanings) this would avoid a contest starting on the 1st of January, when people will most likely be on holiday etc.
This means everybody should have time to get up to lesson 5, and most of us would hopefully get past it, allowing for more complex language and better quality poetry.
By the way, four lines into my first poem, I realised that we don't learn how to use pronouns until about lesson 12. Which means until then, our poetry will be full of proper nouns. Oh well.
For those of you interested in creating rhymes in your poems, the
Ardalambion wordlists feature a "reverse wordlist" to help find rhymes. Unfortunately, Quenya is so heavily inflected (I stole that phrase from the course, yes) that it isn't of huge use. The other wordlists can of course be used to help in poetry.
Finally,
CaptainofDespair and
durelin have just joined our ranks.
[/Rambling]