New student!

A little flower power (Hampton Court Flower Show)

I went to my first poetry class last evening.  I've signed up for a beginners-intermediate course at Morley College in London.  Very nervous!  There were six of us round the table all with different experiences.  We spoke about what we wanted from the course and then our tutor showed us a postcard (we each had 30 seconds to look at it) and then we went into ten minutes of 'free writing' - basically just write non-stop without thinking or stopping.  After that we talked about how it was for us and reviewed what we'd written and highlighted or made notes of any phrases that stood out.  We then chose one of those phrases to write something else but more deliberately, stopping when we needed to.

Our next task was to write on a small piece of paper any six letters of the alphabet in a column then pass it to the person to our right who then wrote one word for each of the letters.  This was then passed to the right and then we had to write a six line poem with one of those words in each line (order didn't matter).  Afterwards we shared what we had written.  There were some interesting poems (also interesting how many words came up more than once like orange, apple, kettle and yak!).  It's amazing what can be achieved in a task like that.

For our homework we have to buy and use a writing notebook/journal as an ongoing thing and to draft a poem to workshop at next weeks class.

I am already feeling the benefit of the class as I have two potential poems from the work I did yesterday.  This is just what I need to get going again and be with others who write for mutual support.

The class had an odd starting time of 5.30pm and finished at 7.30pm.  I was starving by the time I left and headed for the chip shop on my High Street when I got back....'No, don't wrap them I said.'  I think I looked desperate as I headed out of the shop eating as I went!