The Sound of Silence

We were looking at sound at my poetry class last Thursday.  Our tutor played three different pieces and then we wrote about them, what we heard, how they made us feel, what ideas sparked off.  We generally discussed silence - what is it, if it exists - and then looked at a couple of paragraphs from the book A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland.  We also read the poem Honda Pavarotti by Tony Hoagland which uses sound to describe what is going on in a most wonderful overblown way.

Our homework is to spend ten minutes on our own in silence and to listen attentively, then to write about it.  I did my piece this morning and realised that there is no silence!  Of course where you live may be quieter than where I live (near a main road) but even houses have noises. There is a difference between stillness and silence because stillness is something that can be reached within us.  It makes a good subject for poetry, why not try it yourself.

We also briefly looked at rhyme, full rhyme and half or slant rhyme.  So 'able' is a full rhyme to 'table' and 'tribal' is a half/slant rhyme.  We have only just touched on rhyme and I am sure we will come back to it soon.

I've had a creative spell over the weekend, and also this morning after I wrote my piece on silence I wrote a poem about the approach of December.  I may take this to workshop on Thursday.

Three in one publication

Just heard today that I will have three things published in Areopagus' Christmas edition (Christian Writers Magazine).  They are a combination of three types of poem (one free verse about Advent, one with rhyming stanzas and the other a Haiku).  Of course, I am thrilled!

My last Villianelle was well received and now that course is finished.  I will write more in this form but right now I'd quite like to give it a rest!

I had my two poems printed in the OU Poets workbook and now I wait to see if I get any votes.  I have just done my voting on the poems from the last two editions.  Poems with the highest votes will be published in their Anthology next year.

Keeping up with courses!

If you read my other blog you'll know I've had quite a busy week with various activities and writing has been pushed out a bit.  However, I did manage to write my last Villanelle for my Poetry School course which still keeps a structure yet breaks some rules.  I wonder what everyone will make of it tomorrow night for our last live chat.

I also finished my 'Lobster' poem for the Thursday class.  We excelled ourselves I think as there were some really good poems.  I have rewritten the last few lines of the last stanza as suggested by tutor and fellow class mates and feel this is a better ending.

I have written a couple of new poems too, one is a Haiku, the other in three stanzas, so actually I have done better than I first thought considering lack of time.  Even so, I still need to read all the other Villanelle's before tomorrow night and make some notes.  I have another busy week coming up...in fact all weeks until Christmas seem busy now, but at least I will have one course less to prepare for every week.

I've just received a copy of Christopher James The Manly Art of Knitting and enjoying his poetic humour.

Focussed? Well, sort of.

There was this incident on Thursday evening that reminded me of a scene from the film Men In Black.  Our class was over a Morley College for a poetry writing exercise.  The gallery had a display of ceramics and the purpose of this exercise was to find an object to write about and use the voice of the object to write a poem.  It was the writing down that took my mind from poetry to a certain film.  There were only two chairs in the gallery which the potters were sitting on.  We had to balance our notepad on our arm to write our notes and that's when I thought of that scene where the wonderful Will Smith is in this big room with other candidates sitting in a pod-like chair trying to complete a test.  Balancing the paper on his knee, breaking his pencil etc. logic wins out and he drags over (screetchingly) the only table in the room to lay down his paper.  That is still my favourite bit of the film and it still makes me laugh. For us we grabbed a chair when it became vacant - it was a bit like the game musical chairs.

Anyway, I did manage to focus eventually, found an object to write about and am at present trying to draft my poem about a ceramic lobster in a pot (I kid you not!)

The Poetry School online course had live chat on Monday.  I still can't find a voice there and I am beginning to think 'chat' is not for me.  My poem received very good feedback - it was a humorous look at struggling with numbers in Villenelle form.  Wasn't sure how it would go down but people enjoyed it.  The third, and last, assignment is to mix things up, take the Villenelle as far as possible without losing structure.  Sounds too complicated for me.  I've edited one I wrote a few weeks back which is more or less a 'bog standard' Villanelle which I will use if I run out of time to produce anything different.

Style and subject of writing poetry - what's yours?

Had a great class meeting on Thursday.  We each took along a portfolio of between ten and twenty poems and then we did little exercises.  We looked at which subjects we mainly wrote about, the senses we used and how often we used verbs or adjectives etc.  We then looked at the structure of our poems, whether they were all in one long stanza or several and whether the lines were long or short.  These proved to be a most enlightening exercises and it seemed that we all tended to write about life and relationships most often followed by nature!  The senses we mainly used were sight and touch. We then got into a deep discussion on poetry writing and gender (we have two men in our group which helped) and the time flew by.  I found the discussions most helpful.  It is a useful thing to try yourself.  Our tutor said that the subjects we wrote about most often were the ones we tended to come back to when we were stuck. Sometimes it is a case of reworking an old idea in a different way.

Next week we are going to be working in the Morley Gallery over the road from the main college.  I am really looking forward to it.

Exercise:

• Use the guide above to sort your poems - to do this make headings such as relationships, nature and every time a poem mentions a subject put a tick under that heading.  At the end a pattern will have formed. Do the same for senses and types of words you use in your poems
• Try writing poems in different forms/styles to add variation
• Describe in a poem a sense you rarely or never write about
• Is there a subject you would never write about? Why?