Is it really poetry and does it matter?

The poetry course I have been doing with The Poetry School is about to end.  I have uploaded my last poems and commented on others who have contributed.  At the start there were about 35 signed up, yet possibly only 25 took part and over the weeks the numbers dropped until now with the last assignment perhaps six of us uploaded poems, though the forum will remain open for a while for anyone who wants to catch up with any assignments they missed.  It may be that some people did the assignments but didn't upload their poetry.  It takes guts to share your work with others and the dread of what people may think of it, what comments you might receive might put some off.  I do hope the others got something out of it, though I suspect that for some the assignments may have seemed a bit 'off the wall'.  I have to say that though some assignments did seem a bit silly I did them all and felt a sense of satisfaction (and relief!) when I had completed them.  It was fun and I think this appealed to me because I love word play and being silly...thankfully I wasn't the only one!  There was often the cry of 'Is it poetry?' but I don't think that was really the point.  I think of the course more as a poetry generator, a point to start from.  I'll miss it!

Where do I go now?  Well, the new Poetry School brochure is out and I am contemplating.........

I have been experimenting with writing while plugged into music on my laptop.  I find different music encourages different ways with poems - some energetic, some moody, some romantic.  I've written three poems this way.  In the last assignment we were encouraged to invent our own poetry form* (something a little wacky....just up my street).  Due to my love of music my form is for two or more stanzas of three lines. Each line must contain a word associated with music.  I had such fun with this I might write a series!  Why not make up your own form, set your own restrictions and go for it. Do feedback.

(The last assignment included a made up form called 'Wilson' consisting of five short punchy lines that all rhymed except the middle line which had to include a non-rhyming reference to a vegetable! I kid you not.  We had to write one of these.  Mine is below)

Lightning Wilson

Lightning forks the sky

Electric fizz and fry
Like onions sizzling in a pan
Watch those white streaks fly
Earthing, then they die.

Poetry word games

I have just joined an online line poetry course with The Poetry School called Adventures In Form.  This is an unusual sort of poetry as the forms are not your usual sonnets or villanelles but made up forms using word games.  The course is untutored but the assignments (10 in all) are uploaded each week and then participants work on them and upload their offerings and comments can be made via the forums.  There are over 20 people on this course so I have found it time consuming keeping up with all the emails in my Inbox so now I just log on to the course and view them from there.  The first assignment was a oulipo sonnet and the idea was to choose a title from a sign or saying etc., and then use the letters from that to form a poem of 14 lines.  I used the added restriction of trying to write it as as a sonnet with rhyme scheme.  What fun and what a challenge but I really got into it. It can help to use an anagram generator - one for Scrabble is good.  You can find an online one through Google.  Just type in the title and it will list all the words you can make out of the title.

The next assignment is writing what's known as N+7, meaning to change each noun in your poem to the 7th one following in the dictionary. Try using www.spoonbill.or/n+7/ You can type or paste in your poem and it will make the changes for you. It can be very funny.  Whether it is poetry is another story!  All good fun though.

Here is my oulipo sonnet with title taken from a magazine and no doubling up on letters:

Spruce up your home for spring

You refine your home in a soupçon,

root out mess, compress,

ship out in grey sing-song,

focus on genre, of purpose,

muse on scope for a fancy

corner in green or crimson;

no grimness here, sun, comfy

in rosy hue on crisp space, fine cushion;

pep up spring in fiery rinse, pour

cerise from cans, shiny, hip,

no passé guise in puce or more,

no gross or grimy form can grip

for in your eyes you can see secure

your rooms supreme, sprucy, pure.

Iamb, stressed or unstressed, that is the question!

I seem to have been doing a lot of writing and putting documents together but none of it poetry!  I had things to
prepare for an AGM of Mothers' Union branch which I am leader of, as well as preparing items for a display to do with National Marriage Week which starts on 7th February.

I haven't been in the mood for writing poetry.  However, poetry class was interesting on Thursday.  We looked at  meter - all those stressed and unstressed syllables and by the end we were all stressed!  Even our tutor who spent months studying this stuff finds it hard!  I feel a lot better about my lack of understanding of it myself now. We all attempted a two line iambic pentameter and looked at Sonnet 18, Shakespeare's famous Shall I compare thee to a summer's day and we had a copy of part of Milton's Paradise Lost (thankfully we didn't have to read it!).  Basically, iambic pentameter is five iambic feet (five beats or stresses per line (foot) - it's the dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum sort of rhythm. There are variations of stress which all have names like trochee, anapest, dactyl and spondee and there are different feet length.  Because I am by no means an expert I'll refer you to other places if you would like to get to grips with this.  Firstly, a book by Stephen Fry called The Ode Less Travelled, well worth a read.  Try this website but there are many more.  The sign used over a stressed syllable is a dash - or a slash / and unstressed syllables have a u above them.  Here is another website which may be helpful using Sonnet 18 as an example.  Good luck!  At class we will be looking at Sonnets in a couple of weeks, so revisiting this nightmare, ha, ha.  Meantime, next week we are to take in a poem to workshop.

What will you be doing next year?

If you didn't sign up to any writing courses in the autumn, now is a good time to do it as part of your New Years' resolution!  There are bound to be courses in your area or online, or maybe if you know others who write (friends/acquaintances) you could form your own group and meet at someone's house or a pub or coffee bar.  The  you can set a programme of exercises, read books of poets/authors, attend some 'open mic' sessions in your area (do some research!).  The idea is to be with others who write, whether you are a beginner or a little further on with your writing.  We can all learn something by being with others and share our passion and our work.  Small groups often go on to produce booklets of members work which can be sold locally.  The sky is the limit!


What will you be doing next year?  If you have any other ideas for writing why not share them here.

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.

Outlets and another course!

Back in the summer I became a member of OU Poets - the poetry society of the Open University (being a past student).  They produce a workbook with members poems about four times a year on which we can send in  comments on others work and make a note of our favourite poems.  At the end of the year members vote for their 20 favourites for the year for inclusion in the Society's annual anthology. Anyway, I have contributed for the first time with my comments and have submitted two poems (you are guaranteed to at least have one poem in the workbook).  I will now have to wait a while before I hear anything but at least I will be in print, though until a poem is actually published in the anthology it is not considered 'published'.

I have also started a short course with The Poetry School on writing a Villanelle.  It is an online course and tutorials and 'chat' take place on a Monday evening every other week.  Our first 'chat' is Monday 24th October but already we have had our first assignment and have uploaded our first Villanelle.  This form of poetry I have described in a previous post.  It is a challenge I relish (it can be very time consuming!).  I have to say there are some good ones from my fellow students and this course is open to all levels of poets and I certainly feel that there are quite a few who are more advanced than me!

I am extremely nervous about the live chat as I am not great at it.  I still can't gel with Facebook and Messenger is also alien to me.  I have already had to enlist the help of my IT savvy son to sort out Java for me (which I need for 'chat').  I've told him he'll be on stand by for Monday evening!

In the poetry class last week we work-shopped our poems and it was interesting to see what others wrote about and how they went about it.  There were some nice surprises, enjoyable and some moving.  Our tutor laid down some rules for workshops and we each had feedback on our writing, which is always useful and can be reassuring.  We then looked at line breaks and considered what it said about a poem, like the era it might have been written, whether a serious or light verse.  For homework we have been given some prose to break up into lines and then to explain what affect we were aiming for.

I finally sent off my short story to Best magazine (for their competition) and have been working on some exercises from the current Mslexia magazine which has produced a draft poem. I've just finished reading one of Jackie Kay's poetry books (Fiere).  The Scottish words were a challenge!  Somewhere on here (Blogger won't me give the link where I want it!) Jackie will entertain you with some Scottish words!

I see that Christopher James has a new collection coming out.  He is a recent 'find' of mine.

On 1st October I'm off to a Writer's Day put on by the Association of Christian Writers, of which I am a member.  I am particularly keen to see/meet Adrian Plass!

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!