Meeting Notes 2023

Social evening

It was good to share favourite poems. Each person in turn read a poem – there were images of a wren taking a dustbath, measured words, a wild iris, a garment transformed by ironing and the immensity of the sky at night. One of the featured poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, when in Japan, learned the word 'Yutori' which means 'life-space'. The student who taught her this word felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more 'yutori' – more spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen. Other poets included Billy Collins, Simon Armitage, Louise Gluck, Vicky Feaver, David Whyte, Maitreyabandhu, Rebecca Elson and MVPs. There was humour, insight and compassion. There were words that sang.There were 11 MVPs and so we were able to hold 2 rounds of readings together with brief responses to each poem.

Notes by Helen Overell.

9th January 2023

Resonance: Powerful Last Lines. Presented by Richard Lister

Richard Lister shared a short powerpoint presentation which covered:

Notes by Richard Lister.

30th January 2023

Poetry – Telling the Story. Presented by Denise Bundred

A NARRATIVE POEM combines elements of storytelling – plot, setting, characters – with elements of poetry such as form and other poetic devices. All poems tell a story, but a long poem, a sequence or collection must work hard to hold the reader's attention over a longer period.

TYPES OF NARRATIVE POETRY include The Epic Poem, The Ballad, The Idyll, The Lay, the poetic sequence and narrative collection.

Reading narrative poetry we should still consider

We must also consider aspects of telling the Story. The poems should also provide

These are things which would also attract the reader to a novel or short story.

THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE – a sequence of poems which tells a story in a larger collection

Examples

  1. Room of Leaves by Amanda Dalton is a sequence of short poems in her collection How To Disappear (Bloodaxe Books 1999). This sequence was made into a play for Radio 4.
  2. An Iron Age Woman by Graham Mort in the collection Sky Burial (Dangaroo Press 1989).
  3. Year of the Crab by Vernon Scannell in Farewell Performance (Smokestack Books 2007).

THE NARRATIVE COLLECTION – the entire collection of poems tells the story.

Examples

  1. A Scattering by Christopher Reid (Bloodaxe Books 2009) documents the illness and death of his wife. It was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and won the overall Costa Book Award in 2009. It was dramatized as a play for Radio 4.
  2. Her Birth by Rebecca Goss (Carcanet 2013)
  3. Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds (Cape Poetry) which won the TS Eliot prize in 2012
  4. The Broken Word by Adam Foulds (Cape Poetry 2008) which won the Costa Prize for Poetry
  5. Deep Field by Philip Gross (Bloodaxe Books 2011)

In each of these collections the story is linear in time and the poet usually addresses the reader or the person they are writing about.

  1. Beethoven Variations – Poems on a Life (Chatto & Windus 2020) by Ruth Padel. She writes about Beethoven in a linear way, but addresses the reader, Beethoven and other characters in his life. Ruth Padel is also a musician, and she describes her own experiences listening to and playing music in some poems.
  2. Ruth Padel also wrote a narrative collection about Charles Darwin. Darwin – A Life in Poems (Vintage Books 2009)
  3. After Cézanne by Maitreyabandhu (Bloodaxe Books 2019). This collection provides insights into the life and work of Paul Cézanne. Although generally linear in time, it lingers on specific events and paintings, giving the reader an absorbing insight into Cézanne's life.

These sequences and collections do not contain quiet, reflective poems, drawing in on themselves. They drive the reader on with short lines to give tension or long discursive lines enticing the reader to read further. Various characters enhance the richness and change the pace of the writing.

Notes by Denise Bundred.

27th February 2023

Haibun workshop: Pick and Mix – a taste for collaboration in haibun. Presented by Diana Webb

Diana led an excellent haibun workshop: Pick and Mix – a taste for collaboration in haibun. We were invited to write in response to entries by the diarist Francis Gilbert and to work by the artists Eric Ravilious and Winifred Nicholson. Haiku can be considered to be right brain activity, an expression of the inner child, whereas prose is left brain activity, an expression of the adult – both are brought into collaboration within a haibun.

Notes by Helen Overell.

4th March 2023

Wonders of Welsh Poetry. Presented by Elizabeth Barton

CREU GWIR FEL GWYDYR O FFWRNAIS AWEN

'creating truth like glass from inspiration's furnace'

Gwyneth Lewis

In this talk, we celebrated the work of some of the finest Welsh and Anglo-Welsh poets, from ancient bards, Aneirin and Taliesen, to contemporary poets, Menna Elfyn and Gwyneth Lewis, whose poetry adorns the front of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. We discussed how poetry and music are intertwined in the Welsh Bardic Tradition and considered how poetry is a social art in Wales. In addition, we read The Fox by R. Williams Parry, The Moor by R.S. Thomas and Poem in October and the opening of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. We were struck by the uplifting nature of the poems and prose, the ecological and spiritual themes (versus an interest in daily, domestic life in Under Milk Wood) and the extraordinary freshness and inventiveness of the writing.

Notes by Elizabeth Barton.

27th March 2023

Entirely normal. Presented by Mark Boor

We considered the rich life of Henry Normal and his desire from an early age to write and encourage others to share "poetry so good you can actually understand it". The skill of Normal was seen to be, firstly, his use of humour, insight and clear everyday language to challenge, provoke and opine on deeply serious issues in a way that was immediate and compelling, but also worthy of deeper reflection. Secondly, his use of wonderful poetic imagery (such as in Low Tide) to similar effect.

Notes by Mark Boor.

24th April 2023

Sofa Poet

It was good to welcome Ann Pelletier-Topping as MVP Sofa Poet in the Narnia room in The Old House pub in West Street, Dorking. There were 11 people altogether of whom 7 were MVPs. Ann read from her forthcoming pamphlet and then invited us to take part in a selection of writing exercises – these gave rise to innovative responses met with encouragement and positivity. There was discussion on writing practice. Ann referred to Helen Bowell's pamphlet 'The Barman', to Caroline Bird's thought that poetry is inserting mystery into a person's life and to Roger Robinson saying that as an artist we have to be free to fail and so allow ourselves freedom to try out different writing ideas.

Notes by Helen Overell.

5th June 2023

Shaping Water. Presented by Judith Packer

At a time when many people are enjoying time on our rivers or coasts, or looking forward to holidays by the sea, we thought about how water shapes our thoughts and actions, how we 'shape' water using different words, use water in our daily life as well as globally. We used a range of images to prompt and inspire some initial writing: What do you see in water? Place, Peace, Danger, Nature? What mood does it create in us? Gives different perspectives: same place – looking from different directions. Reflections. How our climate affects us; snow may be normal or abnormal, joy & novelty or inconvenience, danger or discovery. We thought about different words for water, ice, steam; the different states of water, adjectives, uses, descriptions. After a brief look at 'Fifty Words for Snow' by Nancy Campbell, we created our own new word for water. We discovered that she had been Canal Laureate and read a few poems from her and other Canal Laureates.

We remembered 'Another Place' by Anthony Gormley, a number of Iron Men located along the Crosby shoreline, and read one of the Stanza Stones by Simon Armitage.

See slide deck available with grateful thanks to Fiona Humphrey for many of the wonderful photos.

Judith had created a short poem in response to a number of pictures taken over the past year and participants were invited to take a look at their own pictures containing any types of water and to write a poem to send as a 'poetry postcard', perhaps from the perspective of the water.

Poem: How do You Take Your Water?

How do you take your water?
With tonic and gin; a slice of lemon thrown in?
Or do you prefer the waves on your back, rather than swimming out or diving in?
Or as a simple drop at dawn.
Captured sky.
Perfect, just for a moment, frozen in time.

Some times can never be frozen
Moments never quite within our grasp.
Do not wait for perfection …
Now it's time – go make your splash!

© Judith Packer June 2023

Notes by Judith Packer.

26th June 2023

Looking at ancestors. Presented by Susan Thomas

We looked at Joy Harjo (first native American poet laureate from 2019-2022) and how she was influenced by N. Scott Momaday and read The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee and this lead to a writing exercise to think about our roots and create ideas from a stem of 'I am …'.

We then read Still I Rise by Maya Angelou and talked about finding our own voice, our own story – we all have a history to tell.

We read The Ancestors by Jackie Wills from her collection A Friable Earth, a playful poem in which the ancestors travel time but come out from her imagination.

We talked about who our audience was. Were we just writing for ourselves? Does it fulfil an inner desire to connect to lost family. Is it a record we wish to pass down. Do we need to be sensitive to the ancestors who have since died? Is the poem more about ourselves and are we imposing ourselves on the story?

We read Digging by Seamus Heaney and went on to discuss parents as subject matter. Sonnets of Albert by Anthony Joseph is the new T.S. Elliot prize winner and we discussed the form of sonnets and read 'Light' from his collection. This was followed by Praise Song for My Mother by Grace Nichols, and the use of food often when writing about ancestors.

Swings and Roundabouts by Fleur Adcock was read and we looked at how you could combine the past and the present. We mentioned The Home Child by Liz Berry and how it is possible to create poems from a fact, then embellish this. How poetry can be a powerful medium for anger and sorrow created from stories of injustice and our ancestors.

We touched on Aboriginal verse and Lalai (Dreamtime), and from an ancient culture to a current collection called Bad Diaspora Poems by a young poet – Momtaza Mehri who writes about being displaced from her roots and read her poem Sufficiently Memorable Password Recovery Questions for the Refugee Parent.

We ended with a recommendation for a further poetry exercise of using a vehicle of some type that has been part of your family history in order to transcend time and connect with the poet's ancestors.

Notes by Susan Thomas.

31st July 2023

Consider the stars. Presented by Helen Overell

The Summer School was held on Zoom and there were twelve people in total. We read poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Elizabeth Jennings, William Butler Yeats, Eavan Boland and Rebecca Elson as well as work by Helen Overell. There was a tanka by Tony Marcoff and there were extracts from the writings of Maria Mitchell, a pioneering woman astronomer in the 1800's. There were photographs of star clusters taken by Hubble. The writing exercises included responses to the phrase 'Consider the stars' and making use of the words 'stars' and 'moths'. There was the opportunity to share what had been written and there were images of stars releasing flight, being a foil to loneliness and acting as a cure for heaviness of heart.

Notes by Helen Overell.

12th August 2023

Rewilding the Imagination. Presented by Elizabeth Barton

In this Zoom workshop, attended by nine people, we reflected on how the best Ecopoetry helps us to change our thinking and behaviour by reconnecting us with our inner wildness.

There were creative writing exercises prompted by the work of poets including Margaret Atwood, Pascale Petit and Edwin Muir and people wrote moving responses to photographs of Inuit people in Nunavut. We discussed the emotional power of using the second person address ('you') and the benefits of not revealing too much about the speaker's identity.

Notes by Elizabeth Barton.

23rd September 2023

Poetry and Politics – Freedom and Responsibility. Presented by Tony Marcoff

Tony asked the question, 'What is the future of democracy?' He suggested that democracy is under attack from within and without, and that freedom of speech and expression are also threatened. He said that we in the free world need to fight again to keep the flame of democracy burning, and to preserve our hard-won freedoms. Tony quoted Ai Qing, the poet father of the artist Ai Weiwei, when he said 'Poetry is the voice of freedom'. Tony continued by saying that our poems could be our postcards to the world, as we who are free need to inspire and encourage those less fortunate than we are, with light, beauty and truth in a post-truth world. The poets quoted in the evening included Paul Eluard's 'Liberty', Solzhenitsyn and his prose poem 'Freedom to Breathe', Maya Angelou and her black consciousness clarion call 'Still I Rise', Pastor Niemoller and his powerful poem '1938', and Adrian Mitchell's protest poem 'To Whom It May Concern'. Tony concluded the talk with his own long prose poem with tanka, 'the unfinished conversation', based on a video installation by the Caribbean artist John Akomfrah.

Notes by Tony Marcoff.

25th September 2023

Poetry Pub

There were 16 people in total of whom 11 were readers. Tony Earnshaw began with an acknowledgement of gratitude to Sue Beckwith, editor of the Mole Valley Poets' anthologies. This year's title, 'Down to Earth', is her tenth anthology. During the first part of the evening contributors read from 'Down to Earth'. After the break there was another round of readings on a variety of themes. This was an enjoyable and convivial evening.

Notes by Helen Overell.

2nd October 2023

Scenes from Life on Earth – the poetry of Kathryn Simmonds. Presented by Heather Shakespeare

"What good poems do is give us a fresh experience and the great thrill and compulsion of writing is to make the world new". Kathryn Simmonds

We spent an evening in the company of this poet, alas not literally, discovering her distinctive remaking of the world through poems from her three collections, Sunday at the Skin Launderette, The Visitations and Scenes from Life on Earth. What stood out was the numinous quality of much of her poetry, and her gentle yet profound exploration of the liminal spaces, the transitions between sleeping and waking, life and death, and the physical and spiritual realms. Looking at life through the prism of faith, she invites the reader to rise above the everyday and examine it from a fresh perspective, peering through the lifted roof of a dolls house or seeing through the eyes of angels, 'sprawling in the trees like celestial tigers'. Her poems remind us of our smallness, our frailty, our preoccupation with the mundane, which causes us to miss the 'flame-lit trees'. Yet they are never without hope, as expressed in the title poem of her latest collection:

"I loved the trees because
they had redemption down
oh God be glorified, I love the trees!
The way they ate their old regrets
and made them into leaves."

from "Scenes from Life on Earth"

Notes by Heather Shakespeare.

30th October 2023

Kaleidoscope. Presented by Helen Overell

'Kaleidoscope' – a time to reflect on this year and to plan for next year, a time to celebrate successes and a time to explore workshop poems. In a kaleidoscope beautiful patterns are formed from fragments placed within two mirrors at an angle of 60 degrees. 'Fragments' was used as an inspiration for writing – this brought to mind sequins shaped like stars and notes from a piece of piano music.

Notes by Helen Overell.

27th November 2023

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