Mab Jones – Lockdown Writers’ Club 2021

© 2021 BBC

As you were reminded yesterday, Lockdown 2020 saw many notebooks being filled. By Lockdown 2, I was back in the scary world of work and Lockdown 3 is a mixture of both (after 3 hours on phone calls yesterday afternoon)!

Some of my notebooks were filled with words from the Lockdown Writers’ Club, organised and facilitated by Mab Jones, a poet I have had the pleasure of knowing for quite some years. The daily prompts offered a lot of material across a range of genres and (like all good starting points), were springboards which encouraged the sparks of ideas to fly. Both Mab’s course and Cath Drake’s workshops, inspired me for sometime after they finished.

2021 has not started the way, in the depth of the summer, we hoped it would. Lockdown offers new and established writers time to write. We all want/need more than the 4 walls of our room and CO19 in our brains.

This rerun is an email only course, so is perfect for people who have restricted access to other platforms.

Lockdown Writers’ Club is an online / email course for writers of any experience.
✅Receive 30 prompts in 30 days. ✅Respond in poetry or prose. ✅Learn, be inspired, have fun!
Just £25
Contact @mabjones for details: mabjonescreativeATgmailDOTcom

Mab JonesCardiff Wetlands Writer in Residence Biography Mab Jones is a “unique talent” (The Times) who has read her work all over the UK, in the US, France, Ireland and Japan. She is winner of the John Tripp Spoken Poetry Audience Award, the Word Factory Neil Gaiman Short Story competition, a Royal Society of Literature ‘Literature Matters’ award, the Aurora Poetry competition, the Rabbit Heart Poetry Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, and the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, amongst others. Her most recent pamphlet is ‘111 Haiku for Lockdown’ (Infinity Books UK). She is the author of two other pamphlets, and two collections: ‘take your experience and peel it‘ (Indigo Dreams) and ‘Poor Queen’ (Burning Eye Books). Her work has been read or shown (as poetry film) at many festivals, at the Southbank Centre, and at various venues and a variety of platforms. Mab teaches creative writing at Cardiff University, has written for the New York Times, and has presented three recent poetry programmes on BBC Radio 4. She previously coordinated International Dylan Thomas Day, and now runs the social media for world famous writer Wilbur Smith. She promotes adventure writing through his Foundation, in addition, and offers mentoring, critique and feedback for writers, most notably through the Poetry Society.

NaPoWriMo – A Post of Terms

I am loving the commitment to NaPoWriMo already. I have decided to post everyday about the process of writing the poem and the prompt.

Last year, it was halfway through before I knew there were optionally daily prompts. The main website seems much clearer this year.

My idea/plan is to write a daily poem – something to journal each specific day but also attempt as many prompt poems as possible.

As with 2013 I will only post an extract from the poems, as there are copyright and publishing issues otherwise, I have no immediate plan with this body of work for April, however some might be suitable for submission and I am trying to build up my own collection of poems.

I have also decided to update this thread regularly with information about the different forms of poetry covered this month in the prompts. You can always give it a go even if you are not ready for the full force of NaPoWriMo.

A Pre- Day 1 Activity:

Ekphrastic Poetry

The prompt for all you early birds is an ekphrastic poem – a poem inspired by or about a work of art. There’s no rules on the form for an ekphrastic poem, so you could write a sonnet or a haiku or free verse.

Day 4: Lune

A lune is a sort of English-language variation on the haiku, meant to better render the tone of the Japanese haiku than the standard 5-7-5 format we all learned (and maybe loved) in elementary school. There are a couple of variants on the lune form, but just to keep things simple.

The first line has three words. The second line has five, and the third line has three. You can write a poem that consists of just one stanza, or link many lune-stanzas together into a unified poem. Happy writing!

 

Day 5: Golden Shovel

Today I challenge you to write a “golden shovel.” This form was invented by Terrance Hayes in his poem, The Golden Shovel. The last word of each line of Hayes’ poem is a word from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem We Real Cool. You can read Brooks’ poem by reading the last word of each line of Hayes’ poem! Now, the golden shovel is a tricky form, but you can help keep it manageable by picking a short poem to shovel-ize.