Poets for Ukraine

Yesterday I listened to incredible poems from George Szirtes, Moniza Alvi and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese at LIVE at The Butchery. Their poems will sit with me for a long time.

During the event Jacqueline Saphra dropped a link to the Fundraiser which happened in London on Mother’s Day, 30th March.

Transcript/Video Information:

A fundraising, awareness-raising, spirit-raising day of poetry in solidarity with the people of Ukraine at this time of great peril and suffering.

Poets for Ukraine, in partnership with The Society of Authors, The Poetry Society, The Poetry School and JW3 held a Poem-a-Thon here at JW3 where sponsored poets read in relay for up to five minutes, some in person and some virtually.

Special guests include:

Juliet Stevenson, Jessie Ware, Meera Syal, Sophie Ward and Nick Hytner
Naomi Shihab Nye from the USA
Headliner poets from the UK, including former Scottish Makar Jackie Kay
Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke
Imtiaz Dharker who holds the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry
This year’s Costa Book Prize winner Hannah Lowe
Forward Prize winner Fiona Benson
Former Poet Laureates Carol Ann Duffy and Andrew Motion
Poet in Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra Daljit Nagra
Veteran actors Harriet Walter and Bill Paterson
They will share the spotlight with Ukrainian poets appearing on video both from the frontline and the diaspora.

All proceeds to our chosen charities, Goods for Good and Hope and Aid Direct.

The links for giving are available under the video.

Go and watch it on the JW3 London channel.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 30 The Final Poem

It is with a slightly heavy heart that we wave goodbye to NaPoWriMo for another year today. I have a bank of prompts to play with if I ever feel the need to dip into ideas, some great resources and a collection of sometimes strange, partly incomplete and astonishing, surprising poems to end the month with.

One has already been used in my PoARTry Ledbury project and another was suitable for the WPL Suffragettes anthology.

The time I have taken out to write has been wonderful, my year as WPL has been amazing but it has impacted on writing time and submissions. I am now working on the tail end projects and setting up those which will continue after my Laureateship.

I will use my Napo time now as editing & writing and get myself back in the saddle ready to take off at speed, or perhaps a canter!

So here we are people, at the end of a month of poetry.

Well, it had to happen, what with time being linear and all. We have finally arrived at the last day of Na/GloPoWriMo 2018! I hope you have had fun writing poetry over the course of the month, and that you’ll come back next year, when we will do it all over again, with new prompts, new featured participants, and a to-be-determined other kind of poetry feature.

Our final, featured participant for the year is NaNoPoRaWriMo, where the Plath-inspired poem for Day Twenty-Nine takes the form of a sonically-dense and lyrical recipe.

Our last craft resource for you is this online collection of recordings of Borges’ lectures on poetry and many other topics. Borges was, in addition to being a poet and writer of strange and compelling short stories, an inveterate professor who lectured widely in both Spanish and English. His lectures are seeded throughout with strange factoids, fascinating observations linking the poets and poetry of different ages and languages, and an overwhelmingly omnivorous approach to knowledge.

And for our final (optional) prompt, I’d like you to take your cue from Borges, and write a poem that engages with a strange and fascinating fact. It could be an odd piece of history, an unusual bit of art trivia, or something just plain weird. While I cannot vouch for the actual accuracy of any of the facts presented at the links above (or any other facts you might use as inspiration!), I can tell you that there are definitely some poetic ideas here, just waiting for someone to use them.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a last post bidding farewell to Na/GloPoWriMo 2018, but in the meantime . . .

Happy writing!

I really enjoyed listening to the Harvard Lectures on Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges.

I love the rediscovering of literature and knowing that I now spend my life writing, researching and learning too and it is wonderful, I will never tire of it.

Poetry is a passion and joy!

I started with the Historical trivia, I have written a sequence of poems based on historical fact/ people, so was interested in this as a starting point. I saved 6/25 facts into a word document and moved onto Art Trivia.

I loved discovering facts about some of my favourite artists, some I knew, having studied them aeons ago at university! I saved 7 facts from 25 on the word document, highlighting 2 that appealed the most.

The weird facts – some of which I knew lend themselves to humorous poetry and have been banked for future writing. I collected a few of the 75, but read them all! 17 out of 75 facts, my favourite piece of trivia:

It is estimated that millions of trees are planted by forgetful squirrels that buried their nuts.

Love it!

 

The result of using this Art fact:

Henri Matisse‘s work, Le Bateau, was put the right way up after hanging upside-down for 46 days without anyone noticing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, America.

was a humorous poem where the guard ends up mopping water.

in the space

where sky

and water

meet.

I enjoyed playing with the form of this poem, I quite fancy seeing what happens if I reverse it and hang it upside down!

 The Poetry School Day 30

Final Day: Send it off

Well, here we are poets. Congratulations to everyone who joined in. It’s been a lot of fun.

As is tradition, your task for this last day of NaPoWriMo is to pick a poem from this month, clean it up, and send it off to a magazine or competition. Or share it with another person.

 

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 29

Welcome back, everyone, for the penultimate day of Na/GloPoWriMo Day 29. I hope today you’ll be writing your 29th poem of the month! And even if it’s only your tenth, or even your first, well, that’s more poems than you started with, isn’t it?

Our featured participant today is What Rhymes with Stanza, where the postcard poem for Day Twenty-Eight is a pun-filled prose poem actually laid out as a postcard.

Today we have new interview (and our last for this year!), with the poet Chris Tonelli’s, whose second full-length poetry collection, Whatever Stasis, is just out from Barrelhouse Books. You can read some of Tonelli’s poetry here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem based on the Plath Poetry Project’s calendar. Simply pick a poem from the calendar, and then write a poem that responds or engages with your chosen Plath poem in some way.

My WPL projects involved a lot of poetry written in response to those read. So I look forward to tackling this poem.

I actually found it harder than I expected. It was a chance to read a lot of Plath’s poems, I finally chose Edge – which may not be in the linked archive.

My response poem was a lot shorter, just 3 stanzas.

the silk growns Queenlike

 

 The Poetry School Day 29

Day 29: Amnesty Day

Today, the penultimate day of NaPoWriMo, is amnesty day. It’s a day to do any or all of the following things:

1) Go back and try some prompts you missed, or want another go at.

 

2) Edit or redraft a poem from a previous prompt.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 28

Hello, all! There are just three days left in our April poetry-writing adventure! I hope you’ve been enjoying it.

Our featured participant today is Thoughts of Words, where the Tarot poem for Day Twenty-Seven features a poetical hermit.

Today, we bring you a new craft resource, in the form of this history and exploration of the prose poem. This essay helpfully catalogs several different styles of prose poem, with examples, and possible strategies for writing.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Following the suggestion of our craft resource, we challenge you today to draft a prose poem in the form/style of a postcard. If you need some inspiration, why not check out some images of vintage postcards? I’m particularly fond of this one.

Happy writing!

I did a workshop several years ago with old postcards, so after looking at the NaPo link I started to research for postcard images from England, one came up with the letter writing side so from there I copied more postcard messages as a starting point.

 

The town is lopsided, one could easily feel drunk
looking at sloping rooftops.

 

 The Poetry School Day 28

Day 28: Music 

“Where words fail, music speaks.” ― Hans Christian Andersen

Before we move on, a note on yesterday’s prompt. If anyone wants to continue practising their iambic pentameter (ip), or any other metre they choose, a good habit to get into is to spend five minutes every day, or whenever you can, writing nonsense verse into your notebook in ip. Don’t worry about the sense — at all.

Anyway!

Today I would like you to write a poem while listening to music. For some this may be your regular practice; for some (like me) it will drive you up the wall. Try it either way. It can be the same song on repeat, or perhaps an album of songs all by the same artist, or an entire piece by a composer, but don’t try this with the radio, a mixed-artist playlist, or anything like that. I want you to sink into and feel the music, which can’t be done if it keeps changing.

Once your music is playing, begin to free-write, without stopping, until you can feel the poem emerge. At which point, it will probably be tempting to turn the music off, or mentally drown it out. Don’t. Try and let it in. Try and let the rhythm, the melody, the tone, and the mood affect the way you write.

I should say that your poem doesn’t need to be about the music. It may be preferable to write about something else, perhaps. For obvious reasons, no example poems today, but a nod in the general direction of two poets who I know write with music very much in mind: Bridget Minamore, whose pamphlet Titanic comes with recommended listening (!) and Rishi Dastidar, who, rumour has it, likes to blast music at his workshop students to stimulate emotions.

 

It is true! I was fortunate enough to do Rishi Dastidar’s Call & Response workshop at Swindon Poetry Festival last year and thoroughly enjoyed using music to wake muse up!

I have also used music several times to write poetry, Candy Royalle used music in her workshop I was in a few years ago too. I do not have the time to write more than one NaPo poem as I am on catch up and have writing deadlines to meet this evening, but what the heck… it only happens once a year, right?

 

 

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 27

I have fallen behind at the tail end of NaPoWriMo, not surprisingly as I have had festival appearances, events and a Book Launch over the past 3 days.

Attempting to catch up but also have submission deadlines so may end NaPo in May.

Hello all, and welcome back for Day Twenty-Seven of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant today is Real Momma Ramblings, where getting breakfast on the table takes all five senses and strong nerves to boot.

Today we have a new interview for you, with Lauren Hunter, whose first book of poetry, HUMAN ACHIEVEMENTS, was published last year by Birds LLC. You can read some of Hunter’s poetry here and here, and you can check out our interview with her here.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt. Following Lauren Hunter’s practice of relying on tarot cards to generate ideas for poems, we challenge you to pick a card (any card) from this online guide to the tarot, and then to write a poem inspired either by the card or by the images or ideas that are associated with it.

I read this prompt before work on the day it was posted. I spent the hours in between work preparing and rehearsing my set for Bohemian Voices (which was a lovely event, I will write a review soon).

Last year I started to look into fortune telling as research for a sequence of poems, one of which won me the Poet Laureateship of Worcestershire and apparently wowed all 5 judges. I look forward to writing a poem for this prompt, I explored the website and picked my card, I only looked at 2. The ideas have been bouncing around the back of my head as I was out on the road going to gigs (helped that the motorway had a 30 mph restriction)! Gave me more thinking time.

I chose ‘The Star’ and wrote about the figure on the card.

…                              the star
shines with unveiled truth

 The Poetry School Day 27

Day 27: Blank Verse

Blank verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter – is the living history of modern English poetry. It is Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson, and even if you never use it again, you should give it a go, as learning to write it will help you read (and hear) them. It sounds like this (stresses in bold and feet marked with | ):

The woods | decay, | the woods | decay | and fall, 
The va | pours weep | their bur | then to | the ground, 
Man comes | and tills | the field | and lies | beneath

That’s Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’, by the way. Note that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Here’s the next line, which has an extra syllable:

And af  |  ter ma | ny a | sum mer | dies the | swan. 

Iambic pentameter should be the basic pulse, though, and try to stick to five beats a line. 

To get the feel of it, I suggest you pick any section of Milton’s Paradise Lost — I like the beginning of Book II: 

High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous east with richest hand
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence; and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heaven….

Your example poem today is ‘Mending Wall’ by Robert Frost (you’ll have to scroll down a bit). The version given here has been marked with the stresses (though you may, of course, scan it differently), and there’s an audio recording of Frost to help you with the rhythm. 

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 26

Hello, everyone! Happy twenty-sixth day of Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is palimpsestic possibilities, where the Warning Label poem for Day Twenty-Five comes with footnotes!

Today we bring you a new craft resource, in the form of this essay by Josh Roark exploring engagement of the senses, and of the notion of embodiment, in the poetry of Ocean Vuong. Roark argues that the key to the success of Vuong’s poems is his particular ability to make the reader feel a poem as a visceral object, and not one that is removed or merely intellectual. If you’d like to check out some more of Vuong’s work, you might look at this poem that, fittingly for our purposes, is titled Essay on Craft.

And now for our prompt (optional as always). Taking our cue from today’s craft resource, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that includes images that engage all five senses. Try to be as concrete and exact as possible with the “feel” of what the poem invites the reader to see, smell, touch, taste and hear.

Happy writing!

I started this prompt by collecting random images associated with the 5 senses.

I then almost abandoned these ideas in favour of writing about my experience of whale watching. The poem needs some fine tuning, but is generally adequate.

rough and smooth,
like the difference between
polar waters and the shallow.

 The Poetry School Day 26

Day 26: The Tonic Chord

Today’s a difficult one to explain, so I’ll lead with the poems and then try to get it across. Have a read of Alan Gillis’ ‘To Be Young and in Love in Middle Ireland’, Rita Dove’s ‘Fox’, and Chrissy Williams’ ‘The Lost’ (one of my favourite poems). Finally, have a read of Edwin Morgan’s ‘Opening the Cage‘. (Hat-tip to Fiona Larkin on Twitter for finding this poem for us!).

All of these poems work with a small palette of key words – just a handful – and shift and rearrange them like a kaleidoscope, so we see different patterns. Think of these words, perhaps, as the tonic chord, the beginning and ending, the reference point to which you always return. I would like you to try something similar. You can either pick out your key words in advance, or, as I would suggest, start writing first, and then begin to modulate and return, modulate and return.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 25

Hello, all! It’s the twenty-fifth day of Na/GloPoWriMo. We’re really in the home stretch now!

Today, our featured participant is Zouxzoux, where the elegy for Day Twenty-Four breathes life into a lost dancer.

We bring you a new interview today, with Rodney Gomez, whose book Citizens of the Mausoleum, is being put out by Sundress Publications. Gomez is the author of several chapbooks, and his poems have previously been published in journals including Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol, You can read some of Gomez’s poems here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our daily prompt (optional, as always). Today, we challenge you to write a poem that takes the form of a warning label . . . for yourself! (Mine definitely includes the statement: “Do Not Feed More Than Four Cookies Per Hour.”)

Happy writing!

I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with the reading. I loved Probability of the Sparrow by Rodney Gomez and liked discovering some of his work through the links provided, a new fan is born. I have also added a new blog to my reader list, about 10 so far this NaPoWriMo –  Zouxzoux’s Elegy poem was lovely, a good one to re-read.

I had a pleasant time writing today’s poem, a warning for my heart. I am fairly satisfied with the results.

It weighs less than a billiard ball,
and is a lot easier to crack.

 The Poetry School Day 25

Day 25: Poems for Children 

Good morning poets. A fun one for you today. I’d like you to write poems for children. It helps to have an age in mind when you write – a poem for a three year old being very different to young adult poetry – so please include your intended reading age when you post. It’ll help people give better feedback.

A couple of traps to avoid. Firstly, don’t, because you’re writing for children, suddenly decide to write like a Victorian. (I don’t know why people do this.) Secondly, try to avoid moralising.

Your first example poem is ‘From a Railway Carriage’, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic A Child’s Garden of Verses, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with.

The second example poem is ‘Falling Up’ by Shel Silverstein, which is number 6 in this list of his poems. 

Sometimes, of course, children write the best poetry themselves. This is ‘The Tiger’ by Nael, age 6.

At the time of reading this morning, I had lots of ideas for this – since then I have been preparing for the festival and many of my original thoughts have been forgotten, hoping they will come back when my mind is free-er.

I wrote about Evacuees as this is the new theme at work and I thought I may be able to use it in PE.

It needs some more work.

We all had labels attached to us,
as if we were parcels –

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 24

Happy final Tuesday in Na/GloPoWriMo, everyone.
Our featured participant today is kavyastream, where the overheard/regional language prompt for Day 23 gives us more Texas sayings than you can shake a stick at.

Today’s craft resource is a long-ish essay by Hyejung Kook regarding how poetry can be created from absence, or in the wake of loss, and how awareness of mortality drives a desire to produce art, people, poems.

And now for our prompt (optional, as always). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy – a poem typically written in honor or memory of someone dead. But we’d like to challenge you to write an elegy that has a hopefulness to it. Need inspiration? You might look at W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats, which ends on a note suggesting that the great poet’s work will live on, inspiring others in years to come. Or perhaps this elegy by Mary Jo Bang, where the sadness is shot through with a sense of forgiveness on both sides.

Happy (or at least, hopeful) writing!

I loved the whiffletree from the participant poem. The practise of poetry mentioned in the craft resource is exactly what NaPoWriMo does for all of us. Puts fingers on those keys.

 The Poetry School Day 24

Day 24: The Gift 

There are so many brilliant ‘gift’ poems that it’s hard to restrain myself to just a handful. Off the top of my head, there’s Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Valentine’, Michael Donaghy’s ‘The Present’, Billy Collins’ ‘The Lanyard’, Robert Frost’s ‘The Gift Outright’….

But today’s example poems are by poets a little less well-known in the UK, though hugely admired in the US. Firstly, I present you ‘The Gift’ by Li-Young Lee, an American poet, born in Indonesia (whose great-grandfather was the first Republican president of China).

My second gift is Rita Dove’s ‘For Sophie Who’ll Be in First Grade in the Year 2000’. Dove is a former US Poet Laureate and is editor of the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011). Some of her classics inspired poems would also have been useful for yesterday’s prompt.

One final thing: don’t forget you can write poems about receiving a gift as well as giving one.

I struggled with this one, my most famous poem is ‘Your Gift’ and I find it hard to even read the word gift without thinking of that poem.

However, I have written an Elegy and didn’t fancy that prompt and then after the day I have had, well I thought I needed to write about potential gifts that will help me, having gone back into a full time role (for the 1st time in 5 years) I think I may print it out and keep it in my cupboard!

 

A recipe book
for energy, late nights and
early lark mornings,

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 23

One week to go!

Hello, everyone! It’s hard to believe, but there’s just one week left to go in this year’s Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is Eat All the Words, where the impossible prompt for Day Twenty-Two has been transformed into a study guide!

We have a new interview for you today, with Kate Greenstreet, whose fourth book of poetry, The End of Something, is just out from Ahsahta Press. You can read some of Greenstreet’s poetry here and here, and our interview with her here.

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Kate Greenstreet’s poetry is spare, but gives a very palpable sense of being spoken aloud – it reads like spoken language sounds. In our interview with her, she underscores this, stating that “when you hear it, you write it down.” Today, we challenge you to honor this idea with a poem based in sound. The poem, for example, could incorporate overheard language. Perhaps it could incorporate a song lyric in some way, or language from something often heard spoken aloud (a prayer, a pledge, the Girl Scout motto). Or you could use a regional or local phrase from your hometown that you don’t hear elsewhere, e.g. “that boy won’t amount to a pinch.”

Happy writing!

I found a wonderful archive of language from the region I grew up in and plan to use this sometime in the future. For now I played with a prayer and wrote a very honest poem.

… be done blue line,
as it is in films.

 The Poetry School Day 23

Day 23: Classics 

Salve and Χαίρετε, poets. Today I’d like you to look to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. You may have to do some research to find a story that works for you. If possible, try to avoid a simple retelling of a well-known legend in its entirety; make it new by doing something different. One way to do this is to explore a small, perhaps overlooked moment, in a larger legend, as Michael Longley does in his poem ‘Laertes‘, which is about the return of Odysseus to his father Laertes. Another is to switch perspectives, as Carol Ann Duffy does in her poem ‘Mrs Midas‘. Yet another is use a snippet of myth as inspiration for a poem about modern life and death, as Jack Gilbert does in ‘Failing and Flying‘, and Danez Smith does in their poem ‘not an elegy for Mike Brown‘.

NaPoWriMo 2018 Day 22

Happy fourth Sunday of Na/GloPoWriMo, all.

Today’s featured participant is ARHtistic License, where the Narcissus/narcissism poem for Day 21 treats the myth from Echo’s point of view.

Our craft resource for the day is a series of reflections by Wesley McNair on “indirect entry” into a poem. McNair writes of inviting mystery and uncertainty into our poems, both with respect to the writing process and the finished work.

And now for our daily prompt (optional as always). I’ve found this one rather useful in trying to ‘surprise’ myself into writing something I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. Today, I’d like you to take one of the following statements of something impossible, and then write a poem in which the impossible thing happens:

The sun can’t rise in the west.

A circle can’t have corners.

Pigs can’t fly.

The clock can’t strike thirteen.

The stars cannot rearrange themselves in the sky.

A mouse can’t eat an elephant.

Happy writing!

I found the process of poems, the craft article/reflections by Wesley McNair a good read.

I look forward to writing my impossible poem! I enjoyed writing this poem. I wrote a thin poem based on an answer in a mathematical forum. I am fairly pleased with the resulting poem and may have found a suitable poem for my final Poet Laureate Collection on Mathematical/Scientific poems in memory of Stephen Hawking.

thoughts about
tiny angles
can wait.

 The Poetry School Day 22

Day 22: Pantoum 

Morning poets. Today I’d like you write a pantoum. The pantoum is an anglophone variation on the Malay ‘pantun’. It uses quatrains with repeated lines, much like a villanelle. Each stanza takes the second line of the stanza above as its first line, and the last line of the stanza above as its third line. Your poem can be any number of quatrains — four is the most common. It looks like this, where letters represent lines (not rhymes):

Stanza 1

A
B
C
D

B
E
D
F

E
G
F
H

and so on. Your example poem is ‘Zadie Smith’s first novel is‘  by the brilliant Bridget Minamore.

I love a Pantoum, I learnt to write this form a couple of years ago and have had one or two published. I look forward to coming back to this prompt.