attention

someone I don’t know well

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Betty

Scoured by grey metal catering pots
and pans.  Grown by the
runner beans incessantly.

Worn in by ninety-two
pairs of size four slippers
(latterly, velvet).

Lit by infinite log fires
sussex beech and oak
no longer chopped by him.

Read by books, new, secondhand,
or borrowed, suspended by
an embossed
red leather bookmark.

Captured by photos of an
African safari, Andrew’s family
from Australia and ‘our dear friend’
Nils from Norway.

Fed by a marathon of meals,
fish finger breakfast butties,
roast lamb (fat included),
homemade fruitcake on
forget-me-not plates.

Pinned neatly into position
by a slowly diminishing
grey-white bun.

Loved.

Note: This poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’.  We read ‘On hesitating to depict my grandmother’ by Gillian Allnutt (amongst others) and were asked to write a poem about someone we didn’t know well enough in six minutes.

writing to order and other new things

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

So it’s been very interesting to be on a poetry course.  Spending time formally considering my own creative writing makes me realise that the last time I did this was when I was about thirteen years old, in English class, before everything turned into A-level essays on this and undergraduate degree studies on that.

Things I have done today that I have not done in the last twenty-seven years:

  1. Write a poem to order.  Here’s a poem about waiting.  Now you write a poem about waiting (here is ‘Waiting‘, unfinished)
  2. Read my own poem out loud to other people.
  3. Read my own poem out loud to a tutor and receive feedback.
  4. Have other known people (than my mum) take my poetry seriously.
  5. Listened to other people read their own creative work aloud to me.

The morning made me feel intensely passionate and vulnerable and dishevelled and lagging behind and out in front and questioning and excited.

Writing to order made me trip over words, try to be too clever, hit on a line of beauty, tumble over a cliché and want to go into hiding, and to come out of hiding.

Listening to others made me in awe, moved, wry, patient and outraged.

I have rarely had this many feelings in such a short space of time.

High point of the day so far:  A real poet said my  ‘wild night run‘ poem was ‘lovely’.  And she gave me some very interesting feedback about how to make it stronger, which I will work on in due course.

I am tired!

Now I must go and get some poems ready to read aloud later on.

Thank you for your encouragement!

 

portrait – writers

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Fourteen writers,
heads bent, pens
scratching, grey hair,
blond, dyed (mine, that is),
imaginations aflutter, fleeting
competition resolutely pushed
aside. Faint mewing outside
‘shut up, Ted’.  Is our four
minutes up yet, we thought,
breathless.

Note: This poem is from the ‘poetry retreat series’.  We read ‘The Bean Eaters’ by Gwendolyn Brooks, noted the Van Gogh-like style and tone, and were asked to writer our own painting-poems in four and a half minutes.  As my first attempt ‘portrait‘ took only one and half minutes, I spent another two on this.

portrait

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

one child much smaller,
party skirt, top with
‘3’ and dried tomato
sauce (is it?) lags
lags behind, pulls
herself up, tries
to follow, eek, slips.
She is no match for her
brother (batman outfit  –
probably pyjamas) and his
new shoes.

Note: This is from the ‘poetry retreat’ series.  As our first exercise we read ‘Subject Matter’ by W. Hart-Smith and were asked to write poem that paints a picture in four an a half minutes (this took one and a half, I think). 

extraplorer on tour

~ extraplorer ~ 3 Comments

I’m back!

OK so the ‘year of the poem’ has not turned out exactly as envisaged in my January posts.  The year of the poem turned, quite quickly, into the year of hardly any poem at all.

Until now.

After months of almost continuous business work and travel, devoid not only of any written down poems, but of any poetic moments at all (maybe they were there, but so fleeting that they escaped before I even had a chance to notice), I am on a poetry course.  Four whole days of thinking and writing about poems.

So I thought you might like to join back on the adventure of extraploring…

To get us started, last night we did a welcome unlike any I’ve attended on a course (this is my first ever poetry course).  We didn’t ‘go round the table and say our names’, no, too prosaic by far, we went round and said our favourite words.

I was in immediate and total bliss: ‘swipe’, ‘splash’, ‘twilight’, ‘botch’, ‘gossamer’, dollop’, ‘interstices’, ‘lime’, ‘splendid’.  A (to be honest) motley collection of us all suddenly united under the banner of ‘I love words’.

And then… well, I will keep you posted with our exercises and writing and you can see how we get on.  One thing to note: This is an ‘editing poetry’ course so some of the questions I have sometimes asked might get answered here.

Wish me luck!