Category: Workshopping

Workshopping/

Brighton Poetry Stanza – new reading group launch

Brighton Poetry Stanza

Brighton Poetry Stanza

The Brighton Poetry Stanza is expanding. Jo Grigg has done a fabulous job of nurturing this group over the last few years, with a diverse group of people meeting once a month to workshop their poems. There are a number of regulars and many more who come along when they can.

Stanzas are regional groups loosely under the auspices of the Poetry Society, but organised entirely by volunteers ‘on the ground’, and they vary in terms of what they offer – some are workshopping groups like ours, others meet less often and are structured differently. But they are open to all, you don’t have to be a paid up member of the Poetry Society.

Now Miriam Patrick, one of our Brighton members, is setting up a reading group under the Stanza umbrella. The group will meet monthly at the same venue as the workshopping group (but on a different night!) with the aim of ‘close reading’ contemporary poems that members have enjoyed, possibly from Poetry Review, or other journal. The new group kicks off this coming Monday, 3rd December, at the Caxton Arms in Brighton, 7.30 – 9.30pm. I’m certainly looking forward to it – I really enjoy hearing what other people get from poems as it really adds to the experience, even sometimes turning me on to a piece that I might have otherwise given a wide berth!

We’re also planning a poetry reading in Brighton – more on this in another post. To celebrate all this ‘expansion’ we’ve even launched a Brighton Poetry Stanza Facebook Page – yeeha!

A plea for help! Even if you’re not local, please visit our Facebook page and ‘like’ us – when we reach 30 likes we can access the stats and things can really start to build. Thanks in advance 🙂

 

Poet's Tips/

Mimi Khalvati on vowel music and editing with form

Notebook

Notebook

Our last workshop of the year with Mimi Khalvati on Saturday, and the subjects of vowel sounds and form were big topics. Here’s an extract from my notes, on the things that struck home for me this month.

Vowel music – paying attention to the vowel sounds of words (NB not how the sounds are written – it can’t be done by sight.)

Sometimes a chain of sounds emerges and this can reveal something about the emotional feel of it. Listen to the sound, what does it tell you? For example – the UH of but, come, cup etc can have an up-in-the-air feeling, a feeling of wonder, whereas the short I sounds of pin, trip, kin, can sound excitable, light. Think of the longer vowel sounds and diphthongs of peel, need, close, bows, low, ground – in being longer they are more settled, grounded, slowing down.

Working with vowel sounds is a good critical tool – sometimes you can hit on the right sound but it’s the wrong word. This is a common problem – you can’t let the word go, because you know there’s something right about it, but you don’t know why it still seems wrong. Lots of things sound similar, you have to work through other words with the same sound.

Still thinking about sounds – if you use a foreign name or word, should you worry about people not reading it with the right pronunciation, and thereby spoiling their ‘hearing’ of the poem? Mimi says you should trust a ‘good reader’ to make the right call and go with it. ‘Don’t write for bad readers!’

Form – when the form doesn’t quite work you must wonder about it. Form is an unforgiving editing tool. Go through and look where you’ve put line breaks, enjambments, stanza length, anything that sticks out (eg a strong, unintentional rhyming couplet in the middle of free verse) and try playing with the form, stanza and line length etc.
On the other hand, don’t force your poem into a specific form if it doesn’t quite fit, eg by ‘padding’ in order for the metre to be correct. Trust in the direction the poem is going and don’t be wedded to an idea if the language suggests otherwise.

Mags & Blogs/

A feast of first lines

Wordsworth manuscript

Wordsworth manuscript

First lines. Ack! It’s worse than a job interview. You have 2 seconds to make an impression. Or something like that.

Do you find yourself going back to the first line and re-writing because it’s just not strong enough? And as a reader, do you ever read the first line and immediately your mind says ‘uh oh’ and you’ve already got a prediction in your head of where it’s going? I know I do both of these things, and more. After the title, the first line has to be pretty good, do you agree?

In a moment of stupor I thought I would try to finally CRACK the first line thing by doing some research. Ha ha! The appliance of science – always worth a try!

So I dutifully recorded all the first lines from every poem in The Rialto 74. Call me crazy if you like, but it was a fun exercise. And the resulting list of 55 first lines actually reads like a poem in itself, although I don’t think even the (theoretical) love child of Selima Hill and Sam Riviere could come up with this. (Love them both though! No offence intended! But they can be pretty left-field!)

So here we go. If this is a breach of copyright, I apologise – all credit to the poets, but if anyone would like their line pulled from this post, on the grounds of non-attribution, please say.

Hard to think about infinity

We’re the lucky ones

The postman listens to Roxy Music on her iPod nano

Down with poetry! It’s all over the place

We lean into the soft brake BLUES

Some people are bad for the soul. Avoid them.

In the museum-without-proprietor

The bound book lay open on the desk

At least you can sleep, folding us and the hours

You’ll have had me, the view of me, down on the sand

At the high pass, forward scouts report,

You are welcome, you arrive to embraces and chatter

There’s a red spot in the centre of today

Laura shows up in time to have to wait

I reflect on their defects. They give me

spine faded, pages yellowed, corners turned down

What would you do if I died right now, here, you asked,

Until recently we were very pleased with Roger.

We were litte upstarts; our causes imperceptible, inflamed

The bathtub, the Frigidaire, the gilded tap,

We learn why things happen

The inn on the Tokaido Road has

Standing at the sink

The others are glad not to be the corpse

are discussing provocation: holding law up to the light.

Across the road the decorators have finished;

In the last August of the war, my

Dear little damp foot

Really I want to keep this to myself

You tell that story again

A girl is two eggs waiting to be a cake, or a sun; Our Father going round and round in her song.

How the heart wire snapped and on the loose my heart

Wriggling, it pulls. The tip of the tail

Robert makes two cups of tea

Each of my poems is

And this too will pass into spring

You tie my scarf so it drapes like Madonna’s,

It is not the rusting of summer into inevitable

A man coughs like a box

I am an old book troglodyte

For years nobody had been to the library

Make do with my father, speeding

Love was the boy you broke up with years ago

Grief was the flash bloke with the bleached teeth

The smell of bonfires. Autumn in the garden.

I’m sat on a bench on the promenade

And how many men are stood like this in their socks

I ride the famous tourist bus for hours,

He’d forgotten he had his father’s pistol.

He’d never seen such a horse before:

I’m not malicious though have scarred a woman

The stone in me speaks directly into the eyes of a toad

We drive until there are no more mirrors.

We finish and you sigh and gaze up into my eyes

After breakfast I clipped the peonies

(image credit: British Library)

Workshopping/

Poetry Day at Jo’s

Poetry day at Jo's

Poetry day at Jo's

Every now and then, poet friend Jo generously offers up her lovely, sunny top floor for a few of us to have a poetry day. On Saturday there were four of us, the smallest group we’ve had so far, but it was lovely – we all brought along whatever we are reading at the moment, or a favourite poem to share, as well as a couple of our own poems to workshop. It’s really nice to have this kind of time and space to talk poetry, find out more about what each of us is up to, is planning to do or write, what we’re getting published and where, have the odd moan (!) about this and that. I always come away energised and hopeful, and thankful for the friendship and support.

Poet's Tips/

More Mimi tips

Here’s my round up of tips from Mimi Khalvati as recorded in my notebook on Saturday…. yours to do with as you see fit!

  • On the subject of clarity and coherence (does one need it? should one worry about it?) Similes are clearer than metaphors, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Mimi’s advice is to use similes ‘to see where you can go’ with the subject, and find the metaphors from that. Then you might want to ditch the similes. It’s a form of distillation/crystaliisation – taking your material and distilling from it the good metaphors. This is what might make it fresh, particularly if your topic is one that’s been done many times before.
  • On too much narrative – you don’t have to ‘situate’ everything. Less of a story, more intense, is what you need to make it a poem.
  • On internal rhyme – there’s nothing magic about it, it’s just English. ‘It’s impossible to write ten lines without some sort of internal rhyme’. Ouch!
  • ‘It’s terribly hard to write a simple, pure, love poem without it sounding trite.’ Pay attention to the sounds, every syllable, every vowel. Sometimes a single word will wrong-foot you. Keep testing it, reading it again and again to hear how it sounds.
  • The sensual, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual – which of these is to the fore in your poem? What’s the balance like? Something to consider. Intellectual (a ‘think’ poem) is more unusual, so might be fresher. Everyone focuses on imagery, so how about fresh ideas, new ways of thinking about something?
  • On titles – ‘let the title come from the opposite side of the brain to where the poem has come from’ – for example if the poem is a bit odd then resist the urge to make the title factual or explanatory. (I wasn’t quite sure about this but it was food for thought… plus I need all the help I can get with titles so I will bear this in mind.)
Workshopping/

Power pose through that next workshop!

Saturday was our monthly workshop with Mimi Khalvati (tips to come in next post!)

I had some really useful feedback from everyone on the poem I took along, but still managed to leave feeling defeated. Why? Because the quality of my observations on other people’s work just seemed completely off.  There’s no chance to backtrack or say any more once you’ve spoken, so each comment is like putting your neck on the block! I don’t suppose anyone except me noticed, but it paralysed me to the point that I felt I had nothing worth saying. I left thinking that perhaps I just knew sod-all about poetry and should stop deluding myself!

But of course these moments are sent to try us. After a day or two of despondency and talking it over with a good poet friend I’m feeling better.

I also watched this TED talk about how body language affects not only how others see us but how we feel about ourselves – and started to realise the part played by my own defeatist posture…when I should be doing this:

Power poses

Maybe this is the answer! Imagine ‘power posing’ through the next workshop, if you’re feeling a teensy bit intimidated…you know it makes sense – forget all those long silences, the crossed-legs-hugging-yourself, that hunching over poems and talking into your lap. No touching your hair as you speak or mumbling apologetically.

Sit back and pretend you’re a movie mogul. Stand up and place your hands assertively on the table! And next time you feel a moment of doubt coming on, stick those victory arms up in the air and give it a big YEEESSS!!

Victory Arms!
Photo by anricat – http://www.flickr.com/photos/31056658@N08/

 

 

Mags & Blogs/

Brighton Stanza on top

Stanza Poetry Competition

Stanza Poetry Competition

First the good news: I got a note through a week or so ago from Paul McGrane at the Poetry Society saying my poem had been commended in the 2012 Stanza competition (judged by John Siddique), but the full results weren’t out until today. So what should I find, but that there are 2 other Brighton Stanza poets on the list of 10 commendeds – Tess Jolly and Tom Cunliffe. Hurrah for us all!

Tess is a friend primarily from Jo Grigg’s workshopping group, which has been a fantastic support and inspiration for me. She is a really talented poet and I’m so pleased to see her name coming up regularly in publications and comps.

So overall, I think that makes the Brighton Stanza the winner this year – thank to Jo for encouraging us all to take part. It’s only a small competition, but always nice to get a little recognition.

And the bad news? My submission to Ambit seems to have gone astray. So that’s 5 months of waiting for nothing. Boo! But the Ambit chaps were kind enough to respond to me on Twitter and suggested that if I re-submit I could mention what happened and they might put my poems a bit higher up the slush pile. Except now when I look at what I submitted, I don’t like them! So they deserve to be at the bottom!

Poet's Tips/

Workshop with Mimi Khalvati

Aren’t we lucky in Lewes? A bona fide A-list poet comes down here from London each month to offer her wisdom and help us improve our writing. And I am finally in! After a year or so of champing at the bit I now have a place, and enjoyed my first ‘official’ workshop on Saturday at the salubrious venue of Lewes Bus Station. As well as Mimi there’s also a fantastic line-up of poets in the group, so I feel really privileged.

Here are a few extracts from my frantic note-taking of Mimi-isms, in no particular order… (I know these sound completely random and out of context they probably are, but I’m partly doing it to remind myself of what was said)

  • Don’t say the same thing several times
  • Be careful when editing not to lose the tone, if it’s crucial to the poem
  • On line length, if you’re unsure: find an important line and try using that as your line length
  • Ask yourself “am I going this way or that way?’
  • If you aim high you have more work to do
  • Writing formal poetry is 50 times harder than free verse (I liked this one!)
  • You sometimes need to be bold and not care what readers think/feel
  • Doubt in the mind of the reader is good. Don’t worry about taking things too literally. Sometimes  it’s a sign you need to read more, and read more ‘illogical’ stuff eg Selima Hill. If people don’t understand that’s their problem!
  • Avoid signposting (ie nudging people), plus a few more ‘over used’ words hit the dust (ask me if you really want to know!)
  • Try swapping nouns or noun phrases and see how it sounds – mess things up a bit – to stretch yourself into unfamiliar territory

Happy days!

 

 

Mags & Blogs/

Bumper latest news

Seagull_dieppe

Lots been happening lately.

Firstly, my good friend and very talented poet Charlotte Gann was shortlisted for the Michael Marks pamphlet award. Although she was pipped at the post it was a wonderful to see her pamphlet The Long Woman make the shortlist for a big prize.

Then, I had the chance to take part in a workshop here in Lewes with Mimi Khalvati. I’ve been on the ‘reserve’ list for a while and there’s now a strong possibility I may make the cut for the autumn dates.

It’s difficult to step into an established workshopping group where everyone else knows each other, and I had decided not to attend as a ‘fill in’ any more, but if I can become a regular member I think that will be much more helpful, for me and I’m sure for everyone else, as It’s not always useful to have a stranger turn up and launch into a critique of your work.

Also in June I finished a short course at the Poetry School with Jack Underwood, all about putting together a pamphlet. It was useful and fun, although I’m not sure I’d do a regular class in Lambeth again as travel to and from isn’t easy – the class over-ran every time and because I had to run for a train it meant I missed quite a lot. More about the pamphlet in another post. Met some interesting poets on the course, including Harry Man, Madeleine Wurzburger, Steve Boorman and Olly Todd.

Although I missed the Brighton Stanza meetup last month and will miss the next (am giving a talk to the London Writers’ Cafe group about blogging) I did make it to the Pighog poetry night at the RedRoaster Cafe in Brighton last week. It was a great evening, with John Davies, John McCullough and Rosy Carrick reading – I really enjoyed Rosy’s performance and was great to finally meet the lovely John McC who I feel I already know a little via Twitter and Facebook – I’m now enjoying reading his book The Frost Fairs. I did read at the open mic (just – they called it a day and then said ‘OK, we’ll take one more reader’) and got a ‘well done’ from John Davies afterwards, which was kind of him.

PS the photo was taken in Dieppe at the weekend, where it appears to be summer.

Angst/

The key to writing better poetry is …

Saw a tweet about the new Arvon course list for 2012 being up. So couldn’t resist taking a look.

I’m going through this thing at the moment where I feel a desperate need for some sort of mentoring, or at least workshopping, with better poets than myself. Better writers, more experienced… I guess I don’t necessarily define ‘better’ in terms of recognition or success, but of course that’s part of it.

But it’s funny, sometimes, when I meet someone in a poetry setting, I get an immediate feeling that they’re ‘good’ – it’s hard to describe really, but I get a little ‘ping’, a lightbulb moment I suppose.

I can think of three people who’ve given me this feeling in the last few years. But I’m too shy to name them right now 🙂 The point is, they’re not all obvious candidates for the ‘lightbulb moment’. And I’ve come across many others who you’d think would qualify, but don’t.

It’s probably nothing to do with poetry wisdom or anything. Just a spark, a perceived (and possible one-sided) rapport.

Anyway, the Arvon courses that jumped out at me were a week on ‘Advanced Poetry’ with Carol Ann Duffy (quality-controlled entry, which I like) – but it’s a) in Scotland and b) overlapping with family holiday (already booked) …. a week in Devon with Mimi Khalvati and Sean O’Brien (I think… if I remember that correctly) – I haven’t yet been able to infiltrate the Lewes Live Lit monthly workshops with Mimi Khalvati, something that frustrates me NO END – and the idea of travelling to darkest Devon JUST to get into a workshop with her, when I can’t do so in my HOME TOWN, seems deliciously perverse.

And then there’s the possibility of a week with Don Paterson, albeit a ‘fiction and poetry’ week, when fiction interests me not one iota…. but Don Paterson? Oh my. Don. Paterson.

So I probably won’t be shelling out my £650 this year to the Arvon Foundation. And anyway, all these courses…. they’re a business, right? Just how many courses have the successful poets actually been on, at least, those who’ve been plying their trade since before the MA Creative Writing boom?

Isn’t writing better poetry down to reading good poetry, attempting to write stuff that’s as good, and practising again and again?