‘Discovering the ability to encourage my own efforts rather than undermine them by criticism has been a huge learning on the course. I learnt this from watching the way Mandy is with people.’
Nigel White, Ways into Writing, Leeds University SCE.
Every July, ten to twenty poets pack their suitcases with clean underwear, several pens and a few good ideas and head to Chop Gate in Bilsdale to write poetry for a week.
We stay at local B&Bs and meet up every morning in the village hall. I come up with a theme and some writing exercises, and we’re off, cracking out first drafts like there’s no tomorrow.
But there is a tomorrow, and I love knowing that some of these drafts will be made into finished poems and that in a few years’ time, I’ll open the pages of a poetry magazine, anthology, or the poet’s own pamphlet and see a poem I recognise, all grown-up.
For example, Carlotta Miller Johnson’s poem ‘Weeding my Sister’ won joint third prize in the Troubadour poetry competition 2009. You can read it (scroll down to the 2009 poems) at Coffee House Poetry.
And Jo Heather’s poem Everyday appears in the September 2006 issue of Equinox poetry magazine. Jo wrote it at the 2005 school, themed The World of Things.
She says, ‘We had reached the last day so I was attuned to writing and my imagination and memory were working freely. We were asked to write about something that was precious to us: to list its qualities, attractive and unattractive, describe where it lived, mention a memory connected with it, and predict its future. I might never have written about my faded old cup but for the exercise, and I was amazed at how successfully it turned out.’
Jo, a disciplined, elegant writer, added the restriction of writing to sonnet length herself.
And here’s another lovely poem: from Shirley Hetherington, and published in her pamphlet Flying Lessons (2006, Mudfog Press)
If
I wouldn’t mind it if you disappeared.
Just leave the gap between your teeth,
the arches of your ‘perfect’ feet.
your nape of neck,
the scar behind your knee,
strong boniness of wrists where dark hairs cease,
your voice held in the answer phone,
patience soldering silver,
the way you clean my walking boots,
your peripatetic specs.
These I would miss.
Shirley’s poem emerged from the 2003 summer school, themed The Body.
Joyce Hodgson, who has recently published a PhD Dynamic Memory: the Long Poem focussing on the poetry of Barry McSweeney, is another regular summer school attendee.
End product apart, there’s something wonderful about wallowing in poetry for a whole week. We lose things: sleep, pens, tempers, inhibitions. We gain things: friendship, pens, weight, confidence.
We’ve been running the poetry school every year since 2000. If you’re interested, for whatever reason, please get in touch. Perhaps you’d like to join us? You don’t need to be local to be welcome: we’re regularly visited by two American poets.
Here’s one of the writing exercises we did recently. You might like to try it.
Think of a family significant to you in the past (not your own). Write a couple of lines about each family member, saving the bulk of the poem for the person who was most significant. What did he/she used to do? Say? Wear? Is his/her story related to history in some way?
Photos by Adrienne Silcock and Monica Sharp