Writers Unbound

Writing poetry - whether or not you’re a poet - is one of the best ways to strengthen your expression, cull your dead words, and become more aware of the sound and flow of your writing.
Even if you are a poet, getting started can be difficult.

Guardian Books hosts a Poetry Workshop each month. Here’s the summary: “Every month, our poetry workshop is hosted by a different poet who sets an exercise, chooses the most interesting responses and offers an appraisal of them…” Past poets include Sean O’Brien in February, David Morley for January, and Jean Sprackland for the last month of 2007. Matthew Francis was the poet for March’s workshop; he received submissions until April 27 and will, I assume, soon post his short list and responses. I don’t see a new workshop listed for April/May, but I’m hoping that’s just a delay on the part of the WebMaster.

I took a little time to go through Francis’s workshop for March. His first instruction is simple: Complete the sentence, “When I think of summer, I think of…”
Easy enough, and not exactly inspiring yet. My list was lack luster and predictable at the beginning: grass, playgrounds, vacations. (For some reason I went straight to summers as a child, not summers now, as an adult. Hm.) But, as Francis said, I started thinking of things “very personal to you, the sort of associations that not everyone else would have, while others may be general experiences that nevertheless wouldn’t occur to many people.” Thing such as
building little houses out of twigs in my grandparent’s yard
everyone’s terror of wasps
sticky hummingbird feeders
big dinners of cornbread and molasses, peas, squash, greens
being disappointed at how lame a “real treehouse” was
shoveling up thick clay mud when we tried to dig our own swimming pool
proposals of marriage
camping trips, plastic tents. mom’s hair messed up and funny while she poured our breakfast out of individual cereal boxes by the small campfire, dad smelling of fish and lakewater and looking young and happy, free days, sand, dirt trails, woods tripping over their roots to reach the lake, popping back into wet swimsuits, getting gravel between your foot and your flip-flop, how cold and then warm the water was, squishing up through mud and pebbles, finding mussels, my sister catching the baby gar


Francis continues his workshop by having you list ten gifts: five to someone you love, five to someone you hate, and “Each of the gifts will be an experience for one of their five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. I emphasise an experience, not an object…”.

Here are my ten (I’m sure you can guess which are for the one I love, which for the one I hate):
taste of fresh sweet plugra butter spread on pumpernickel
smell of woodfire smoke and leaves in november air
sight of himself as I see him
touch of the perfect temperature steaming bath
sound of him on drums playing to a perfect combination of distorted guitar and me singing a soprano-high indian-minor melody over

taste of soured milk
smell of one of the really nasty diapers
sight of water flooding his basement
touch of unexpected spider in your hair at night
sound of slightly flat tenor singing remake of 70’s love song with electric drums and cheap keyboard

The final step of the workshop is to create similes from the images in the gift-list, and then use those similes, images, stories of the gifts to create a poem.
I stopped there so I could come tell you about this great workshop… now I’m off to write my poem. It’s too late to submit it this month, but I’m keeping my eye on that site.