Tag: wyverns

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I’ve Started So I’ll Finish

On Saturday, I made my annual visit to StAnza in St Andrews, billed as Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.

I’ve been going for around a decade, but my commitment has varied from year to year. Sometimes I’ve been to as many events as possible during a day trip, and sometimes I’ve booked accommodation so I could stay for the late-night slam.

This year, I made a conscious decision to buy just one ticket for the Breakfast Poetry show. As part of the entry fee, the audience is offered light refreshments and a coffee. In the afternoon, I planned to take the opportunity to catch up with my pal Robert who lives in St Andrews.

My advice for going to StAnza – and poetry events in general – is always to carry a notepad and pencil. I always find little nuggets of information that would otherwise be forgotten afterwards.

I’m glad I did because I was trying to compose a poem for my monthly Wyverns group using the prompt ‘Stars and planets’. I’d been turning over two ideas but they’d been coming out as short stories.

But as I listened to our guests Rachel Mann and Yomi Ṣode, it started to come together. It’s hard to quantify, but just being around other poets can help the process along. I was able to complete the piece that morning.

The following day, I typed up the piece and sent it to the group. The meeting had already taken place a week before it normally does because of a scheduling conflict, but I did received generally positive feedback by email.

I don’t yet know what my next festival will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out what’s on.

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Until the Last Moment

I’m a member of a monthly poetry circle called the Wyverns. We each typically write a piece ahead of the next meeting to be read aloud and discussed. There is always a broad prompt to assist with choosing a subject.

In most cases, I submit my work relatively quickly, but I’d let it go in October because I thought the focus of the November meeting was entirely given over to discussing an upcoming pamphlet project. Around 48 hours before the meeting, it transpired that I’d misunderstood what was said. We were discussing the project, but there would also be time for poetry.

It was time to knuckle down. The prompt was ‘Being Human’, which coincided with the theme of the aforementioned pamphlet and is also why I misunderstood the brief. By coincidence, I’ve been learning a lot recently about the disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried, so I wasn’t short of material.

Much of the online communication in the group is done using an email discussion list, so I posted my ten-line verse there as soon as I was satisfied with the wording. I also printed off several paper copies for those who might not have checked their emails.

As a result, I was able to gather feedback on it, which was more favourable than some pieces where I’d spent days thinking about the wording. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there.

If you’re local to Dundee, incidentally, you can come and hear poems from the pamphlet being performed tomorrow at the Global Room in the University of Dundee.

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Uninspiring Prompts

I’m in a monthly poetry circle where we write a new poem each month. There is always a prompt to help with inspiration, but there’s no obligation to follow it.

For this month, it was suggested we write about public art. I thought this would be a simple task, as I live five minutes away from three separate sculptures on the same piece of land: one is a spiral, another is a vertical zig-zag, and the third is in the shape of a large egg.

I instead spent days trying to be inspired by one or more of these pieces. I tried rhyming poetry, free verse, a self-referential style, and a critical style, yet nothing was working. I eventually figured out the problem. I needed context for these sculptures, but there is absolutely none, not even a sign with a title or something about the artist. Without this background information, I found myself unable to engage.

Instead, I walked a few minutes up the road to a mural painted last year. It spans the height of a six-storey building, is attributed to a particular artist and there is background information available online. That poem took less than an hour to write and I’m more satisfied with it than any of my previous drafts.

There is no telling what’s going to be a prompt for your next poem, but if something isn’t working for you, there’s no shame in moving on to something else that does inspire you.

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Local Stories in the Global Room

Let me address first of all why you’re seeing this post on a Sunday when I’m accustomed to making them on a Tuesday.

I forgot to update on Tuesday, so my self-imposed punishment was to make two further entries this week: one on Friday just gone and one today. From Tuesday, we’ll go back to weekly posting.

In this entry, let me take you back to last Sunday.

Every year, the University of Dundee runs the Being Human festival, in celebration of the humanities. I’d signed up to join their Talking Bus tour, driving a round trip of approximately 75 miles to places in Angus. During the trip, we were told folk tales by Dr Erin Farley. She’s someone I’ve known for a long time, and last year she launched a collection of these stories.

This book has proved to be rather influential in my poetry group, the Wyverns. The group is not normally open to the general public, but we do have a history of tie-ins with the Being Human festival, so this is the one time of year we can showcase our work. Tuesday saw the launch of our seventh pamphlet at the university with accompanying readings.

In common with our previous publications, this took place in the Global Room on campus, used for social and cultural events rather than lectures. Each of the Wyvern poets stood up in turn to perform our poems, and the words were also displayed on a TV behind us for the audience to read along. The best perk, in my opinion, was the bowl of posh chocolates that was passed around the crowd to accompany the tea and coffee. Erin and a few others were in attendance, and it seemed to go down well.

In all that excitement, I simply forgot to update this blog. I only remembered early on Wednesday morning, when the moment had long passed.

After the event, the group exchanged a few emails on our discussion list. One member reported feeling exceptionally nervous about performing, which reminded me that not everyone is comfortable standing on a stage to read. I sometimes forget this because I read to an audience at least once a month, and I rarely think anything of it. While this is a subject I’ve addressed before on the blog, a casual search suggests I haven’t updated my advice since 2018.

I reckon that’s a topic to revisit next week, but in lieu of a more comprehensive entry, the best general piece of advice I can give is to treat it like learning any new skill.

Let’s say you know nothing about snooker, but you read up on the rules, buy a table on a whim and find a regular willing opponent. If you play three frames a day for twelve months, that’s well over a thousand matches. Within a year, you’ll know which moves work and don’t work, the optimum spin to place on the ball, how to block the other player effectively, and so forth.

In short, you’ll be pretty good at playing snooker by this time next year, just in time for our potential eighth pamphlet.

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A Regular Writing Routine

I’m part of the Wyvern Poets group in Dundee, having been a founder member in or around 2015.

Unlike my other groups, this one does not actively recruit members but it does publish its work. Most notably, Dundee University has invited us to put together a pamphlet for the Being Human festival every November, and to perform our work on campus.

For the rest of the year, the members each write a poem ahead of our monthly meetings. There is always an optional prompt; normally a single word like ‘environment’, ‘pace’ or ‘journey’. The poems are then discussed on a peer-review basis and suggestions are made between members.

I find if I undertake no other writing in a given month, I always submit something for the group, even if it’s at the last minute or if I’m not entirely happy with it. As there’s only around a week until the next meeting, I’m going to crack on with this month’s prompt – villanelle – right after I finish this.

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A Surprisingly Unpopular Event

I received a message from someone local who’s currently working on a community-focused project that launches this weekend. It’s aimed at encouraging people to think more about the clothes they have, the memories they represent, and imagining what might happen when these items are passed on.

One of the proposed events was to bring in local poets to respond to the above themes, but as the organiser didn’t know many poets, she wanted to tap into my connections. I was happy to help out, and I spoke to two of my poetry groups.

After a week, I was surprised to receive virtually no response to my messages, especially as the clothing event was intended to take place in person. As an organiser, I’ve found that people react to staged events more positively, as the public has become weary of so many virtual ones.

I explained this to the organiser but added that I would still like to contribute. My starting point was a T-shirt from 1996 that I still own, and the resulting piece became an exploration of when I met my first girlfriend at age 12, and how my approach to relationships has changed between then and now.

I don’t know whether I’ll actually be able to attend, as something more pressing has arisen, but I wish her all the best with the project.

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The Evasive Verse

This week, I’ve been trying to write a piece for my poetry circle. Specifically, it had to be in some way related to the author Robert Duncan Milne, a forgotten contemporary of H G Wells.

As the reading for this has taken up so much of my time, I don’t have a full-length entry for this site.

However, I’ve often advised that going for a walk is a great way to sort out the ideas in your head, and that’s exactly what happened here. After days of reading, and trying to tie together a few of Milne’s concepts into a single verse, it was a lunchtime trip outside that gave me the final verse.

I’m about to read it over just now, maybe tweak it, and send them my work.

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Back in the Writing Saddle

The last week has proved to be quite a productive one, even if my pieces were inspired more by deadlines than by the need to express my thoughts.

For starters, my poetry circle is compiling an anthology to mark the 250th birthday of Sir Walter Scott. My original plan was to copy selected lines from the Mark Twain book Life on the Mississippi, in which he levels a number of criticisms at Scott, and create a poem from those. It wasn’t happening that way, but I was able to write a shorter verse during a bus journey.

I also have a pal who runs the writing podcast Story Circle Jerk. Unfortunately, the latest episode has been held up with technical problems, so Kai asked previous guests to submit readings of original flash fiction to appear in a future one. I actually submitted two pieces, allowing the host to choose: an old piece that was revamped for the occasion, and a new one inspired by the title of the podcast.

Finally, I’ve been working on a longer-form piece since last year. It’s not ready to be shown to the public at this stage, but the feedback I’ve received from the other website users has been encouraging. I’d posted a one-off short story, never expecting it to spawn no less than seven sequels, with another one in the pipeline. My current thoughts are to draw them together into a single 15,000-word volume.

On top of this, I’m once again starting to see writer pals getting published, being booked for events, launching pamphlets, &c. It even turns out I know someone involved in Life & Rhymes, which won a BAFTA on Sunday. I feel all this energy starting to rub off on me, and I hope I can sustain it and create something useful with it.

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Local Motion

If there’s one activity that unites writers other than producing words, it’s a tendency to go for long walks, an endeavour that seems to help organise the thoughts. I aim for 21,000 steps every day – a 20,000 target, plus a 1,000 margin of error – so I’m on my feet for a lot of the time.

Over the last few months, I’ve been catching up with a podcast on my walks. it started five years ago, so it’s been quite amusing recently, as the hosts and guests lay out their plans for 2020, assuming live gigs and workshops would be going ahead as normal.

I’m now only about six months behind, but I’m finally feeling the fatigue of consuming so many episodes on the trot. I’ve therefore made a conscious decision to ease up on my listening for the moment, and I’ll catch up when I’m ready to dive back in.

Now I’m back to using the time to organise my thoughts – just like I used to – and it’s helping me produce more work. Long may that continue, even when I start my podcast again.

For instance, I wanted to write a piece for my poetry group to include in a pamphlet, but I couldn’t strike the right tone. After a few walks, I managed to sort it out and make a submission.

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It Would be Clichéd to Use the Title ‘Poetry In Motion’, so I Shan’t.

One of the best-known verses in the English language is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, written more than 200 years ago. I can hardly compare myself to William Wordsworth, but a couple of days ago, I took my own walk with the aim of writing poetry.

Since 2017, I’ve been a member of the Wyverns poetry group, which has been meeting by e-mail rather than in person for most of the year. There are, of course, better solutions than e-mail, but that’s the way we’re stuck with for the moment. As such, I’d missed the theme for this month and I didn’t have much time to write it.

So I headed up the Law Hill in Dundee with the intention of writing in the forms of a tricube and a ghazal. Unsurprisingly, at 572 feet above sea level, the poems ended up being about a hill.

The connection between walking and writing has been known for centuries, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that Wordsworth was so gushing about his daffodils.

And yet the other classic piece of advice to writers is the very opposite of going for a walk: to keep a pen and paper by your bed for ideas. Apparantly, the limboland between waking and sleeping is a good place for them to materialise, but that doesn’t work for me.

I need to be moving around, pencil and paper at the ready, just in case I spot golden daffodils.