Last Saturday I headed off to London for an all-day workshop all day workshop with Katy Evans-Bush. She has been immensely
helpful is providing advice as I’ve been finishing Convoy but this was the
first time I’d had the chance to go to
one of her workshops. This was a reprise of a very successful workshop she’d
previously offered on-line.
We were looking at and playing around with John Keats’ idea
of Negative Capability.
The workshop, actually I’m going to cease calling it a
workshop as a more accurate description would be poetry master class, gave us
the chance to consider what Keats meant. The part of his description that stuck
in my mind was his ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. How
do you do this as a poet? How do you get out of the way to allow the reader to
make her own emotional investment in the poem you’re offering to the world?
We started by reading Keats’ Ode on Melancholy, which I have to confess I’d never read
properly before. Part of the beauty of
the day was the chance to spend time with this poem and other poems by Philip
Gross, Alice Fulton and Elizabeth Bishop. Like would-be jewellers we held their
poems up to the light to examine how they did it and how we might follow.
In between looking at the poems there were chances to write,
to try things out, to grope our way forwards whilst trying to get out of the
way of our own feet. There were eight of us in the group which was a good
number, and we were allowed not to share
what we’d written until the end of the afternoon when the writing was still at
first draft stage but slightly less rough (I’m mean mine of course) than it had
been at the first cut.
Why don’t I do this more often I wondered? Spend time with
people who care about and want to share poems – this perfect line and see what
he’s doing here. Difficult to decide on my favourite of the published poems but
I think if forced to choose it would have to be Philip Gross’ Elderly Iceberg
off the Esplanade from The Water Table.
Rather like the iceberg there is great deal hidden under the surface of this
poem.
So a near perfect day and there were surprises and mysteries
in the poems which people read out at the end. I’ll just single out the one
written about dark earth in London. Who knew that after the Romans had left
Britain the capital returned to being a forest. This is evident from archaeological
excavations but until Saturday was rather a gap in my historical knowledge.
And I came away myself with the beginnings of a poem, having
taken note of the advice to ‘be aware of yourself as a receiver and shaper of
signals, impressions, emotional waves. It also felt as if I’d had my critical
faculties sharpened like someone who has been to a wine tasting of the rather
better stuff and been educated in the process.
