This afternoon, I was lucky enough to attend a workshop with the wonderful poet, Tara Arkle. As ever with such things, it wasn’t really long enough, but in the time we had with Tara we crammed in a great deal, and left with some poetic jottings and a load of thoughts about how to take them further.
We looked at a poem by Henry Normal, Three Lies and One Truth about the Moon, and Tara asked us to write something inspired by it. This is what I wrote:
Three Lies and one Truth about the Place I Live
Jesus stepped ashore at Uphill with his Uncle Joe from Arimathea.
St Patrick landed her, long before he drove the Irish serpents away.
Blackbeard moored his brig at Uphill Pill,
And these tales all exist and all are true in my world.
We didn’t have time to share our work, but I think Tara might have thought what I wrote was not economical enough with the words I used. We then had to write five things – and I can’t quite remember the purpose of this exercise, but we had to imagine what we would do after the session. I think maybe it was to think about what we would write, or how we would pursue the ideas behind her suggestion, but I was very literal. I imagined what we would actually do after the workshop. In my ‘poem’, Macaque is my friend and poet who was with us.
Five Things
1 We get in the car and fasten our seatbelts.
2 I try to remember which way we came, controlling my left right confusion and asking Macaque.
3 We drive through tunnels of green, sun-lit, expecting to arrive in a different place, a different world, and time.
4 We find known roads, and drive across The Levels, in view of the uplands.
5 We have reached our destination; we remember to to take all our belongings with us.
It was a very interesting session, and I’m sure it will be evident in my writing!
Lois Elsden 