Today was the first seminar for the campus MA. I've decided to blog after each session and I am part-time so this will be every tuesday. This could become overkill because I am already writing it into a journal, and various notebooks. Perhaps by writing about it in a variety of places, something new will come out each time. Nice thought.
Paul F. started us off by reading and discussing prose poems. What are they? what makes them both prose and a poem? Do they work?
The main conclusion was that they were all on a sliding scale and some of the group favoured those at the prose end, while others favoured those at the poem end. I like the lyrical and surreal poem end of the spectrum. As it moves towards prose, I start to see it morph quickly into flash fiction. I am more comfortable with the notions of poems, prose that is poetic and flash fiction. I haven't got a well honed ability to decipher poems that are pretty much prose. I wouldn't say I am black and white, but I like transparency. Sometimes i think I have written a prose poem based only on the fact that it was clearly nothing else. But then I read someone really good at it, and I can see where the form came from. After having a bit of a discussion about what worked and what didn't, we moved on to a discussion about the huge amount of work written from photos. This was an interesting exercise. Nothing radical and unthought of, but nevertheless it prepared us for writing our own prose poem based on a randomly assigned photo.
Most of us received Victorian sepia photos of ladies and gents, while a couple of us had more modern photos: a herding family with reindeer, and a man with a fish and a lemon. I found it really hard to be inspired by my photo of a blank looking woman (I wish I had taken a photo of it for uploading here) just looking into the distance. No expression. No background. No date. I actually would have preferred the man with the salmon. But alas, we were given half an hour to write a prose poem and then read it out to the class. Herein lies the point of this blog. It was a bit scary. We had barely learnt each others names (no cheesy ice-breakers or sticky badges) but just had to reveal our inability straight out! We all gave the obligatory intro statement about how 'mine is crap, really!' and 'i never do this sort of thing' but eventually got down to the business of sharing. This was my offering.
Paul F. started us off by reading and discussing prose poems. What are they? what makes them both prose and a poem? Do they work?
The main conclusion was that they were all on a sliding scale and some of the group favoured those at the prose end, while others favoured those at the poem end. I like the lyrical and surreal poem end of the spectrum. As it moves towards prose, I start to see it morph quickly into flash fiction. I am more comfortable with the notions of poems, prose that is poetic and flash fiction. I haven't got a well honed ability to decipher poems that are pretty much prose. I wouldn't say I am black and white, but I like transparency. Sometimes i think I have written a prose poem based only on the fact that it was clearly nothing else. But then I read someone really good at it, and I can see where the form came from. After having a bit of a discussion about what worked and what didn't, we moved on to a discussion about the huge amount of work written from photos. This was an interesting exercise. Nothing radical and unthought of, but nevertheless it prepared us for writing our own prose poem based on a randomly assigned photo.
Most of us received Victorian sepia photos of ladies and gents, while a couple of us had more modern photos: a herding family with reindeer, and a man with a fish and a lemon. I found it really hard to be inspired by my photo of a blank looking woman (I wish I had taken a photo of it for uploading here) just looking into the distance. No expression. No background. No date. I actually would have preferred the man with the salmon. But alas, we were given half an hour to write a prose poem and then read it out to the class. Herein lies the point of this blog. It was a bit scary. We had barely learnt each others names (no cheesy ice-breakers or sticky badges) but just had to reveal our inability straight out! We all gave the obligatory intro statement about how 'mine is crap, really!' and 'i never do this sort of thing' but eventually got down to the business of sharing. This was my offering.
The blur is not from the capturing, the blur was there in you, softening your edges as a chalk over the years, till you were merely a soft-focus of heart and hair and eyes in an empty chair. You weren't the prettiest, but the last light of us reflected in the cubes of your eye - as you watched the leylandii inch away to the sky, over my shoulder, silently through the back. Those pinched needles straining to overshadow it all. The roots creeping easy round your ankles. Mary, your sepia hair was gold to me, my evergreen.
I was worrying about exposing myself as a vulnerable and pathetic writer, fearing the silent judgement of others, but really I think everyone was way too busy thinking the same thing of themselves to be worried about my nervously read botch job. It's not easy to write on demand, let alone share it on demand a few minutes later, but we all did it and I couldn't really tell you now about anyone's, other than they were all fine. There were no howlers. I can only say that it was a lesson in growing a thick skin quick, if not to protect you from others, but to protect you from yourself.
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