The social evening was well attended with 8 Mole Valley Poets meeting in person and 4 joining in online. There were two rounds of reading favourite poems including work by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Roger McGough, Rebecca Goss, Seamus Heaney, Naomi Shihab Nye and Billy Collins as well as by MVPs. There were images of a blackbird nesting in an upturned palm, a thrush in full-hearted evensong and the coolest of snow angels.
Notes by Helen Overell.
Richard Lister shared a short powerpoint presentation which covered:
Notes by Rickard Lister.
Diana led an inspiring workshop on writing haibun as though putting an outfit together with mix & match components. These could be season words or images acquired over the years that combine to be subtle or outrageous. The writing could be a tribute to established classical haibun writers like Basho or present day ones like Bob Lucky whose 'Advice to Writers' includes 'It's hard to know what you have to say until you say it.' We were invited to write in response to poems by Christina Rossetti, her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife Elizabeth Siddal as well as to artwork.
Notes by Helen Overell.
Based on the thoughts of Alain De Botton and John Ruskin we reflected on 2 questions:
"Beauty is fugitive, it is frequently found in places to which we may never return or else it results from a rare conjunction of season, light and weather." Beauty is ephemeral and deeply personal, it will also reflect how one is feeling at any moment in time.
To possess beauty, one needs to really look at something to understand the elements of what make it beautiful, to be simultaneously perceptive and mindful, both are essential to help poets create what Ruskin called "word paintings".
Notes by Mark Boor.
'Poetry is grounded in the earliest experiences, in memory too deep to name, stored in the senses rather than in the filing-system of the conscious mind'.
At the Source, Gillian Clarke
In this talk, we read rich and sensuous poems spanning the many decades of Clarke's illustrious career. These included Catrin, which explores the tender, and, at times, tense relationship between a mother and a daughter, and Polar, a heartbreaking poem about climate crisis. We discussed the incantational nature of Clarke's writing (a quality she shares with other Celtic poets), casting a spell over the listener through sharp imagery, strong rhythms and a powerful evocation of the senses.
Notes by Elizabeth Barton.
We considered the life and works of Marian Hemar, a leading Polish celebrity in the inter war years as a port, songwriter, playwright and more who was unable to return to Poland after the war and lived in exile, continuing to write and broadcast from London and subsequently from our own doorstep in the Mole Valley.
His poems of exile and longing led us to consider the reality of exile and to look at poets currently writing in exile in the UK. These included poets from Tibet, Afghanistan and Iraq and we were introduced to their work and that of the group Exiled Writers Ink.
Notes by Tony Earnshaw.
It was good to welcome Alwyn Marriage as MVP Sofa Poet for a convivial evening of poetry and writing. There were 11 people altogether of whom 8 were MVPs. The theme was 'In Person' and reference was made to poems where writing about one person enabled us to learn about someone else. Alwyn read from her own work including the poem 'The clue lies in the lady's toe' which was inspired by a Henry Moore sculpture. We then read poems including 'Digging' by Seamus Heaney and 'Warming her pearls' by Carol Ann Duffy and considered the absent presences within the poem. We were invited to take part in writing exercises – these gave rise to innovative and good-humoured responses. Alwyn read further from her work and included a glose or glosa – this form has Spanish origins dating from the 15th century.
Responses included:
"I too really enjoyed the session, one of the best sofa poets I've participated in with Alwyn's deep skill and ability to help us engage and grow."
"It was a brilliant evening! Alwyn is such an inspiration and I was staggered to discover the breadth of her interests and achievements."
"… So I went to the Sofa on the Poet event and do you know what – it was brilliant and did me a power of good!"
"A great evening – one of the best we have had."
Notes by Helen Overell.
How To Disappear | Bloodaxe Books 1999 |
Stray | Bloodaxe Books 2012 |
30 Poems in Thirty Days | Arc Publications 2021 |
Notes on Water | Smith Doorstop 2022 |
Fantastic Voyage | Bloodaxe Books 2024 |
Amanda Dalton is a poet who also writes for theatre and radio – plays, personal essays and adaptations of novels. She is a tutor too, and I chose to speak about her because I am fascinated by the way she weaves stories through her poetry. I have used some of Amanda's collections to illustrate how she does this.
Her first collection How to Disappear was shortlisted for the Forward Prize – Best First Collection and it contains a long narrative poem – Room of Leaves. This was the first of Amanda's poems that I read on a Poetry Society course in Manchester in 2011 and it introduced me to the possibilities of narrative poetry.
In the sequence, Room of Leaves, the first poem is in the form of an autopsy report from 1994 which I found intriguing. The sequence then goes back to the beginning – in 1959 when Gracie (a pharmacist) in her thirties meets Frank who is infatuated by romantic films. He proposes to Gracie but deserts her at the altar. The sequence tells how she spends the rest of her life living in the garden of her mother's bungalow, waiting for Frank. The sequence is in three voices: Gracie, Frank and a narrator. Amanda adapted this narrative sequence of poems into a radio play – Room of Leaves which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 some years ago.
Notes on Water (2022) is a pamphlet consisting of two long poems. The first started as a poem about water – dreams and floods. While she was writing it, her partner was diagnosed with a terminal illness. The second poem in the third person – more explicitly about the journey through grief and loss but still about water. She combined both poems into a 'fractured narrative' for BBC Radio 3.
Fantastic Voyage (2024) is her most recent collection. It reflects the 1960's science fiction film Fantastic Journey where a group of scientists are shrunken and travel in a tiny capsule through the blood of another scientist who has a clot of blood in vessel in the brain, to try and save him. The collection consists of prose poems, free verse and at its centre, she blends both poems from Notes on Water into a 'fractured narrative'.
I used Amanda's poems to illustrate her wonderful poetry and her skill in characterisation which she employs to tell stories. You can find out more about Amanda Dalton on her website.
Notes by Denise Bundred
Isabel was born in Colombia and came to England as a young child. She studied Modern Languages and later Documentary and Television Features, before returning to Colombia at the age of thirty to work in documentary television. She began writing poetry on her return and has published two full collections and four shorter collections, including Madonna Moon, which won the Coast to Coast to Coast Mini Portfolio Competition.
We read and discussed a variety of poems, many of which move fluently between London and Bogotá, the present and the past, drawing on recollections of her early life. The language often spills into Spanish, and Isabel's vibrant description and striking imagery evoke a vivid sense of place, whilst demonstrating memory's power to return our past to us, whether or not we wish it to, "…as if the past were a blood vessel that had been cauterised, but the blood flowed back; it could not help itself" ('Agapanthus'). The poem 'My Father's House' suggests an ambivalent relationship with the past, a need to preserve a connection to it and yet prevent it from disturbing the present:
"Who can tell me
how to put the ghosts to rest?
So they come to visit
only for short stays
and never rearrange the furniture."
As well as relating stories and portraying characters from her past, Isabel writes movingly about those close to her now, including her artist husband, Simon Turvey, who beautifully illustrates many of her poems. In "From the High Mountain", she traces their shared journey with palpable tenderness:
"…as here, in bedroom dark
you slip into sleep,
and I, not ready to let you go,
whisper my nonsense in your ear,
that even as you wander,
these words may draw you near."
Our writing exercise this month drew on a line from Isabel's poem, 'Agapanthus': "Here they are again, in my mind's eye…". Poets were invited to bring to their mind's eye an object, plant or photograph from their early life and write from it.
Notes by Heather Shakespeare
The Summer School was held on Zoom and there were twelve people in total. We considered the theme Transience – lasting a short time or constantly changing – and read poems by Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, UA Fanthorpe and Elizabeth Bishop as well as two sonnets from the Heroic Crown of Sonnets 'Transience' by Helen Overell published in the Long Poem Magazine. There were photographs of ripples on sea water, glitter of light on low tide, a mountain stream and the breaking of a wave on a pebbly beach. The writing exercises included responses to these photographs and to the phrase 'Now that I remember'. There was the opportunity to share what had been written and there were images of the slenderest thread, steam from a train filling the station and seagulls off-kilter across roof tops.
Notes by Helen Overell
In his introductory remarks, Tony Marcoff spoke about the power of song – how Frida Kahlo told her art students to sing while they were painting, how Blake is reported to have died singing, how the people of Estonia literally sang their nation into being in the 'Singing Revolution'. He also told the story of Caedmon, first English poet. Caedmon saw an angel in a dream who commanded him to 'sing me the creation'. And the story of Orpheus whose dismembered head floated away down-river, still singing.
The poems presented included an ancient Chinese poem/song, an emotional elegy by Surrealist David Gascoyne, a passionate academic poem 'Song in Sight of the World' by J H Prynne, a mystical love song/poem by Bob Dylan (which we heard actually performed), and a very moving haibun by Diana Webb, who was told by nurses to sing to her tiny baby grandson in intensive care. There was an extract from Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself', and Tony said that though Whitman worked as a nurse in the American Civil War and saw terrible things, he still produced this song to life, this song to America, this song to the world.
After reading a selection of international tanka, which are really just 'short Japanese songs', Tony read his own incantatory 'O magnum mysterium', and his 'canticle of reality', which has been described as 'a psalm for a secular age'. He then quoted these immortal words by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam:
And if the song is sung truly,
from the whole heart, everything
at last vanishes: nothing is left
but space, the stars, the singer.
Notes by Tony Marcoff
Thank you to everyone who took part in Poetry Pub – there was a great atmosphere and there were many great poems. Tony Earnshaw thanked Liz Barton, the editor of the newly launched Mole Valley Poets Anthology 2024 'Hidden Light'. The Greek poet, Odysseus Elytis, on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1979, declared 'The duty of the poet is to cast drops of light into the darkness'. The poems in the anthology show glimmers of hope in a troubled world. There were 24 people altogether made up of MVPs, MVP alumni, loyal supporters and new faces. There were readings from the anthology in the first half of the evening as well as from other work. There were 16 readers in total who all read again after the interval.
Notes by Helen Overell
Firstly we took a brief look at the life of T.S. Eliot and how the prize commenced in 1993. It is the biggest prize in poetry currently (£25,000) and possibly most prestigious. We looked at the list of winners from 1993 and also who the judges were. We listened to extracts of the poets down the years reading their own work on the poetry archive. There seemed to be a prominent theme of 'self' and identity as a topic and we did a short writing exercise on this. We looked at Anthony Joseph's Sonnets For Albert – winner in 2022.
We looked at each of the 10 entries shortlisted for 2024 – having just been announced and a brief background to each poet. The Young Critics scheme was highlighted, this is encouraging young people to appreciate and be involved in poetry, and is in it's second year in critiquing the T.S. Eliot prize. Last year's winner was Jason Allen-Paisant with Self Portrait as Othello, and the back story to his success offered some inspiration for us as a group.
Notes by Susan Thomas
After discussion on the programme for 2025 there was a brief presentation on 'Catching the light' where a cobweb is strung with 'globes of light', 'seeped light' warms a chalk path and a camera lens brings moonlight to a focus giving a clear image of the moon. The writing exercise gave rise to the movement of a patch of light reflected by the face of a watch, an ordinary meeting place transformed by the sheen on railings, the bright glow in drips of water from dipped and raised oars and the sparkle of snowflakes illuminated by headlights.
Notes by Helen Overell