Meeting Notes 2026
Social evening
This was an enjoyable meeting with appreciative responses to sharing of favourite poems. There were 12 MVPs present – 6 online and 6 in person. There were three rounds of readings with a rest break after the first two rounds. Readings included 'Seaside Golf' by John Betjamin and 'Where's a Pied Piper When You Need One?' by Wendy Cope, work by Owen Sheers and by Yannis Ritsos, 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver and 'Gate-4' by Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as poems from 'Otherworlds' – the Mole Valley Poets Silver Jubilee Anthology 2025.
Notes by Helen Overell.
Polish Poets: Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Presented by Liz Barton
This talk explored the poetry of two major Polish poets: Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert. Both poets lived through Nazi occupation, followed by Communist oppression, affecting their attitude towards language and the responsibility of the poet. The talk examined their different journeys and writing styles but highlighted their shared belief that poetry should bear witness to history, resist tyranny, and pursue truth.
Notes by Liz Barton.
Storytelling animals: ideas for narrative poetry. Presented by Richard Lister
Storytelling Animals: Ideas for Narrative Poetry was an exploration of story as an imaginative means of communication where an audience is engaged with rather than told and meaning is revealed rather than defined. We considered examples of narrative poems based on i) whole lives ii) specific details iii) clashing viewpoints and iv) interlacing strands.
Notes by Richard Lister.
"Arrives on Time – see it, say it, sort it". A haibun workshop about trains. Presented by Diana Webb
Diana Webb led an inspiring Saturday afternoon exploring "Arrives on Time – see it, say it, sort it" – a haibun workshop about trains. We read poems including 'From a Railway Carriage' by RL Stevenson and 'Adlestrop' by Edward Thomas as well as haibun including 'Delayed' by Alan Peat and 'Mind the Gap' by Iliyana Stoyanova. We were invited to write a haiku based on lines borrowed from a poem and haibun based on prompts such as a conversation while on a train. There were postcards of paintings representing aspects of train travel and we were invited to write an ekphrastic haibun in response to one of these. This was a most enjoyable journey.
Notes by Helen Overell.
Reflected light: poetry and the moon. Presented by Sue Lewis
The moon is a powerful image. We examined ways in which poets, from Sappho to the present day, have borrowed its silent presence to illuminate their work. The moon can be a metaphor for ritual, faith, healing and magic; a witness to war and the first step to space exploration. We then composed and shared some of our own responses using the five-line cinquain format.
Notes by Sue Lewis.
Portals into the Psyche: How Fairy Tales can Enrich our Writing. Presented by Liz Barton
In this workshop, we explored how fairy tales are thresholds to the inner world of the emotions and a fertile source of inspiration for poets. We considered a Jungian approach to interpreting fairy tales and read work by writers including Zbigniew Herbert, Angela Carter and Carol Ann Duffy. There were writing exercises encouraging us to lose our way in the woods and embrace our otherness.
Notes by Elizabeth Barton.
Poetry and the City. Presented by Steve Bygrave
Urban life has transformed the ways in which we see and think about the world; crowds, revolution, even public transport have created new forms of seeing and writing. Although we may think of the natural world as the subject-matter for poetry, and may also think of novels and films as the forms that best represent urban life, poets have written about cities for as long as there have been cities, and poems offer some of the most innovative and engaging ways of thinking about them.
In this session we considered poems about three Western cities: the Paris of Baudelaire, Walt Whitman's New York, and London, with which we began and ended. We compared ways of representing the city in two famous poems, Wordsworth's sonnet 'Composed upon Westminster Bridge' and Blake's 'London', seeing the way the former treated the city in terms of categories drawn from nature, where Blake's was a city-dweller's view, face-to-face with the inhabitants Wordsworth chose not to see.
We went on to notice three recurrent topics – that cities change all the time; that cities are crowded and populated by strangers; and that making a list was a way of representing these things – in instances from Baudelaire and Whitman – bypassing T.S. Eliot, whom Tony Earnshaw is to talk about in July 2026 – and then at more recent instances in Frank O'Hara and in three women poets, Amy Clampitt, Stav Poleg and Amy Blakemore, the last two still in the early stages of their writing careers.
Notes by Steve Bygrave.
Poetry Pharmacy. Presented by Susan Thomas
We looked at the Poetry Pharmacy beginnings with the life and achievements of William Seighart.
William Seighart began his poetry pharmacy in 2014 offering poems to people in a tent after listening to their problems. There are now 3 books in the Poetry Pharmacy collection, which take a human condition (emotion, psychological need) and offer a prescription of a poem for it. We looked at conditions that may affect being a poet; need for spiritual satisfaction, unrealized talents, overthinking, need for self care, dissatisfaction with life – wasted potential and maturing relationships.
We then looked at the Poetry Pharmacy shops in Shropshire and London started by Deborah Alma and talked about the website. We did a writing exercise encouraging peaceful thoughts that we could bring out for ourselves in difficult times beginning with 'in this garden' or 'in this room …'. The group generally found the exercise beneficial and one member wrote for the first time after a long break from writing.
Notes by Susan Thomas.
Public Event: Sofa Poet. Presented by Clare Pollard
We were delighted to welcome renowned poet, novelist and playwright, Clare Pollard. She gave spellbinding readings of poems inspired by myth, folk and fairy tales and asked us to think back to the material objects, such as books or films, through which we first encountered the stories we loved. Clare also read from her most recent collection, 'Lives of the Female Poets', and invited us to engage with a past poet using the technique of direct address. This lively and enjoyable event was attended by 15 people, of whom 9 were Mole Valley Poets.
Notes by Elizabeth Barton.
The Waste Land. Presented by Tony Earnshaw
T S Eliot is reputed to have regarded The Four Quartets as his masterpiece, but The Waste Land was, arguably, more influential.
Published in 1922, The Waste Land transformed 20th-century literature. It captured the devastating disillusionment, spiritual decay, and cultural fragmentation following World War I. By using collage-like, non-linear techniques, Eliot permanently revolutionized modern poetry and language.
Unhappily married, writing in the evenings after a long day at the bank, he suffered writer's block and then a breakdown soon after the war and wrote most of The Waste Land while recovering in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the age of 33. Eliot later described the poem as "the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet the poem seemed to his contemporaries to transcend Eliot's personal situation and represent a general crisis in western culture.
The poem's influence extended far beyond modernism into a variety of cultural and artistic domains including Literary Modernism, the introduction of Cubist and Cinematic Structures, ongoing influence on Pop Culture and Music and Cultural Criticism as scholars continue to explore how the poem engages with comparative mythology, psychology, and the early 20th-century loss of meaning.
Reactions to publication were mixed – The Times Literary Supplement opined: 'We have here range, depth, and beautiful expression. What more is necessary to a great poem?' while in The New Statesman, FL Lucas wrote that 'Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all.'
Eliot later described the poem as "the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life… just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." In his then view, "Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in the jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm."
Process
The process was one of writing, rewriting, taking feedback and editing from Ezra Pound. Large amounts of material were deleted, a painful process. The end result involved the rejection of his/its American origin and the infancy, childhood, the 'readerly' smooth form, continuity of form, clear meaning, the centrality of Christian religion and the single point of view. Introduced or included were, many religious allusions, both Christian and other, Buddhist references particularly, throughout but especially the ending and a cornucopia of literary and other allusions.
In the process a new poetry emerged, a new internationalism, a new understanding of modernity and 'a polyphony of conversation and quotation that put Dante into the vernacular and made pub quarrels literary' (Helen Vendler in the Yale Review)
Legacy
"Eliot's Waste Land is I think the justification of the 'movement,' of our modern experiment, since 1900," (Ezra Pound)
'The originality of The Waste Land, and its importance for most poetry in English since 1922, lies in Eliot's ability to meld a deep awareness of literary tradition with the experimentalism of free verse, to fuse private and public meanings, and to combine moments of lyric intensity into a poem of epic scope.' (Pericles Lewis in Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007))
Notes by Tony Earnshaw.
Public Event: Summer School: Becoming other. Presented by Helen Overell
There were seven Mole Valley Poets in total at the Summer School. We explored the theme 'Becoming other' – this could be from skein of wool to knitted scarf, from felled tree to musical instrument and from evening shadows to moonlit night. We read several poems including Blue Iris by Mary Oliver and The Skylight by Seamus Heaney. There were writing exercises together with opportunities to share what was written giving rise to images of 'Today I am swing and jazz', 'shoes grey with yesterday's dust' and 'words that open up to the sky'.
Notes by Helen Overell.
Meeting Notes Archive
- Meeting Notes 2008
- Meeting Notes 2009
- Meeting Notes 2010
- Meeting Notes 2011
- Meeting Notes 2012
- Meeting Notes 2013
- Meeting Notes 2014
- Meeting Notes 2015
- Meeting Notes 2016
- Meeting Notes 2017
- Meeting Notes 2018
- Meeting Notes 2019
- Meeting Notes 2020
- Meeting Notes 2021
- Meeting Notes 2022
- Meeting Notes 2023
- Meeting Notes 2024
- Meeting Notes 2025