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.

5^th January 2026

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.

26^th January 2026

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.

23^rd February 2026

"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.

7^th March 2026

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.

30^th March 2026

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.

22^nd April 2026

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.

27^th April 2026