Avril Joy's Blog, page 7

A Poem for Women in Prison

Aztec Love Song for Uprooted Flowers

I’m delighted that Helen Ivory’s poetry and prose webzine – ink, sweat and tears have today published my poem –

Aztec Love Song for Uprooted Flowers

I carry them to your house on my back,
uprooted flowers.
I am bent double with the weight of them,
of women torn from the soil, their roots mud
stem and sepal crushed
I carry them. I carry their scent…

read the complete poem HERE

The poem will be part of a collection of prose and poetry – Going In With Flow...

I Wrote a Poem – it Won a Prize – I Went on a Boat…

Towards the end of last year I started sending poems off to magazines and competitions – the silence was deafening, and silence in the world of poetry amounts to ‘no thank you.’ It was nothing I wasn’t used to, rejection is a fact of life for any writer.

Now, I’m pleased to say, things have started to look up. I’ve recently had acceptances from both Strix and Snakeskin (link below) and to my great surprise and delight my poem Skomm (you can read it below – just scroll down) has been awarded f...

2019

A year of reading more poetry. A year of keeping my writing journal – and posting on Instagram. A year of workshops, submissions and most likely rejections. A year of acceptance? A year of writing more poems – of working on my Uprooted Flowers….

zoltan-tasi – unsplash

PopUpPoetry Durham

PopUpPoetry is HERE and it’s on our doorstep in Durham City! And what a treat for those who love poetry – both writing and listening. It’s the brainchild of Dr Alison McManus and Katharine Goda  who believe poetry is good for the soul!

Held in the beautiful setting of  St Chad’s College PopUpPoetry offers free monthly poetry workshops (by and large on the third Thursday of every month from 4.30-6.30)

Check them out here on their Facebook Page or here on Twitter

So far it has welcomed award w...

Windows

When you set off to write a poem about windows because in the world of prison where you spent so many years windows are significant – chiefly for their lack of view and lack of resemblance to windows as we know them – and you end up with a poem about rain and memory, that’s what writing poetry seems to be: not really knowing where you will land.

As far as what a poem should be it’s hard to go past this from Andrew Mcmillan on judging the Magma poetry competition and what he’s looking for:

…po...

Poem for Nazanin

I think about the plight of Nazanin Zhagari-Ratcliffe often. Her plight and the plight of others like her, especially mothers, weighs heavy on me. Most probably because of the years I spent working in a Women’s Prison,  because I’ve seen first hand the  devestation and heartache caused by the separation of mother and child,  also  I know what prison is and what it does to people…

If you haven’t signed the petition for Nazanin’s release, please do so, you can sign here

At the moment, I’m writi...

Everything I’m Learning About Poetry – Quantity versus Quality

Since coming back from my Arvon poetry course, I’ve written poetry almost non-stop – in a flood you might say (somewhere around 25 poems )- interrupted only by a week away at my son’s beautiful wedding in Brantome in France.

Written at such a pace, you would be forgiven for asking are these poems any good? Quantity versus quality and all that – well surprisingly for me I would say they are. I think with every poem I write I get better. I learn more. It doesn’t mean they’re all brilliant, at a...

Everything I’m Learning About Poetry – Poems Grow Poems

Yesterday on Twitter,  the poet Kate Clanchy wrote ‘To celebrate #NationalWritingDay  …sit down with your favourite poem, let it sound in your head and write a version of it. You are allowed to do this. It’s how most poems get started.’

And I thought it was just me – that maybe it was habit I was getting into, that I would have to grow out of – this reading of a poem and finding I was writing my own version, or at least beginning with an echo of an individual line, or of the form itself. No s...

Everything I’m Learning About Poetry – My Arvon Course

 

View from my window

I wondered if it could be true – if Arvon was as good as they said it was. If it was the real deal. Well I’m back to tell you categorically, without hesitation, it’s not only the real deal but the best deal. It’s the best money I’ve spent in a long time and possibly the best ever spent on my writing.

Last week, on the first ever short-course at Arvon, which was held at Lumb Bank, with tutors Kate Clanchy and Carol Bromley I went from sceptic, scardey- cat,  to happy conv...

Everything I’m Learning About Poetry – Mary Oliver, Gardens and Poetry

My writing table in the shade

To write we need an absence of interference,  of noise of the intrusive kind and of demands on our time . We need the kind of peace a garden can provide.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching…A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again. Mary Oliver

This morning as I sit to write at the table in my garden which so often provides me w...