Avril Joy's Blog, page 8
May 11, 2018
Everything I’m Learning About Poetry – Emily Dickinson
I’ve spent this week discovering Emily Dickinson, a poet whose work I’d inevitably encountered but never seriously read or given thought to. I’m now hooked on the poems and part way through a biography by Lyndall Gordon – Lives Like Loaded Guns.
What have I learned so far?
I learned that most of her poems never went further than her desk drawer, apart from those she sewed into small booklets called fascicles and gave to friends.
That publication came after her death.
That she was not a pub...
April 23, 2018
Everything I’m Learning About Poetry…the Physical
In her book How to Be a Poet, Jo Bell advises ‘stay focused on the physical, avoid lyrical interpretations or florid description…stick to what you actually see and feel…Be specific too…just observe.’
You’d think I’d know this, after all it’s what writers of prose do, but I see that with poetry, for me, the tendency creeps in to use lyrical interpretation and move away from the physical and literal.
I’m learning not to do this. I know I’m learning because today when I was unhappy with a poem ...
April 15, 2018
Everything I’m Learning About Poetry – Marie Howe
The more I read poetry the more my appetite for reading poetry grows. So much so that this week I find myself thinking of wasted opportunities. Why don’t I know more about poetry, why I haven’t read more widely? This can of course be seen through another glass – there are still so many great poets waiting for me out there, still so much pleasure to be had in discovery and in the inspiration that new reading brings.
As my appetite grows and I taste new poets I’m also beginning to learn what I...
April 8, 2018
Everything I’m Learning About Poetry…. Getting Out of the Way
There are so many ways in which writing poetry is similar to writing prose. Perhaps what strikes me as most similar in these early stages of my journey is that established poets, poets I admire, all suggest that the poet’s job is to get out of the way of the poem.
Jo Bell in her book, How to Become a Poet, which I’m already re-reading and which I recommend highly, says, ‘As you write, remain open to the posibility that the poem isn’t about what you thought it was about – the thing that first...
April 1, 2018
Extreme Thrill Seeking – Everything I’m Learning About Poetry & What I Already Know About Short Stories
Erwin Hersy – Unsplash
Let me say from the start I am not an extreme thrill seeker. Far from it. You won’t find me paddling out from under the mists of Victoria Falls into the world’s most dangerous, class five, rapids. No. If you know me at all then you know I am much more likely to be found lolling in a summer punt with my fingers trailing the water.
Yet despite this, I am about to throw caution to the wind and embark on a big, new adventure. One that will take me right out of my comfor...
