At our March session, Carol Howarth led a session on contemporary poetry, using some ideas from the Mslexia primer on writing contemporary poetry.
She spoke about some of the things that can turn a piece of text into a contemporary poem (line breaks, stanzas, rhyme, imagery, rhythm, punctuation, etc.) and recommended reading poems aloud to find their natural rhythm.
There were interesting discussions about the poems we read: ‘How to disappear’ by Amanda Dalton and ‘Mother tongue’ by Gwyneth Lewis.
We used ‘How to disappear’ as inspiration for writing our own ‘How to’ poem. There were instructions on how to sing, how to play the guitar, how to make a video of yourself and how to fall out of love (twice!)
And we used ‘Mother tongue’ to have a go at writing an extended metaphor about something we’re passionate about.