In September we tried our hands at ekphrastic poetry and syllabic verse in a workshop let by Emma Purshouse. During lockdown, Emma wrote a tanka a day, inspired by photos taken by her dad, and shared the photos and accompanying tankas on Facebook. Now we wanted to have a go too.
Emma started us off with a ‘guided fantasy’ exercise. We had each brought a picture along to the Zoom session, and now Emma asked us to ‘step inside’ our pictures and answer a series of questions, including:
What’s the first thing you see?
How does it make you feel?
What can you smell?
After several more of these questions, we went back through our answers and turned them into a coherent piece of prose, leaving out anything that didn’t fit.
Next, Emma introduced the idea of syllabic verse and invited us to pick one or more images from our writing and turn it/them into a haiku or tanka. As Emma pointed out afterwards, if we tacked a haiku onto our piece of prose, we would have a haibun. Three for the price of two 😊
Sonnet or not: Our next task was to pick a line from our piece of prose and use it as the first line of a 14-line poem, keeping the same syllable count for each line. As Emma explained, imposing a syllable count forces you to think carefully about word choices.
By the end of the session, we all had a piece of prose, a tanka or haiku (and in this case possibly also a haibun), and at least the start of a 14-line poem that we could polish and send off to any publication looking for ekphrastic poems, or enter in the Cannon Poets ‘Sonnet or Not’ competition (closing date 31st October).