Simon Armitage reads in Easingwold and I get ready for my next Online Programme
The above two items are entirely unrelated - except if I allow myself to show off for a moment and mention that Simon Armitage once shortlisted me for the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition.
Last night, the lovely Mr Armitage came to Easingwold, a small village north of York where my family live, and gave a witty, moving and thoroughly entertaining reading. There are surprisingly few poets around who can read and talk about their poems in exciting and engaging ways. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at that.
Some poems - certainly lots of mine! - work best surrounded by silence, in the still white holding space of the page. And, after all, as Simon himself pointed out, lots of writers choose to be writers because they like to spend most of their time sitting at home at their desks on their own, in privacy. Who says that they should be good at reading their work to others? But it is a real treat when you get the opportunity to sit back and be read to by someone who is really good at doing it.
And one of the things that I love about working with people during my Online Programme in Creative Writing for Personal Development, Health amd Well Being is the feeling of being read to. People work on something in progress and share it with us in the workshop forums and over the six months of the programme, I begin to get a real sense of their developing voice. I begin to really hear them in their writing.
I am now preparing for my next Programme, which begins on 9 October.
We have a lovely group of people enrolled on the course - and there’s still room for more, if you’d like to join us.
I like the flexibility of working with people in this way. We can enjoy conference calls together and also access different parts of the Programme at the times that are right for us. I can adapt parts of the course as we go to suit the emerging interests of the group. And we always have such a wonderful range of people from different parts of the world and different interests and backgrounds.
So, I’m looking forward to October.
In the meantime, Simon Armitage said last night that he thinks every poet should practise writing ‘the definitive poem about their home town.’ I think that’s an interesting idea, to write about your idea of home or the place where you live or grew up. It’s something that fits well with the idea of writing as a process of discovery or journeying or development. I’d better get writing.
