Poetry Monthly

Thank you to Bee for her fabulous performance poetry idea last month. It was really successful and a luxury to watch and listen to lots of superb poetry with a cup of tea and a packet of chocolate covered nutty biscuits. Here are three cracking performance pieces, do follow the links to hear the sound bites:

londoncalling brings home to life. Dark and brooding with unmistakeable fondness:

http://www.abctales.com/story/londoncalling79/home-poetry-monthly

Lively procrastination with a slab of fine cake from Noo:

http://www.abctales.com/story/noo/nano-wrimo-poetry-monthly

Accidentallyexisting gives it bags of poetic attitude:

http://www.abctales.com/story/accidentallyexisting/yo-dominator-poetry-monthly

Here’s my brief for December:

Visual poetry blends structure and content to create art. Think shapeliness. Think unconventional on the page, think word and image.  Contemporary poetry has seen a recent revival of the visual form, including abstract experimentation with poetic structure as well as poets making distinct and recognisable shapes on the page. Also known as pattern, concrete and eye poetry, the form depends on more than the words to convey meaning and crucially, the poem does some visual work whilst maintaining good quality content. 

I want you to have a go. Consider the relationships between your subject and shape, try indenting lines, focus on word arrangement and imagine how best to depict the actions or basic movement of your contents. Interpret it loosely.  Let yourself experiment. You can offset your words, write them high, low or make things across the page; draw word pictures, play with your line formation. Don’t think that an obvious shape as you know it says all that much - you could try for an abstract visual if it achieves the emotional complexity you’re looking for. Check out modern pieces such as Greta Stoddart’s ‘Wild Pear’ (2015) and Anne Rouse’s ‘Starlings’, both are shaped and demand a different way of reading the poems.  EE Cummings (1894-1962) and Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) both constructed pattern poetry. Enjoy and a big thanks for all your effort and participation.

Ray

Image source:  http://tinyurl.com/qzpyzjq