Workshop: Poetry with Ruth Padel

Exercise 1: The Shift – to be considered in advance of day one

Based on Robert Hass’s poem Dragonflies Mating which remembers a childhood scenario which highlights feelings about his alcoholic mother.

Target: write a poem looking back on a moment of intense feeling, whether sadness, trauma, or intense joy, in your own or someone else’s life, and somehow resolve it in the poem by relating it to now, looking at the world around you.

1. Start out in sectionsor fragments and see how it goes.
2. Once you have a sequence of fragments, play around with them, losing some, melding them into one, reversing them. Maybe they don’t want to go into one which is fine. The point is to emerge with a poem about remembered moments of grief of joy that somehow relates to now.

DAY 1 of the workshop

9.30-10.30am we read together Robert Hass Dragonflies Mating, discuss what it’s doing and why: its strategies. Of time, we also discuss other sequence /fragment poems, like Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird’, Warsan Shire’s ‘The House’ or another

We discuss how they unfold in numbered sections, tell a story or stories, how perspective might shift from one section to the next, how the voice/ speaker, the length, shape or tone of each section, vary. Also see Anne Carson, ‘On the magic of fragments’ in her Paris Review interview, and think about her phrase, ‘the space you can’t get hold of’.

“The way that a poem breaks off leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended. There is a space where a thought would be, but which you can’t get hold of. I love that space. It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, so spooky.”

10.45-12.45pm You read a poem each and we discuss. Maybe you’ve started this exercise already and want to share it, or you could bring another poem already written. Not over a page and a half long, or we won’t get to everyone’s.

1.15-2.30pm ‘I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.’ Robert Frost. We read a few things I’ll bring, share working ideas and discuss how we might tackle Exercise 2 which I’ll share with you – to rough out over the evening.

DAY 2

9.30-10.30am We read together a poem or poems I’ll bring and discuss its strategies, thinking particularly about the challenges of Exercise 2

10.45-12.45pm You read your Exercise 2 poems and we discuss them. If you haven’t done it, bring a previously written poem

1.15-2.30pm ‘The one-line stanza, as a uniform pattern, unlike a oem in two- or three-line stanzas, is relatively rare… ‘Two lines introduce the idea of form as the energy of relation.’ Hass, Form

We carry on reading & discussing your poems, also discuss how lineation can carry or embody the ‘message’, sense or underlying idea of a poem. We also discuss reading I’ll bring, and Exercise 3, which I’ll also share then.

DAY 3

9.30-10.30am We read together a poem or poems I’ll bring, discuss its strategies, thinking particularly about the challenges of doing Exercise 2, and discuss which poem you might read in the last session of the day

10.45-12.45pm You read poems from Exercise 3, we discuss them and ways of tackling it

1.15-2.30pm You read a poem you’ve worked on in the week, not to workshop but as a performance