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poetry workshops

Kent, and then suddenly Spain

On Friday we decided to re-enact our historic walk (last year) in the Kent countryside, and so we did. We walked to Luddesdown

whose church was closed again. Nearby we saw again this old (? grain mill?) but last year it was autumn then and there were no such flowers in it.

And there was more brassica. A small purple forest of it.

And then on Saturday I hopped a plane to Spain to escape the rain. Lula has been vigilant, catching wild plastic pigs that might be threatening us (why else would they be flying away from us at regular intervals, she reasoned) and giving them a good shake to subdue them before presenting us with the corpse.

All is warm and peaceful at Almassera Vella. Marisa and Christopher would like you please to come on down!

Lots of lemons.

And it is orange season. We are being willingly drowned in fresh orange juice.

Marisa’s lentil soup was just what we needed after our travels.

And lunch yesterday was a beautiful sight; so many lovely cheeses! And an elegant Russian Salad with tuna.

London break

London was mercifully cool and damp after a hot week in Parma, and it was wonderful to catch up with the old gang in the Shackleton Room of the Troubadour where we dined on Brompton Burgers and fish and chips. The food, I’m afraid, looked more promising than it tasted, but the service was excellent and the private room a fortunate thing as there was a lot of youthful exuberance beyond the doorway. London restaurants can be deafening. (But at least they will be smoke free come July!)

We followed with a very large cake from Patisserie Valerie:


Says it all, really.

The next day my kind cousin took me to a Chiswick treasure, Fish Hook, which used to be a South African specialty restaurant (Fish Hoek as it was then) whose niche turned out to be just too narrow for the neighbourhood. In its new incarnation, it serves well priced lunch specials like this one: asparagus veloute with cockles and pea sprouts…


…followed by perfectly cooked sea bream…

… and – living as I do in gelato country I was curious to see how English versions compared – home-made ice creams (vanilla, caramel and chocolate). The comparison? I think I may actually prefer the local gelato here in Parma; the ice cream tasted … thicker and more dense. Still good, though. Might need further research.

I had a very good supper, surprisingly good, from a Lebanese takeaway called Elias, on Turnham Green Terrace. Lamb shish, tahini, hoummus, felafel, pita bread and a few other things – all incredibly good and carefully prepared before my very eyes. And a fresh apple, carrot and ginger juice to wash it down. Perfect.

Then on Sunday I was reunited with my old writing group and we had a delightful poetry workshop (and excellent lunch of bits and pieces from Carluccio’s) before a few of us headed off to a Poetry School talk by Michael Schmidt about value judgements in poetry at the dangerously wonderuful London Review Bookshop.

Sallied out of there with a few more food books (In the Devil’s Garden; The Cheese Room; Last Chance to Eat; and even a small poetry anthology, Open-Mouthed) and dined on Indian (balti curries, for a thoroughly British experience) at Annapurna.

And back to sweltering Parma. On with the week….

Workshops that don’t cost a thing, and one that is worth every penny

“I like to write for performance, but I end up doing things which are somewhat beyond my capacities as a performer… What I can do, at a poetry reading, is give you an impression of what a piece would sound like if it were performed by somebody else more competent than myself.”– James Fenton (Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in their own words. Picador, 2003)

Last night at Mocambo, we had the excellent John Gould – always droll and delightful – reading with a terrific discovery, Canadian-born, Vermont-based poet David Cavanagh. Definitely one worth seeking out.

I’ve been a follower of the Guardian for some time, not least because of its extensive poetry coverage. Last year they began offering an online poetry workshop which is a great thing to try if you’re feeling stuck for ideas.

Another place that offers workshop ideas is Mslexia magazine. A good and useful website and a worthwhile extravagence to subscribe to the print copy.

And on the other side of the coin… well a pile of coins really… ok, to get to the venue might take quite a *big* pile of coins, with some paper thrown in… check out Tamar Yoseloff’s workshop in Crete coming up in June – no idea how full it is, but if you can do it, do it. I did last year, and I’d happily do it again. Have you ever seen such a delicious workshop space, or a more focused group of writers? Man, the calories we burned working on those writing exercises… This particular taverna, Notos, served the best kolokythokeftedes, tzadzki, octopus and much more besides. Our favourite lunching spot.

My first time in Greece, and yep I really get it now, why everyone who goes there gets misty and wistful talking about it. The food, the food: everything just tastes better under a Cretan sun.
Here’s a little bite from one of the pieces I wrote in Tammy’s workshop:

Kalispera, Good Evening

An evening breeze, kalispera,
blows us towards dinner, till now
the only Greek I’ve ever spoken:
fluent in haloumi, moussaka, souvlaki,
names grown tender
in the memory of my mouth…

Meter mania

The lovely Saskatchewan-born neo-formalist Elizabeth Bachinsky shared her passion for sonnets with Kate Braid’s form class in Nanaimo last night. She is very fond of palindromes and Sapphic stanzas as well, and her first book, Curio, included a translation into anagrams of part of The Wasteland. She has done some wild things with Google search results too.

There was a preliminary discussion of meter, and while reading the chapter on Iambic meter from the excellent text, An Exaltation of Forms, we ran into diverging opinions on how to scan the line, which I now learn is “oft-debated” in scansion: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” (–Shakespeare, Sonnet 30).

Kate said that Keith Maillard had once told her that it was important not to confuse rhythm with meter and that this had made sense of the metrical world for her. If I’m paraphrasing her correctly, she said that rhythm has more to do with the emphasis we might put on a line when we read it, and meter is the more abstract “unreal” template we put over that line to measure it, within the context of the rest of the poem.

I’m still puzzling on that, but I found something that supports Maillard’s view, if music and poetry are this strongly connected, on a page about music theory. It says:

Many modern conceptions of rhythm and meter place them in opposition. Rhythm is often defined to consist of the actually sounding durations of music, while meter is the alternation of strong and weak beats, or the interaction of pulse strata, that are inferred from the rhythm. Rhythm is thus conceived as emerging and active— a “concrete” patterning that is measured by, and heard to work with or against the “abstract,” deterministic, rigid metrical grid.

Does that make sense to anyone? A couple of us thought the line (see second paragraph above) could be scanned as more or less straight dactylic tetrameter (quibbles over whether “silent” could be read without an initial stress, in context), but others wanted to put it into iambic pentameter with a double ionic (unstressed/unstressed/stressed/stressed) foot in the middle and a trochaic substitution in the first foot.

Ok, any [other] prosody geeks out there? For the rest of us, I like this page for a nice basic summary of meter. And I was having a little fun today with this one that has some online quizzes and tutorials on prosody.

And for those of you who prefer food, here’s what I had for supper last night (Rich Leek Tart, it’s called). Obviously I have a long way to go as both a cook and a food photographer, but it was pretty tasty. The leeks were sweated for about half an hour, with minced shallots and a couple of sliced mushrooms, before being mixed with strained yogurt, swiss cheese and eggs, and the result was sweet and dense; it almost tasted like I’d added sugar.