Take three poems, choose your words and ...

Jackie Kay inspired many of us recently when we had the pleasure of hearing her read (perform would be more accurate) as part of the Lowdham Book Festival last month. She is a star! So it seemed appropriate to select Jackie Kay's poetry collection Darling to spark our writing exercise at this month's meeting.

Three poems were chosen at random from the collection by asking group members to suggest a page number. Everyone noted down between six and 10 words from each poem as the poems were read aloud to the group. Members then had 15 minutes to write in any format as long as they used all their chosen words. I've participated in this exercise on a number of occasions now and always been surprised and excited by the results. Not just in how it frees my own imagination, and creates interesting new associations between words. What's great is hearing everyone else's contributions. Did we choose similar words or different ones? And what did we make with them?

This is what I came up with. It may be the beginning of a short story, and I aim to work more with the persona/character that 'appeared' on the page. I'm encouraging other members to post their writing from this exercise here. Come on - you know you want to!

Words selected::
trees, whipped, cotton, scream, bass, landing, happen, telling, keep, missed, trousers, toffee, skin, bones, revolutionary, gulls, waving, learned, returned, soft, down.


There's nothing revolutionary in my trousers.
It's just the way I like telling it in a full
bass voice: "See what I can make happen".
And I did. All those years ago, when I was
skin and bones and I couldn't do a press-up
for toffee, you thought me soft;
tried to keep me down. While the gulls
would scream, preparing for landing
on yet another bag of chips, I was patching
myself with cotton. There's a turn-up
in these jeans. I learned what I missed
under that pier, rolling off you as the wind
whipped my backside raw. The crack of
the boards was trees splitting. The only joy
in waving you off imagining what returned.

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Conversation Pieces

Conversations between writers can be fascinating. Can we continue a dialogue here by responding to each other - in poetry or prose, or a mix of genre?

Take a look at LikeStarlings, a place for talking in poems, where the following project is taking place.

The idea is simple:

1. Pair poets who don’t know each other

2. Start with a poem by one of them

3. The other writes a poem in response, within a week

4. The first responds to that poem with a poem

5. That exchange happens again, so four new poems, and a conversation of five, are written

Can we do something similar? But of course our idea could look something like this: some of us will know each other, the response needn't be identified as a poem, we don't need to restrict the process to pairs, and we can have as few or as many exchanges as we please.

Responses invited to:

I seek reasons,
strive to meet
love in the afternoons,
returning deliciously cold,
fingers sodden
mouth frail.

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Keeping Inspired

At the last meeting we agreed to experiment with some exercises here in the hope that we can inspire and respond to each other's themes. We also want to have some fun in the process, and provide something for you (the reader) to read!

Here is my opening encouragement and stimulus for inspiration. Although I wrote this some time before I joined Sapphist Writers, it does help me to celebrate the work that we're doing as well as our future ambitions.

I will come direct:
no second-hand mediocrity;
not a ritual required.
We are women
impelled to be
totally ourselves.

What does it mean to you to be totally yourself? When are you impelled to be nothing less?

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