Inspired by Nature - Juliet Wilson

I grew up in suburban Manchester and was always interested in nature. I was an avid birdwatcher from an early age, and took every opportunity to take up binoculars whether in the garden or on family holidays. My first published piece of writing was when I was nine and I had a very short piece about (for some reason!) penguins published in the hospital magazine when I was a patient for a month. I also had a piece in the local church magazine when I was a young teenager. However, apart from that, and although my English teacher always praised my work, it wasn't until I left University that I first started writing at all seriously. 


Soon after graduation I moved to Malaŵi for two years. The wonderful scenery and wildlife were totally inspiring and although I worked very hard as a teacher I found myself with plenty of spare time (and there was no such thing as TV in Malaŵi in those days). I naturally found myself using a fair amount of this time to write. 
My first published poetry pamphlet was Bougainvillea Dancing a collection mostly inspired by my time in Malaŵi, which raised money for charities working in Malaŵi.

I currently work as a part time adult education tutor, leading birdwatching walks and teaching creative writing. I also volunteer for the Water of Leith Conservation Trust, which looks after one of Edinburgh's rivers. I walk along a stretch of the river every week, noting the wildlife and collecting litter. Every walk is different, I love watching the seasons change. The area I walk along is a real haven for wildlife, several species of bird live here and I sometimes see deer running beside the river (remember, this is not far from the centre of Edinburgh!). So as well as collecting litter, I always end up collecting inspiration for poetry! There's direct inspiration in terms of observing specific things that become a haiku for example or a short story. There's also indirect inspiration – just being out of doors, surrounded by nature is inspiring in itself. 


© Juliet Wilson

Juliet's poem Cows in Meadow Flowers is published in Green Spaces: Poems From Poetry Space Competition 2012. Buy it from Poetry Space Bookshop £4.95until January 31st (retail price £5.95) 

Visit Juliet's own site at:
http://craftygreenpoet.blogspot.com/

Christmas Poems

Happy Christmas to all Poetry Space Supporters and everyone who reads this today.

I don't want to die at Christmas

I don't want to die at Christmas
cheated of that warm turkey sandwich
on the eve of day.
I don't want to miss the glint in your eye
as you unwrap the surprise
of a hint remembered.
I don't want to rob Santa of his jolly jaunt
and leave a gift of tears instead
wrapping the day in melancholly
and the promise of earth to earth....
I don't want to eclipse the word made flesh
by flesh unmaking itself
in the denial of breath.
But if I die
near the day of days
wrap me in tinsel and coloured paper.
Leave me under a tree
and sing carols by lamplight:
'Joy to the world',
'Come and join the celebration',
'See amid the winter snow',
and dance,
let there be dancing.
And place the last advent candle
at my feet
to warm
my
sole.

© Keith Wallis

Christmas Turkey

We purchase the ginormous, scraped-out bird

and garage it until Ovening Eve.

It has to be outsized with so many two-day,

Christmas mouths to feed; Ten, including

the in-laws, my mum, the unmarried uncle

and his silent ‘friend’.  Takes two of us to cradle

the consecrated carcass, steam-screaming,

from sacristy to linen, carving altar.   

Usually, the kids religiously take turns to gnaw upon

the weekend legs; so we concoct another Yule-tide lie;

calling it Custom to offer limbs, wings and all things

bony to visiting elders with teeth enough to gnaw.

“I likes a bit of breast m’self,” I boast, winking at

Her spooning out the veg and trimmings and blushing;

while watching our three wince at even the tiniest helpings

of sprouts and parsnips, sage and stuffing.

After all this preparation, dressing, cooking, carving 

and flimsy, paper-hatted, out-of-character jollity   

I know our three would be more than Christmas happy

if only they served bread and cranberry sauce at K.F.C. 

© Mike Lee
 

SILENT NIGHT

The sun could not destroy

the cold season of winter nights

neither, could it conceal the Robin

from the blooming roses

and candle lights,

frosty flowers and singing birds.

The stars could not dim its flare

of shooting wishes and dancing array

nor the moon, dye its boon

in a natural sky, of Jesus’ birth.

Children find peace at the country-yard

dreaming morning Zebras with magical spice of Santa’s gifts

and shed every little joy ‘till eternity.

A scene in my head,

a Christmas ushered, in midnight blue.

© Michael Kwaku Kesse Somuah (Ghana)2011

My Style - Rosalind Adam

I love writing poetry but I do it in My Style. I’ve never been particularly knowledgeable about the theory of poetry. I can’t tell my terza rima from my quatrain, so recently I decided to do something about it. I bought a copy of Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. I have to confess to being a Stephen Fry fan and this book is written as if he’s sitting there talking to me, so I happily launched myself into the first few chapters, and ploughed through his many and varied exercises that he kept insisting I complete. The annoying thing was that nothing inspiring fell onto the page. It was no good. I couldn’t write poetry to a formula and I put Stephen and his vast literary knowledge onto my bookshelf so that I could return to writing in My Style.

So what is My Style? It’s whatever sounds right. I count the metre but I don’t stick rigidly to it. A rhyme or half-rhyme makes it a more satisfying piece of work for me but I’m not obsessive about it. The interesting thing is that if I play around and change a line to improve the metre or rhyme, the altered version is always, without fail, a great improvement on the original. And as soon as I drop a precious phrase that’s holding me up I have a much stronger piece of writing. Sometimes the original idea for the poem disappears completely and I’m making statements that I didn’t expect to make.

This poem started out as a description of an old rotting door and ended up as:

Front Doors

Do you wonder what’s behind front doors

While wishing for a life that isn't yours?

Do you look at neighbours with regret?

You think you want to live their life and yet...

I bet those neighbours often look at you.

I bet they envy everything you do.

They’d love to have the life they think is yours.

So many things can hide behind front doors.

Rosalind Adam

The idea for Front Doors must have been in my head somewhere but I certainly hadn’t planned to write about that. I don’t know how or why this happens but for me it’s one of the most satisfying things about being a writer.

Blog:http://rosalindadam.blogspot.com

Website:http://www.rosalindadam.co.uk 

On the "Outside"

These past few days have been exhausting as anyone who has been following the Poetry Space group may have gathered. I found myself faced with what I felt to be an inappropriate post and deleted it.Some people were pleased I had, others felt that they had a right to judge for themselves and in the end I came to the conclusion that they are right . Extreme views as one person put it are possibly best "out in the open where they can be challenged". This is true democracy in action. I have spent many hours examining what led to my decision to press that delete button and I think there were many factors to it. Fear was a big factor. I acted in self-protection .  I was worried about my good name, the reputation I have built up with Poetry Space Showcase and the printed publishing business.This is all to a large extent controllable. On these sites only I only publish material I am comfortable with and that  fit with my view of Poetry Space.

My discussions with family, friends and colleagues have all helped me to clarify my thinking on this and to realise that the forum I have created is not mine. It belongs to everyone who contributes to it and each and every one of us has a different idea of what that space is for. Like a mother who lets her child go out in the world I am now going to let this forum evolve as an entity apart from me and just use the ethical guidelines available to me - that I use all the time in my role as a counsellor. From now on I will rely on the group members themselves to monitor extreme postings and only press that button if I feel the posts breach UK Child Protection legislation and UK Anti Terrorist legislation and if I have to do that I will also record the posts in case they are needed as evidence.

It is hard being on the outside and it is hard being the one making the decisions. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Being on the outside is the theme for a poem I wrote very recently for a competition organised by The Bardic Writer's Circle - a lovely group of writers in Caerphilly who set up this competition so that they could raise funds to produce an anthology of their own writing in 2012. I will be meeting them next week to receive my prize and I'll also get to meet Professor Chris Meredith who judged the competition.

This is the poem:

Outside

I am not sure

how  I came to be outside

rather than inside

how  I came to be

on a homemade sledge

gathering speed

how arms and hands

belonging to me could

own another child’s fat warmth

or how

in the bronze twilight

of a winter’s evening

my face

could burn

and freeze

and laugh

all at the same time.

© Susan Jane Sims

All the best for now,

Sue

Judge's comments on Bardic Writer's Circle website

Poetry Aid - Poetry Space out in the community

Whenever possible Poetry Space loves to help small charities or community projects to raise money and we do this through our book sales and by collaborating with other companies. In the summer of 2010 I was approached by 88 year old hicky (pen name) because he had a delightful collection of poems and cartoons that he had drawn himself using Microsoft paint programme. His idea was to benefit a charity that helped elderly people in some way. After an initial brush off from the biggest UK charity in this field we turned to small UK charity Contact the Elderly because though they are small they do have branches across the country. The core of these branches are volunteers who offer to host tea parties in their own homes on a Sunday for a group of isolated elderly people and volunteer drivers who take them there. The meetings are monthly and they have 75 group now all actively helping our older citizens to feel valued and cared for by offering, tea, cake and friendship.

In the cold winter weather some volunteers also called on elderly people with the group to see if they were okay although this is beyond their remit as volunteers.

In 2012 we shall be releasing a sparkling new edition of the book with a new cover drawn by young artist Toby Morgan, together with a CD of the poems put together with music by vibrant New York Theatre company, On the Square Productions. Many thanks to Rob Benson and Duane Tollison in NY who are currently working on the project for us.

It is early days but we are hoping that profits from the new edition and CD can also benefit a small community project in New York that works with senior citizens. They well deserve it. Our seniors may now have reached older age however they have much to offer us in terms of their wisdom and experience. Like all of us they want to feel valued and listened to.

Look out for the book in 2012.  Contact the Elderly have already received £250 from the first edition. This is likely to raise a lot more.

Sue

Spaces and Places - Nikki Bennett

As a young girl, I used to hand-write and hand-sew books for my parents to ‘borrow’ from my bedroom library; as a young woman I wrote for the ongoing situations and people in my life – some of these became From Puberty to the Menopause, now re-named Love Poems – a book covering a span of forty years.

I made my career in the world of TEFL/TESL, teaching in many countries and to a wide selection of age-groups and professions, and had the opportunity to travel widely, including on the Trans-Siberian Train, so gaining a wide international viewpoint (Trans-Siberian Travels), and to run a group celebrating International Poetry and Poets (uni-verse)

As a volunteer, I worked in many organisations and was International Director and then National President of Business & Professional Women UK and represented UK for that organisation at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, among other events. So grew my awareness of and need to write to highlight women’s issues (The Places We’re Touched).

My public reading spaces have been varied: I have had several solo spots in UK poetry festivals and poetry group readings and have also read in the USA and Europe, including at the conferences of International Women Writers’ Guild, New York state and Geneva International Writers. Again, often flagging up women’s circumstances and issues.

Spaces and places have been both huge and tiny in my life. I been awed by vast spaces, such as those in South Africa and the Sahara and also had to learn to live in a small space: cooped up in a tiny student room, a medical isolation room (Pink Nightie Poems).

At times, the spaces in my heart and head fill immensely and words flow out to fill a whole book concentrating on one person (The Pebble Collection, Love Shines Beyond Grief). Yet once these poems are ‘out there’ they find their own place in the world, people identify with them and they grow their own space.

 www.nikkibennettpoems.com

My Orange Duffle Coat - Susan Jane Sims

© Chris Sims November 2011

I am delighted  that so many people are taking an interest in this new dedicated competition site. Lots of people have written guest blog entries and if you look back over them all I think you will agree that they are all very inspiring.

This week has been particularly exciting  and I am putting this down to wearing my orange duffle coat nearly everywhere I have been. A long time ago my writing  mentor said to me: "find something to be a symbol for you, to give you confidence." For her it is a magic cloak, a metaphorical symbol that helps her to feel confident when standing up in front of a lot of people in a lecture hall  to give a presentation Me, I needed something real rather than metaphorical and I started to realise that whenever I wore my orange dufffle coat, now over ten years old I felt better about myself and wasn't scared to approach people and start a conversation.

 I have always loved the colour orange and as child in Bristol, leaving in a home behind a shop I sometimes felt invisible however what helped me then was helping Dad paint my room orange and having orange curtains at the windows. Mum made the curtains as that was something she did for a living. She made beautiful curtains and soft furnishings for total strangers, taking in the work through middlemen and women who delivered the material and orders to our door.  Much of the time I hated it as a Friday night delivery meant Mum, and also Dad ( because he helped her measure and cut the material), were working all weekend to have the curtains or cushion cover,s or whatever else finished by Monday morning. The demands were often totally unreasonable but the work had to be taken to pay the bills. This time though Mum made the curtains just for me. They were a beautiful shade of orange and not made from very thick material as we couldn't afford what Mum's customers could afford. However they were had sewn and lined with my mother's love, and as my room was a sunny room at the back of the house I would wake in the morning to a gorgeous orange glow that filled the room.

This week my orange coat worked its magic by taking me me into Foyles book shopin Quakers Friars, Bristol and now two brand new copies of Like It Is by Philip Lyons  are being on the shelves for people to walk in, browse and buy. Foyles' manager, Dave  has also agreed to Poetry Space putting on some events there in 2012 so do watch this space...

Bye for now,


Sue
www.poetryspace.co.uk


Like It Is by Philip Lyons, Poetry Space Ltd October 2011. ISBN 978-0-9565328-5-5


Coming up soon a guest blog entry by Bath poet, Nikki Bennett