september + poems

Hello friends

I'm aware I've been blog-absent the last fortnight or so – it's the busiest time of my year, and having been ill there's work stacked everywhere I look. But from here, autumn greetings on this stunning early-October morning with those soft mists alighting on the many cobwebs and the sun breaking through like an impression of itself.

When I offered the INSET teacher-training day for the Prince's Trust PoetryQuest project, my co-tutor was friend and colleague Anthony Wilson. Our styles are very different and complementary, and we ran a workshop each.

Anthony used the poem 'Autumn' by Iain Crichton Smith as a way of talking about writing about a subject by breaking the grip of our 'usual' language in relation to certain themes. We were encouraged to call out all the words we habitually associate with autumn and then forbidden to use them in our poems.

In my correspondence course I use exercises that stimulate our thinking about familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways (by challenging our individual 'default' vocabulary as well as expanding our imaginative and associative responses beyond the clichéd), so when my lovely Two Rivers poetry group met here yesterday I co-opted Anthony's exercise to combine it with my own.

Here are the drafts of my responses to the subject, but I've allowed myself to re-include some of the more iconic autumn-in-England imagery.

Selling the Wind

i
Autumn is gales, owl-call, dusty chrysanths

and Michaelmas daisies, logs

from the dry-store, a net over summer,

first pumpkins, conkers, the shortening

of days, first blaze in the hearth;

is cloud-cover, light slant on the meadow

and haze in the valley, swallows

jostling the lines, a pride of horses

cantering towards night, slight hint

of restlessness in your lover’s eyes.

*

ii

Sun's rays are slant

cut the air with the texture

of longing.

In the strewn borders

the first small autumn cyclamen

push up into their love affair

with light and drizzle;

squrrels strip the trees.

We find it hard to be clear,

feel the need to tidy

our lives.

*


iii

I remember new T-bar sandals

the creak of a huge leather satchel,

the fear even then that it might

not be big enough for the learning

it would need to carry.

Gulls come inland.

Bees are drowsy, slow.

The evening's mead-and-honey-luminous.

Michaelmas daisies

are the colour of longing.

Everything speaks of leaving.

 

~ Roselle Angwin October 2011