Poetry Workshop

Hip! Hip! Hooray for Foothills Writers! I love this group of motley authors! We are a strange mix that has come together with one goal in mind...become better writers. We were featured in the March issue of Our State magazine, that's how established we are. Now we are going to have a delightful event, a poetry reading under the gazebo...picnic shelter really, but gazebo sounds so much more poetic! 

We meet regularly on Wednesdays at the museum in Gamewell and share the good times of publishing and sympathize with the not-so-good times of rejections of someone's latest submission. After a meet-and-greet (and eat) time, we rattle our brains and warm up our typing fingers with a six-minute prompt. The topics we address come from out of the blue and have taken me into spaces I never would have imagined I would be. We share our compositions with each other, if we wish. Or not. Some are so personal that we don't want to hear our words spoken aloud.

After these preliminaries, the leader of the day presents a writing-related lesson. During the month of April, three of us per session taught about one form or another of poetry...in honor of Poetry Month. One person chose ballads. Another did open verse. One did a variation of haiku. Another did conversational poems and on a different day did Taurograms, where each word in the poem starts with the same letter, not an easy task if I say so myself. I signed up for three different dates to teach and looked through the list of varying poetry formats to find the styles that I wanted to share. I need structure as I write, so I looked for poetry that had a cadence and a rhyming scheme...like a cinquain. I had actually studied that in school somewhere along the way. Five lines. Varying rhymes - ABAAB; ABABB, any combination of words that rhyme. For my other class sessions, I wanted something eccentric, something so unusual it would make a fun time. Both of the ones I selected were from the Welsh tradition. Those poets really know how to complicate life in a most interesting way.

First I chose the Cyhydedd Fer poem structure. This is a poem made up of couplets, pairs of rhyming lines, which attracted me to them in the first place, but, and here's the kicker, each line must have eight syllables. Not so difficult, once I learned how to pronounce the name. We meet in a museum and are surrounded with mannequins displaying uniforms...military, sports, Scouts. I assigned everyone to imagine the person who once wore those uniforms and write a Cyhydedd Fer to tell a story. What we came up with!

On a different week, I taught another poem format I couldn't pronounce...will I ever learn!! This one was a clerihew, a more recent poem structure with a four-line AABB rhyme scheme, comical or whimiscal themed, and about a noted person. First we all wrote about the same person, Edgar Allen Poe. The fact that Edgar had so many variations was a testament to the wide range of brain philosophers in our Foothills Writer's group. Next I had everyone trace a six degree of separation from a famous person to themselves (think Kevin Bacon) and then write a clerihew about it. What fun!

Now we want to share the product of our labors with you. We invite you to celebrate with us this Wednesday afternoon, May 14, one o'clock at the Gamewell Walking Park. No telling what you will hear!

Catch of the Day,

Gretchen

PS There will be food!