Changeling

It's good to be back after the Christmas holidays. We met last week and it was great to have the conversation around each other's poems spread out to discuss broader ideas of poetry. For example, in tutorials, or writing groups, you might hear someone say that a poem with stanzas of unequal length should be revised into a more regular pattern. Equally, you might ask why someone writing in free verse would use a regular stanza length form. Lots of ideas, preferences, etc, can seem like rules, and it was good to have the chance to break down these ideas and question them.

We were reading Rimbaud's Illuminations (trans: Ashbery) in the reading group. There was a really mixed response, as I guess you might expect, with some people enjoying the read, others struggling with it (me), and others just not excited by it, questioning why Rimbaud is still being read and translated; what does his work do for the contemporary reader?

I found the Illuminations difficult because I couldn't remember what I was reading once I closed the page, I wanted to come away with something more than confusion, but I would question whether my own reading history has left me with a certain way of approaching texts, a way of making sense of it, which these poems don't lend themselves to (and perhaps are trying to avoid). I'd be interested to spend more time with the poems, and more time reading around them.

The next Bank Street Arts Poetry Cafe workshop is Wednesday 1st February - 12pm start.

The reading group is looking at Clare Pollard's Changeling. Here's a review by Ben Wilkinson from the Guardian last July.

See you then.