Arvon Poetry Course

When I was a teenager, English homework was an agonising affair because I could never think what to write about. It seems hard to believe that the same person has just returned from an Arvon poetry course at The Hurst where a morning session involved writing seven poems in three hours! There’s no doubt that Peter and Ann Sansom, our tutors, are magic but at the same time there must be some benefit from age and experience. I didn’t quite manage seven every morning but I did write poems about many things from

1. what happened at the weekend to memories of childhood,
2. being in a man’s world as a female birder in the 1990s to a dinosaur discoverer in C18th (Mary Anning),
3. showing fund raisers around our lab as a PhD student to the misery of skin disease and
4. being crazy about moths to not so crazy about dogs.

Others are still to be finished including two on Taekwondo.

Intense creativity was just part of it; I also got to know some wonderful people.

I had a brief break from poetry drawing a design in AI based on this wonderful chair beside the lake that became the front cover of our course anthology.