2025 3rd Quarterly Meeting Report

 IS THERE POETRY IN ALL OF US?

Minutes of Quarterly Meeting Saturday 12th July 2025

2 - 5pm Bridgnorth Library Meeting Room, Listley Street

Present: Irena (workshop leader) Ann, Louise, John, Adam, Michele, Liz

Apologies: Sue, Jennie, Marie, Kath, Andy, Emma, Suzie, Ruth, Fiona

Many thanks Irena for leading us through a most enjoyable afternoon finding the inner poet in each of us. We explored when perhaps we might choose poetry over prose to express our thoughts and feelings  and after identifying our favourite books and plays looked for any correspondences between them which reveal themes we are drawn to. We wrote short poems about one of our favourite pieces either describing a scene we particularly remembered or the feeling the writing / production left. 

We considered how less is often more in poetry looking particularly at HTW poems, The Butterfly by Sue Akande and The Rabbit by Fiona Carstairs, both published in April on the blog.

After reading "On my father's feet are the shoes of dead comrades" by Jackie Kay we constructed memory maps of incidents / objects from our own memories for inspiration.

Finally we considered how we might write poetry in another person's voice, such as the poetry in Carol Ann Duffy's anthology, 'The World's Wife' which features verse written from the point of view of famous men's wives.

Louise pushed for us to come us with a more precise definition of what poetry really is to which the answer is whatever you want it to be, whatever sounds right, whatever words do the job of expressing how you feel or describing what you've seen in an arrangement of words and sentences that work best for you. Sometimes that means using formal poetic structures at other times free verse. Irena noted that well known poets have come up with a range of definitions of what makes a poem. WN Herbert says his poetry is 'a snapshot in time,' whilst Jackie Kay defines her poetry as moments of belief, coupled with an intense love of language and Carol Ann Duffy calls poetry simply 'the music of being human.' And therein lies the key - a poet writes words that convey beauty and feeling in ways that engage listeners, like music, and like music there are many genres and many tastes and not rights or wrongs.

Thank you Irena for helping us look deeply into ourselves to find poetic inspiration. We all wrote 3 poems each in the course of the afternoon - that's 21 poems between us - and as Irena said some of them will hopefully find their way onto the blog so that all High Town Writers can enjoy reading them - even if writers couldn't make this workshop.