Ekphrastic Prompt 2: 'Seed' by Peter Randall-Page

'Seed', granite sculpture. Peter Randall-Page.

This immense granite seed stands in its own purpose-built chamber at Cornwall's Eden project. Information about its creation can be found on Peter Randall-Page's website, and there is a short film about it here at Eden.

Image Credit: "SEED" by ME - desktop. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Liberated from my Hard Drive

This is an old dramatic monologue that has never before seen the light of day. It was obviously ashamed of itself...

Image:Original Artwork, Ink & Acrylic on Canvas, Sally Douglas

On The Line                         

I didn't mean to get into this mess

Just got in with the wrong crowd

on the dark side –

found myself one morning crumpled

and screwed up

 – in a dirty dive –

let myself be taken for a ride

But oh, it was exciting  –

whizzing around with a new gang

feeling a bit of rough

letting myself be run through

by the blues

but now

I see it’s changed me

My other half won’t know me now

he’ll hang around with others

(clean as clean and white as white)

who have an

almost

matching rib

I am blue

and no one else is blue like me

I pray for

bleach

Sally Douglas

Ekphrastic Prompt 1: Antony Gormley's 'Event Horizon'

Image 1

Image 2

Today's post is a writing prompt: a couple of images to use as a starting point for a poem (or two), or perhaps a piece of flash fiction. 

If you'd like to, please feel free to share your result in a comment below. 

Some more information about the artwork can be found here.


Image Credits:

Image 1: "London National Theatre with sculpture" by Todd Huffman from Phoenix, AZ - Watcher. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons.

Image 2: "Gormley-event-horizon" by WyrdLight.com. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons.

Embedding Maths in Poetry

This term I'm doing a teaching course at my local FE college. It's been very interesting so far, and because it's not subject-specific, I've met people who are teaching or training in widely differing subjects - Hairdressing, Health and Safety, Catering, Safeguarding, Personal Training and many others. In one of our assignments, we had to give examples of we would embed 'functional skills' into our own subject area.

Functional skills are English, Maths and ICT - and apparently we're pretty bad at them in the UK, so the Government wants teachers to take every opportunity they can to give learners the opportunity to use them. And - here's the rub - 'embedding' means the students don't notice you're doing it!

So, how on earth do I embed Maths in Creative Writing? After a lot of head scratching (and asking fellow poets for ideas) I came up with the following:

• Discussing word and syllable counts - simple, but counting is a maths skill
• Multiplying stanza length and number of stanzas to ascertain a desired line count
• Using Dadaist  and OULIPO  techniques to generate poems and discussion on probability and mathematical generation of material
• Discussion of the influence on poetry of Fibonnacci and the Golden Ratio
• Talking about probabilities and percentages in relation to the chances of getting published!

I'm sure there are many more, but it took me quite a while to get even these. But after I'd handed in my assignment, I remembered that the title of this blog comes from relating poetry to maths - you can read about it in my very first post, here. It turns out I've been embedding maths in my own musings about poetry for quite a while...

"Mandel zoom 00 mandelbrot set". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Can I Do It? A Daily Blogpost for November

It's November, so lots of my friends are doing NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. For the next 30 days my Facebook and Twitter feed will be full of posts about word counts and late nights, caffeine consumption and character creation. One of these days I will do it myself - after all, I have got two unfinished novels languishing on my hard drive - but I'm a bit committed at the moment, so it's not going to be this year.

This morning, though - just in time - I discovered there is an alternative! Thanks to Josephine Corcoran, I now know of the existence of NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month. I'm not a very consistent blogger, as anyone running their eye down my archive will quickly discover. In fact, there hasn't been a single blog post for October this year (oh, the guilt). So it would be quite a challenge for me to post every day.

Is it a challenge to which I am equal? Only time will tell. But I'm going to give myself a few guidelines to make it more likely:

• Posts can be short. Even very short.
• Posts can consist just of a picture and a caption as long is it's at least tangentially relevant to the theme of this blog.
• If I have some spare time I can plan a few posts in advance.
• If I'm stuck I can use some of the prompts here and here, and any others I might find - as long as I make them relevant.

So, here's the plan. I'll take on the challenge. I might even succeed...

Well, that's Day 1 done. Anyone going to join me? 

Here's One I Prepared Earlier: The Fair Toxophilites

First published in Iota 80

The Fair Toxophilites, a painting by the Victorian artist William Powell Frith, depicts three finely dressed young women engaged in archery. It is part of the collection at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. When I wrote the poem in 2007, I was struck by the intensity of the main figure, and the way her clothes seemed at odds with what she was doing. It felt to me that the artist was not thinking at all about her thoughts or character, but more about the dress she was wearing. However, it also seemed to me that, in spite of this, some of her determination had made its way through his brush-strokes. So the poem became a comment on the way Victorian women were socially and physically constrained.

Today, looking for a link to the picture to post here, I found that RAMM's website has now got some information about the artist and the painting. And I discovered that I was right about Frith's attitude to the subjects. He decided to paint the picture after seeing some 'lady-archers' at the seaside, whose 'feats' had 'amused' him. He used his daughters, Alice, Fanny and Louisa, as models, and commented that 'the subject was trifling and totally devoid of character interest', but the clothes would be a record of 'the female habiliments of the time'. Well, he was right about the clothes, but I think the picture tells us a lot more than that, even if that wasn't at all his intention. I wonder what became of Alice of the determined jaw.

Chapbooks and Marc Woodward's 'A Fright of Jays'

I've just come across Maquette, a Devon-based publisher of chapbooks. Their list is small but, judging by the two pamphlets I've read so far, excellent. They have published four:  Kelvin Corcoran's Radio Archilochus, Jos Smith's A Plume of Smoke, Sally Flint's The Hospital Punch and Marc Woodward's A Fright of Jays.

I like chapbooks and pamphlets. They create a different reading experience from that of a full collection: tighter and more focussed. The poet has the opportunity to explore a theme or subject in depth without it becoming overwhelming. Poems are able to 'talk' to each other more intimately. And they're not so heavy to carry around!

You can find my review of Marc Woodward's A Fright of Jays, here at Canto Poetry.