Summer Break

As usual AppleHouse takes a break in July and August as our family and friends fly into the South of France for their holidays with us. We have a busy few months with people we love and I hope that's how you'll spend your summer too.

Here's a list of 10 things I will do, or attempt to do, this summer. You can add your list too if you like.

1. Write a poem for my nephew's wedding celebrations.
2. Take the cat on her first trip back to the UK.
3. Make soda bread.
4. Write something small every day in July (See my 'open field' blog.)
5. Go swimming in the sea.
6. Try to spend less time on Facebook.
7. Think positively about my possible contract for a new book but cross all available bits of my body too!
8. Be relaxed about sharing the control of my kitchen when I have guests. (Tough one!)
9. Drive our new tractor around the apple farm in Kent.
10. Remember to drink more water than wine. (Another tough one!)

See you in September.
Write well.
L x

The Beautiful List

I've spoken about and shared list poems a couple of times before but I really don't think we can have too much of a good thing. List poems, done well, sing to us because of their deceptive simplicity: they wear the disguise of an ordinary everyday thing (shopping list, to do list etc) but the poet's choice of form and language lifts them up out of the ordinary and makes them extra-ordinary.

The following poem, by Tim Nolan, (which you can listen to HERE on The Writer's Almanac before you read it), slows our reading down with its short couplets. It asks us to pay the same amount of attention to the 'forgotten'. But this isn't just a poem about a literal change of season. The introduction of the human relationship in the middle of the poem - the flush of your face/ so much - asks me to reconsider the other imagery, the statements at the close of the poem, and the title as metaphor. Here it is and many thanks to Tim for giving his permission:


Long Winter

So much I've forgotten
the grass

the birds
the close insects

the shoot—the drip—
the spray of the sprinkler

freckles—strawberries—
the heat of the Sun

the impossible
humidity

the flush of your face
so much

the high noon
the high grass

the patio ice cubes
the barbeque

the buzz of them—
the insects

the weeds—the dear
weeds—that grow

like alien life forms—
all Dr. Suessy and odd—

here we go again—
we are turning around

again—this will all
happen over again—

and again—it will—

Tim Nolan

If you're in the UK or Europe
then check out the The Book Depository
for Tim's collection, The Sound of It.

What do you take from that penultimate couplet and the final line on its own? Inevitability, acceptance, understanding?

I take comfort from it; repetition in all its guises can be comforting. Although my comfort is tinged by inquietude. I'm not sure I want another long winter, I'm not sure that I want some things to happen over again. But I also know that my experience of life is deepened by living through change.

Poems that make us think, that shift us between different emotions, these are the ones to cherish.

I don't want to be prescriptive with a poetry prompt. Let this poem work on you through several readings then set out on a journey of your own.

Write well.
L
x

I resolve not to...

New year, new page, new leaf, new look... we can't help but associate the beginning of the year with starting new projects, or resolving to change things, or give up things.

I'd like us to think about the things we resolve NOT to do:

I resolve not to make fun of my sister's dog
I resolve not to open the 2nd bottle of wine

But let's not be limited by reality or practicality:

I resolve not to invade Iraq
I resolve never to die without informing you of place, date and time

Have fun with free-listing over the next week. Then look back and see how parts of those lists could be shaped into a poem.

Write well.
L
x

Happy New Year

... to everyone who follows this blog, or has just come across it accidentally. I hope you enjoy what AppleHouse will deliver during 2010.

It's too early in the year to apply too much pressure to ourselves, so let's take it easy as far as writing a poem is concerned, and just play with lists (a little like the 2010 Wishlist, but with a different focus). Anything we write feeds into our writing practice... except emails! They just make us feel as if we're writing : )

Write a list of 10 things you have never done. Be playful, bizarre, honest, emotional, intellectual... don't try and control your writing.

Then close the list with something you have done during the course of your life, beginning with the phrase 'But once I...'. Describe this thing in detail, what happened, how you felt.

Here's my own spontaneous attempt. I look forward to reading yours.

I have never travelled across a desert.
I have never been lost.
I have never learned to tango
or how to fly a plane
or how to tell when a man is lying.
I have never left the house and kept on walking for days.
I have never lied about my age.
I have never tried to tightrope walk
or hang upside down from an acrobat’s bar.
I have never slept on sand.
But once, in a dream, I flew,
my feet lifting from the ground the way
a balloon rises in the air
and in those moments before I woke
I was incredible.

Write well.
Lynne