Nothing changed from day to day, not one thing. I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept. Saturdays and Sundays, instead of work, I was out killing time from morning on, making the rounds of movie theaters, Then I had dinner and a couple of drinks, read, and went to sleep, alone. So it went: I passed through the month the way people X out days on a calendar, one after the other. (Haruki Murakami. A Wild Sheep Chase. Penguin, 1991). So, how was your month? Write a poem about how you spent April. Or about a different month you spent mechanically, just getting by, as Murakami describes in this excerpt. Photo by Lis Ferla. Copyright commons, some rights reserved.

Nothing changed from day to day, not one thing. I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept. Saturdays and Sundays, instead of work, I was out killing time from morning on, making the rounds of movie theaters, Then I had dinner and a couple of drinks, read, and went to sleep, alone. So it went: I passed through the month the way people X out days on a calendar, one after the other. (Haruki Murakami. A Wild Sheep Chase. Penguin, 1991).

So, how was your month? Write a poem about how you spent April. Or about a different month you spent mechanically, just getting by, as Murakami describes in this excerpt.

Photo by Lis Ferla. Copyright commons, some rights reserved.

1 year ago  View high resolution

Denise Levertov is just one of the poets whose work you can hear on the Poetry Center Digital Archive, which launched today. Listen to one or more of these great recordings from the 1950s and write a response. Image: Cardigans and Coffee

Denise Levertov is just one of the poets whose work you can hear on the Poetry Center Digital Archive, which launched today.

Listen to one or more of these great recordings from the 1950s and write a response.


Image: Cardigans and Coffee

1 year ago  11 notes

As a librarian who has worked with historic collections, dust has been a feature in my working life and finds its way into my poems quite regularly. I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic or sudden as this, though - building work in the basement of UCL’s Grant Museum threw up clouds of plaster dust at the beginning of the month. Marcel Duchamp was also inspired by dust and its strange qualities. Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding shows part of Duchamp’s process in making his Large Glass - dust was allowed to lie on the glass for over a year, before Duchamp wiped it mostly clean, but fixed some to the cones that formed part of the work. And ultimately, of course, dust is composed of little bits of us - of our dead skin cells, hair, other dry detritus - a little, though not exactly, like the tumble dryer lint in Gabriel Orozco’s Lintels. For tomorrow’s prompt, either write a poem incorporating dust of some kind, or incorporating something random that features in your daily professional life. Image: Mark Carnall

As a librarian who has worked with historic collections, dust has been a feature in my working life and finds its way into my poems quite regularly.

I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic or sudden as this, though - building work in the basement of UCL’s Grant Museum threw up clouds of plaster dust at the beginning of the month.

Marcel Duchamp was also inspired by dust and its strange qualities. Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding shows part of Duchamp’s process in making his Large Glass - dust was allowed to lie on the glass for over a year, before Duchamp wiped it mostly clean, but fixed some to the cones that formed part of the work.

And ultimately, of course, dust is composed of little bits of us - of our dead skin cells, hair, other dry detritus - a little, though not exactly, like the tumble dryer lint in Gabriel Orozco’s Lintels.

For tomorrow’s prompt, either write a poem incorporating dust of some kind, or incorporating something random that features in your daily professional life.

Image: Mark Carnall

1 year ago  3 notes

I was really interested in the story behind this year’s National Poetry Month poster by artist Stephen Doyle. Tomorrow’s prompt is simple: write in response to the image, or to Doyle’s questions in his description of the work, or simply to Elizabeth Bishop’s oddly wonderful and wonderfully odd poem, ‘A Word With You’

I was really interested in the story behind this year’s National Poetry Month poster by artist Stephen Doyle.

Tomorrow’s prompt is simple: write in response to the image, or to Doyle’s questions in his description of the work, or simply to Elizabeth Bishop’s oddly wonderful and wonderfully odd poem, ‘A Word With You’

1 year ago  1 note View high resolution

e. e. cummings' erotic drawings

Only three days into the 30/30 challenge, and already I’m behind! 

Eva Aldea sent us the link to this gallery of e. e. cummings’ erotic poetry and drawings to prompt us to write our own. 

Hopefully tomorrow …

1 year ago  2 notes

It’s the start of this year’s 30/30 poetry challenges, and April Fool’s Day.

Write a poem based on one of the Museum of Hoaxes’ Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time, but written as if the hoax were really true. What would the (your) world be like if it really did contain flying penguins, UFOs in London or the washing of Lions at the Tower of London. Or even spaghetti growing on trees. 

1 year ago  1 note

Slightly late posting my prompt for the 30/30 challenge, so it’s a simple one - just a time and location: “In the library at night …” Image: A night at the library by svenwerk (Copyright Commons: some rights reserved)

Slightly late posting my prompt for the 30/30 challenge, so it’s a simple one - just a time and location:

“In the library at night …”

Image: A night at the library by svenwerk (Copyright Commons: some rights reserved)

1 year ago 

At a recent poetry tutorial, the tutor told me that I was fortunate to have a specialist vocabulary from my day job (as a librarian / library academic) to inform my poetry, and this got me thinking about specialisms and how they can add something exotic to writing.

Today I received an email from the “Knitting Club” at work, and that reminded me of the hours I used to spend poring over patterns with my mother and grandmother as a child. I was particularly absorbed by my mother’s knitting machine (a more modern and versatile model than the one in the video) and have already referenced winding wool for my Grannie in the Tate’s online anthology.

Winchester School of Art holds the Richard Rutt Collection of books used in his ‘History of hand knitting’. Some of his nineteenth century books are available on the library website. Browse through them to get a feel for the language of knitting, or, if you’re a complete novice, watch this video from cyberseams on the basics.

Three choices of prompts:

* Write a poem about knitting, using the vocabulary of these and other sources

* Write about clothing yourself, whether through handicrafts or shopping

* Write a pattern poem using your own specialist language. A pattern poem is like a recipe poem, except that in the end you have a product. So I might write a pattern for making a book, or a library, or a website, and a plumber might write a pattern for a kitchen sink.

Or, of course, respond to any of the images and digital resources in your own way.

1 year ago  1 note

Today’s prompt is my last one for June’s 30/30 challenge. It’s based on activities from the workshops at the WLM@40 conference and the Feminism in London Midsummer Feminist Party. The images here, from a range of real-world and online library collections, show corsets, which were used “to help the girl grow as she should grow” (from the advert for Martha Washington Missees’ Corset Waist for Girls, bottom left). However, in order to create the tiny waist, the body rearranged its internal organs, as illustrated in the image on the bottom right. One of the causes behind the trope of the quick-to-faint ladies in Victorian literature is the very real lack of lung capacity caused by the cramped chest area caused by corsets. Nowadays, corsets are often worn as sexy underwear and can be fetish items of great beauty (mages in the centre). This shaping and control of the female body is the root of the urge of 1970s feminists to burn their bra. Our complex relationship with our undergarments led Brenda Jiménez to carry out her art project ‘A bra does not make the woman’ in Mexico. She photographed young women wearing their bras over their tops and asked them to speak about what it meant to them. She later posted the project to the International Museum of Women’s Imaining Ourselves online exhibition. Todays prompt is to look at the images here and at Jiminéz’s work and to think about the question: How do our clothes shape us and how do we shape our clothes?

Today’s prompt is my last one for June’s 30/30 challenge. It’s based on activities from the workshops at the WLM@40 conference and the Feminism in London Midsummer Feminist Party.

The images here, from a range of real-world and online library collections, show corsets, which were used “to help the girl grow as she should grow” (from the advert for Martha Washington Missees’ Corset Waist for Girls, bottom left). However, in order to create the tiny waist, the body rearranged its internal organs, as illustrated in the image on the bottom right. One of the causes behind the trope of the quick-to-faint ladies in Victorian literature is the very real lack of lung capacity caused by the cramped chest area caused by corsets. Nowadays, corsets are often worn as sexy underwear and can be fetish items of great beauty (mages in the centre).

This shaping and control of the female body is the root of the urge of 1970s feminists to burn their bra. Our complex relationship with our undergarments led Brenda Jiménez to carry out her art project ‘A bra does not make the woman’ in Mexico. She photographed young women wearing their bras over their tops and asked them to speak about what it meant to them. She later posted the project to the International Museum of Women’s Imaining Ourselves online exhibition.

Todays prompt is to look at the images here and at Jiminéz’s work and to think about the question:

How do our clothes shape us and how do we shape our clothes?

1 year ago  View high resolution

Nothing changed from day to day, not one thing. I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept. Saturdays and Sundays, instead of work, I was out killing time from morning on, making the rounds of movie theaters, Then I had dinner and a couple of drinks, read, and went to sleep, alone. So it went: I passed through the month the way people X out days on a calendar, one after the other. (Haruki Murakami. A Wild Sheep Chase. Penguin, 1991). So, how was your month? Write a poem about how you spent April. Or about a different month you spent mechanically, just getting by, as Murakami describes in this excerpt. Photo by Lis Ferla. Copyright commons, some rights reserved.

Nothing changed from day to day, not one thing. I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept. Saturdays and Sundays, instead of work, I was out killing time from morning on, making the rounds of movie theaters, Then I had dinner and a couple of drinks, read, and went to sleep, alone. So it went: I passed through the month the way people X out days on a calendar, one after the other. (Haruki Murakami. A Wild Sheep Chase. Penguin, 1991).

So, how was your month? Write a poem about how you spent April. Or about a different month you spent mechanically, just getting by, as Murakami describes in this excerpt.

Photo by Lis Ferla. Copyright commons, some rights reserved.

Denise Levertov is just one of the poets whose work you can hear on the Poetry Center Digital Archive, which launched today. Listen to one or more of these great recordings from the 1950s and write a response. Image: Cardigans and Coffee

Denise Levertov is just one of the poets whose work you can hear on the Poetry Center Digital Archive, which launched today.

Listen to one or more of these great recordings from the 1950s and write a response.


Image: Cardigans and Coffee

As a librarian who has worked with historic collections, dust has been a feature in my working life and finds its way into my poems quite regularly. I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic or sudden as this, though - building work in the basement of UCL’s Grant Museum threw up clouds of plaster dust at the beginning of the month. Marcel Duchamp was also inspired by dust and its strange qualities. Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding shows part of Duchamp’s process in making his Large Glass - dust was allowed to lie on the glass for over a year, before Duchamp wiped it mostly clean, but fixed some to the cones that formed part of the work. And ultimately, of course, dust is composed of little bits of us - of our dead skin cells, hair, other dry detritus - a little, though not exactly, like the tumble dryer lint in Gabriel Orozco’s Lintels. For tomorrow’s prompt, either write a poem incorporating dust of some kind, or incorporating something random that features in your daily professional life. Image: Mark Carnall

As a librarian who has worked with historic collections, dust has been a feature in my working life and finds its way into my poems quite regularly.

I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic or sudden as this, though - building work in the basement of UCL’s Grant Museum threw up clouds of plaster dust at the beginning of the month.

Marcel Duchamp was also inspired by dust and its strange qualities. Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding shows part of Duchamp’s process in making his Large Glass - dust was allowed to lie on the glass for over a year, before Duchamp wiped it mostly clean, but fixed some to the cones that formed part of the work.

And ultimately, of course, dust is composed of little bits of us - of our dead skin cells, hair, other dry detritus - a little, though not exactly, like the tumble dryer lint in Gabriel Orozco’s Lintels.

For tomorrow’s prompt, either write a poem incorporating dust of some kind, or incorporating something random that features in your daily professional life.

Image: Mark Carnall

I was really interested in the story behind this year’s National Poetry Month poster by artist Stephen Doyle. Tomorrow’s prompt is simple: write in response to the image, or to Doyle’s questions in his description of the work, or simply to Elizabeth Bishop’s oddly wonderful and wonderfully odd poem, ‘A Word With You’

I was really interested in the story behind this year’s National Poetry Month poster by artist Stephen Doyle.

Tomorrow’s prompt is simple: write in response to the image, or to Doyle’s questions in his description of the work, or simply to Elizabeth Bishop’s oddly wonderful and wonderfully odd poem, ‘A Word With You’

e. e. cummings' erotic drawings

Only three days into the 30/30 challenge, and already I’m behind! 

Eva Aldea sent us the link to this gallery of e. e. cummings’ erotic poetry and drawings to prompt us to write our own. 

Hopefully tomorrow …

It’s the start of this year’s 30/30 poetry challenges, and April Fool’s Day.

Write a poem based on one of the Museum of Hoaxes’ Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time, but written as if the hoax were really true. What would the (your) world be like if it really did contain flying penguins, UFOs in London or the washing of Lions at the Tower of London. Or even spaghetti growing on trees. 

Slightly late posting my prompt for the 30/30 challenge, so it’s a simple one - just a time and location: “In the library at night …” Image: A night at the library by svenwerk (Copyright Commons: some rights reserved)

Slightly late posting my prompt for the 30/30 challenge, so it’s a simple one - just a time and location:

“In the library at night …”

Image: A night at the library by svenwerk (Copyright Commons: some rights reserved)

At a recent poetry tutorial, the tutor told me that I was fortunate to have a specialist vocabulary from my day job (as a librarian / library academic) to inform my poetry, and this got me thinking about specialisms and how they can add something exotic to writing.

Today I received an email from the “Knitting Club” at work, and that reminded me of the hours I used to spend poring over patterns with my mother and grandmother as a child. I was particularly absorbed by my mother’s knitting machine (a more modern and versatile model than the one in the video) and have already referenced winding wool for my Grannie in the Tate’s online anthology.

Winchester School of Art holds the Richard Rutt Collection of books used in his ‘History of hand knitting’. Some of his nineteenth century books are available on the library website. Browse through them to get a feel for the language of knitting, or, if you’re a complete novice, watch this video from cyberseams on the basics.

Three choices of prompts:

* Write a poem about knitting, using the vocabulary of these and other sources

* Write about clothing yourself, whether through handicrafts or shopping

* Write a pattern poem using your own specialist language. A pattern poem is like a recipe poem, except that in the end you have a product. So I might write a pattern for making a book, or a library, or a website, and a plumber might write a pattern for a kitchen sink.

Or, of course, respond to any of the images and digital resources in your own way.

Today’s prompt is my last one for June’s 30/30 challenge. It’s based on activities from the workshops at the WLM@40 conference and the Feminism in London Midsummer Feminist Party. The images here, from a range of real-world and online library collections, show corsets, which were used “to help the girl grow as she should grow” (from the advert for Martha Washington Missees’ Corset Waist for Girls, bottom left). However, in order to create the tiny waist, the body rearranged its internal organs, as illustrated in the image on the bottom right. One of the causes behind the trope of the quick-to-faint ladies in Victorian literature is the very real lack of lung capacity caused by the cramped chest area caused by corsets. Nowadays, corsets are often worn as sexy underwear and can be fetish items of great beauty (mages in the centre). This shaping and control of the female body is the root of the urge of 1970s feminists to burn their bra. Our complex relationship with our undergarments led Brenda Jiménez to carry out her art project ‘A bra does not make the woman’ in Mexico. She photographed young women wearing their bras over their tops and asked them to speak about what it meant to them. She later posted the project to the International Museum of Women’s Imaining Ourselves online exhibition. Todays prompt is to look at the images here and at Jiminéz’s work and to think about the question: How do our clothes shape us and how do we shape our clothes?

Today’s prompt is my last one for June’s 30/30 challenge. It’s based on activities from the workshops at the WLM@40 conference and the Feminism in London Midsummer Feminist Party.

The images here, from a range of real-world and online library collections, show corsets, which were used “to help the girl grow as she should grow” (from the advert for Martha Washington Missees’ Corset Waist for Girls, bottom left). However, in order to create the tiny waist, the body rearranged its internal organs, as illustrated in the image on the bottom right. One of the causes behind the trope of the quick-to-faint ladies in Victorian literature is the very real lack of lung capacity caused by the cramped chest area caused by corsets. Nowadays, corsets are often worn as sexy underwear and can be fetish items of great beauty (mages in the centre).

This shaping and control of the female body is the root of the urge of 1970s feminists to burn their bra. Our complex relationship with our undergarments led Brenda Jiménez to carry out her art project ‘A bra does not make the woman’ in Mexico. She photographed young women wearing their bras over their tops and asked them to speak about what it meant to them. She later posted the project to the International Museum of Women’s Imaining Ourselves online exhibition.

Todays prompt is to look at the images here and at Jiminéz’s work and to think about the question:

How do our clothes shape us and how do we shape our clothes?

e. e. cummings' erotic drawings

About:

Writing exercises and prompts based on special collections and their websites.

Originally conceived as a workshop for Essex Poetry Festival 2008.

More background info here.

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