The Poetic Process

This year’s meetings were brought to a close with a wonderful poetry-writing workshop on Monday 9th June, led by Katy Price.

Katy introduced the session by commenting how she would have liked to have discovered more about the collaborative process behind Crawford’s Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science: how such works as Kinloch’s ‘The Organ Bath’ were crafted and drafted, unseating scientific vocabulary and ideas and making them do poetic work; becoming self-reflective as language was recruited to perform scientific functions. Attention to the activity of writing (and rewriting) poetry, she pointed out, also parallels the increased emphasis on communicating scientific methods, processes, and practices to wider audiences, as well as detailing experimental findings. She discusses this in more detail in her review of the volume for the BSLS website.

The workshop then gave us the chance to experience one particular poetic process ourselves, writing ‘found poetry’ from field guides and reference works. It was based on a similar seminar given by David Morley at the Poetry School in March 2007. Our chosen structure was syllabics: for inspiration in this relaxed form of verse, something of a half-way house between metre and free verse, we listened to Thom Gunn’s ‘Considering the Snail’. Diving into an eclectic range of texts, we tackled subjects including pig disease and microscopy, astrophysics and chordate evolution, birds and badgers, ending up with a wide range of styles, lengths, and approaches. Some examples of what we managed to ‘find’ in just over an hour’s searching should be appearing on the blog soon.