‘Yesterday All the Past’: A Digital Poetry Retreat on Writing the Past, with guest reading by Glyn Maxwell
The past is everything that’s happened up until now so, as a subject for poetry, it offers plenty of things to pick from. During this workshop week, we’ll look at a wide range of things that the past can offer our poetry.
We’ll begin with the personal, thinking about how memories of family, school, work or coming of age, for example, can offer a way into poems. What stories do your parents tell, about their life before you were born? What memories do you have of childhood? What characters did you come across in education or work, and how can you transform all this material into moving poems?
From here, we’ll work our way into more public pasts. History is such a rich subject, and there are so many ways into it. We’ll consider the monologue as a way of inhabiting historical characters, using pen and paper to travel to any time you like, from the time of Henry VIII to 1960s swinging London. We’ll also think about adaptations and updates of pre-existing stories, the way that classic texts can offer a structure for a poem as well as a rich vehicle for exploring how times have changed.
The past is also, of course, a great way into the local and the political, allowing us to explore class consciousness and deepen our knowledge of our local area. What was life like for the people who live where we live? What precious stories are waiting for us in the streets around our homes? And what conflicts and struggles can we tap into? Whether you want to address the Miners’ Strike, some local struggle for emancipation, or times when you’ve felt history brushing the back of your neck, we’ll consider a range of ways into the public past.
If our school notions of history might be tied up with Tudor rulers, our passions in history might concern Marilyn Monroe or John Lennon. The lives of pop culture figures are wonderfully rich, full of mystery and extravagance and spaces for us to imagine poems into. These are lives that are great subjects in themselves and which might also create extra layers for personal poems. Like all parts of history, there are as many opinions on the lives of pop culture heroes as there are people to think them, and one thing we’ll think about is the possibility of getting several different versions of a historical event or episode into a poem.
Lastly, of course, the past is not just the past: it’s with us today, and bound up with notions of our future. We’ll think about how present and past can interact in a poem, and how exciting gear changes can happen in the movement from one to the other. How can a poem hop and skip between times? How can a figure from the past step through the door and into the room we’re sitting in? And how can the knowledge of what was open up the poem as a space to imagine what could be?
During the course, we’ll draw inspiration from a rich variety of writers, such as Nick Laird, Patience Agbabi, Helen Mort, Kim Addonizio, Chen Chen and Amy Acre. Our subject for the week will be nothing less than everything that’s ever happened, but in addressing this, we’ll be looking to create innovative and brand new work to dazzle the poetry publication spaces that are out there, writing poems with a rich future. Join us for a glorious writing week!