Here’s wishing everyone a Happy World Poetry Day for 2021. Here’s some background information from UNESCO as to why World Poetry Day is more important than it might appear: Held every year on 21 March, World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms… Read more
Every month (or nearly every month) I work in a generative space that asks us to make seven poems for seven days starting on the seventh of each month (it’s called ‘sevens’). For March, I experimented with erasure poetry. I really admire some of the… Read more
Julian’s work combines the lyrical and political. Ambiguous, imagistic, it encourages us to see the world differently, encouraging multiple understandings and different readings. Here, he reads and discusses his poem, Home to the Hebrides, which was published in Ink, Sweat and Tears in June 2020.… Read more
Matthew’s work is evocative and sincere without being sentimental. His poetry frequently uses landscape as a means to explore ideas and intersections of time, space and human stories, using powerful imagery that takes the reader on a journey full of multiple transformations. On the blurb… Read more
I’m hugely pleased to have poetry published in Feral: a journal of poetry and art, this month. It’s a great journal, featuring work from a really diverse mixture of creative voices, each presenting different perspectives and windows into individual worlds. But there are intersections; a… Read more
Welcome to Tentative Zoetrope. This started out as a personal blog, a kind of reflective diary to help continue my own writing process. Now I’ve met some amazing and super-interesting writers, it is time to put this space to work and use it for poetry… Read more
Hello, and welcome to my website. I’m a collage artist and visual poet based in the UK. I’ve had my artwork and visual poetry featured in Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Waxwing Literary Journal, Thrush Poetry Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Sugar House Review, amongst others.… Read more
First, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in this brave and curious venture. Here’s our collaborative found poem made by putting together all the individual pieces.
The poems were absolutely lovely, and stood alone very nicely indeed (you can see them on the wakelet at the bottom of this post). This also means that it was difficult / impossible to try to put them together in ways that didn’t dilute the intriguing possibilities of the originals.
Particular kudos to Amanda for presenting a perfect line of iambic tetrameter. In non-technical terms that means four beats in the line, the stress (beat). Her poem reads: fast come that dead and somber fall (beats in bold).
Also kudos to everyone for the amazing visuals! They were all beautiful, but I particularly loved the torn out words from lighthouse creative therapy. The fonts and assemblage gave the found poem a kind of vintage/reflective feel.
I’m going to present three versions of collaborative poetry from our informal collective of #CreativeSummer20. You can read them below. One uses all our lines, but the others have more editing. I’ve added punctuation to two but left one closer in spirit to the original cut out words, using lower caps and spacing to suggest where pause-points might be.
Let me know which ones you prefer, and do come up with your own, too and if you post to twitter with the hashtag I’ll share here.
I’m excited to be volunteering for Creativity Works this week as part of their summer of creative wellbeing. There’s been some intriguing work posted (some of them with stunning visuals, too). Take part by watching the video and posting your text on twitter using the… Read more
