Poetry News - Launch of I-spy and Shanty

Super exciting week coming up.

I am launching my new book at Culture Rapide on Thursday 27 February at 20h.

All details here.

Paris Lit Up Writing Workshops - January 2014 - News

My next making workshop is on Sunday 5 January in the library at Shakespeare and Company as usual at 12h30h.

and NEW for 2014 starting on Saturday 11 January at the Cafe Apparement at 16h is a two hour weekly feedback workshop hosted by either Jason Francis Mc Gimsey, Paul Stephenson or me.

Do think about coming to one or other or both of these to kick start your writing year.

Writing Workshop

My next Paris Lit Up writing workshop is at Shakespeare and Company on Sunday 1 December at 12h30. The theme is THE DARK. Details here

Paris Lit Up - Magazine launch

It was stupendous, wonderful and fanastic! Our launch party ripped and roared its way into the Paris night. Details here and please, please, please, if you are in Paris, buy a copy of the magazine and if you are not please, please, please buy an ebook copy.

Thank you for supporting all our literary adventures.

PLU Writing Workshop

My next workshop will be: 'NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS.'

Explore William Carlos Williams' famous dictat with me and find new ways to make poems, prose, flash fiction, texts from and into Objects and Memories. 

Please bring with you one object of any kind that is particularly precious, but not necessarily in the monetary sense. Details of location, time, cost etc. here.

Writing Workshop - October

Plenty, Plenty, Plenty, the harvest in all its forms is the theme for my next writing workshop.

Come and see how much new work and ideas for poems, flash fiction and short prose pieces you can make on working the land and bringing the countryside into town. 

Gather sheaves of paper and other writing equipment and join the fun in the library at Shakespeare & Company on Sunday 6 October at 12h30. Details here. 

Suggested donation 10 euros to much needed Paris Lit Up funds.

Writing Workshop News - 1 September

The first Paris Lit Up Writing Workshop of the new year will be on 1 September at 12h30 in the library at Shakespeare and Company. Come and join me for a two hour session creating new ideas and work for poems, flash fiction and short prose pieces.

The theme is Taking Another Word for a Walk, Challenge yourself to see just how much you can do with one little word. I dare you!

Donation 10 euros to Paris Lit Up's much needed funds. See you there then.

Paris Lit Up - End of Year One

Well it's been an absolute roller coaster of our first Paris Lit Up year, in which I have learned so much. More things than I could possibly have imagined about working with a group of disparate and marvellous people, taking photographs of poets who don't stand still, writing reviews of wonderful literary events, co-editing a fabulous magazine, running and preparing writing workshops, co-organizing and co-hosting a popular and exciting weekly Open Mic and so on.

At times it's been almost like a full time job, or has at least taken up every spare thinking moment. There is always something to do and I have had to make myself stop, reflect and find time to enjoy everything and everyone we have been working with.

I am really looking forward to all the great things we have planned for year two. More of those anon. Watch this space or rather the various PLU spaces (see below). But there's a magazine to launch, more workshops to plan and whole host of lovely Open Mic guests for your entertainment. The autumn is going to be packed. No sitting about thinking about writing. Speaking of which, it's a miracle that I have managed to get any of that done at all, but I have!

Visit the website, friend us on facebook, follow us on twitter. Open Mic is running right through the summer.  Enjoy! and THANK YOU to everyone who has come to an event, helped in anyway, or otherwise encouraged us to keep on lighting up the city.

Poetry Workshops - News

My next Paris Lit Up writing workshop is on Sunday 2 June in the library at Shakespeare and Company when we will be Taking a Word for a Walk. Come and see what you can create from just one word.

On Sunday 7 June I will be leading a workshop at the Reading Poetry Festival in the UK from 10am-12pm at the Museum of English Rural Life.

Ekphrasis with Sylvia Plath

This month's close read takes on Plath's poem The Disquieting Muses*. If you are interested in making art from art, as Plath does here, come to my next Paris Lit Up writing workshop on 7 April at 12h30 in the library at Shakespeare and Company. If you can't wait until then, there is a writing prompt for you to try at the end of this post.

Plath uses the idea of and rewrites the Sleeping Beauty fairytale in this poem addressed to her mother. Instead of asking why the wicked fairy was not invited to her christening she wants to know which family member was not invited and chose to send 'three ladies in her stead/with heads like darning needles'. The second stanza expands this imagery into other children's stories and fairytales with its reference to Hanzel and Gretel, to ask whether her mother's words from these sources dispelled the ladies 'nodding at night around my bed'.

The ladies represent the ultimate childhood nightmare for Plath. As she says idiomatically in the third stanza, they even broke her father's study window panes where a hurricane did not and in the fourth and fifth stanza prevented her from enjoying the delights of childhood like dancing, 'singing the glowworm song' and playing the piano. The nightmare continues into adulthood as the muses are the travelling companions she must face as they 'stand their vigil in gowns of stone/Faces as blank as the day I was born/Their shadows long in the setting sun'.

Plath continues to lay the finger of blame for her state of mind, and here we might read-in some biography and her depressive episodes, on her mother. The repetition of the words mother, mother lays emphasis on this at the opening of the poem, in the final stanza and at several places in between.

The poem ends with a puzzle that she will not betray the company of the muses. What does this mean? That they are far from nightmare and by now familiar comfort, artistic guides even, or that to oppose her mother she must alley herself with what terrifies herself most? Perhaps both. This poem is often read as the young woman wrestling older female figures who are trying to smother her**, but I think this is a simplifcation.

Of course, all of this is without even knowing that Plath had in mind a particular painting, executed during World War I by Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio di Chirico, when she wrote this. Once you see the painting (left), the description of the figures and their precise position around the crib is apparent, and somehow for me less nightmarish. Unfortunately, now you know this, you can never read the poem in isolation, as you are almost bound to want to navigate between the two to see which elements Plath used and which she ignored.

That is an added dimension to the game of ekphrasis and specifically what is crucial for the writer, I now think, is to be skilled enough to make a completely self-contained poem that does not need to be informed by knowledge of its source. Often I find it tedious to have such imposed on me as reader, as it requires work on my part to go elsewhere (and I am inherently lazy), instead of just enjoying the poem, although guilty as charged on previous occasions!

And now for the writing...Find yourself a scary painting. There are plenty to choose from (Bosch, Fuseli, Munch come readily to mind). Use its images as description for something scary from your childhood. It does not have to be a gothic nightmare, just something that frightened you (and perhaps still does). Just remember to cut it loose from its moorings and don't make the piece dependent on knowing the painting, avoid references to the actual artist, although you might want to throw the reader a clue, as Plath does, in the title or in one of the lines. Have fun. Boo!

 * The poem can be found in the Faber Collected Plath (1982) pg. 74
** See Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008) pg.42 and further cites. 

Into the Light with Sylvia Plath

To shed some light on another of Sylvia Plath's poems in advance of my next Paris Lit Up Writing Workshop on 3 March in the library at Shakespeare and Company and set you a writing challenge, I'm going to take a close look at Sylvia Plath's 1962 poem By Candlelight. Ostensively a poem about waking in the night to tend to and feed a crying baby: 'Balled hedgehog./Small and cross', the poem has various points of light, to adopt a painterly term, before settling in praise of the particular candlestick as totem/guardian of the child. Let me elaborate.

Addressing the child ('small love'), the poem starts in a country night with a delightful image of it 'steeled with the sheen/Of what green stars can make it to our gate.' The stars are the first point of light and they are strange, being green. The next point of light is the mirror (a constant Plath object, as noted in my first two posts - scroll down for more), which floats mother and child 'at one candle power'. A mirror is the place where they meet each other. A candle third point) has a quasi-religious significance as a 'haloey radiance' and blows their shadows on the wall of the room making them 'violent giants'. Yet its light is barely there at all to start with as it is almost snuffed out.

The third and final stanza of the poem focuses on the candle : 'the light/ that keeps the sky at bay' and the bent man candlestick 'the little brassy Atlas' and its 'five brass cannonballs', which for the child represent protection, solidity and certainty in an insecure world :'to juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.' In this way, light banishes darkness in the poem, literally and metaphorically.

And now for the writing challenge: something wakes you in the night, what? focus on sounds in the dark inside and outside the house; then introduce one light source, then another, focus on how they effect you and what they do to the room; what happens next?; use the present tense and choose a title that doesn't have the words light or night in it. Enjoy and good luck!

The poem can be found on pg. 236 of the Faber Collected Plath (1981).

Paris Lit Up - Open Mic

A bright, shiny, new Open Mic night will start in Paris on 21 February - details here - you'd be mad to miss it

Writing Workshop - Journeys - with Sylvia Plath

My next Writing Workshop for Paris Lit Up is next Sunday, 3 February, at 12h30 in the Library at Shakespeare and Company. The theme is Journeys. Ahead of that, let's take a look at one of Sylvia Plath's poems and here's a suggestion to write something in response.

In Ariel, Plath's poem Totem, is a journey of a less literal kind. Deceptively it starts on a railway line running through countryside, but from the beginning this life metaphor is unstintingly visceral and threatening: 'The engine is eating the track' and 'the farmers like pigs....(have) blood on their minds'. Indeed the poem is soaked in the red stuff from 'the butcher's gullotine' and the aborted hare to Plato's afterbirth, Christ blood and so on: 'the world is blood-hot and personal'. She returns to the travel imagery towards the end of the poem:

'There is no terminus, only suitcases

Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit
Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors.'

Mirrors again - a Plath trope. It's a frighteningly uncompromising vision of life's journey and the tied nature of existence:

 '...blue children
In nets of the infinite,

Roped in at the end by the one
Death with its many sticks' 

culminating with death in its last line.

Me and the girls, Bryce Canyon, Utah, 2003.

Here's the writing challenge: think of a mode of transport (there are plenty to choose from Shank's pony to parachutes, sailing ships to skateboards, and bicycles to balloons) that represents or could represent your life journey and use its imagery and specialist vocabulary to say something(s) about either your life so far, the life you plan to have in the future, or the life you wish you'd had in the first place. Enjoy and Good Luck.

Paris Lit Up Writing Workshop

The first workshop of 2013 will be on 6 January at 12h30 until 14h30 in the library at Shakespeare and Company. The theme is THE CITY and there will be lots of writing prompts and suggested exercises for writing about cities and their contested spaces. See you there!

More information here: http://parislitup.com/ai1ec_event/paris-lit-up-writing-workshop/?instance_id=165

Paris Lit Up Writing Workshop

A drop-in workshop led by Kate Noakes on the first Sunday of every month at 12h30 - 14h30 in the Library at Shakespeare and Company. It is open to everyone, beginner to prize winner, and is designed to get you writing prose and poetry. Kate provides ideas and writing prompts on a theme each month. It is not a feedback workshop.

The first workshop for 2013 will be on 6 January.

Kate has an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan, has published three books of poetry and has taught creative writing for Oxford University. She is presently working on a novel.  The workshop cost is 10 Euros. All you need to do is bring is writing equipment and something to lean on.

parislitup.com

Paris Lit Up

New community site for all things literary in the anglophone scene in Paris: events, readings, publications, workshops, reportage and so on. Please visit parislitup.com regularly