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The Girton Poetry Group

Not Averse

Archive of meeting dates, themes, forms

Easter term 2022:  18 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  ‘X’ // ‘orange’
  2. Form:  Concrete Poetry // Found/Blackout Poetry

Lent term 2022:  23 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Wait/weight
  2. Form:  Roundel

Lent term 2022:  16 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Seek
  2. Form:  Aubade

Lent term 2022:  31 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Hope
  2. Form:  Haiku / Tanka

Michaelmas term 2021:  22 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Home
  2. Form:  Ghazal
  3. Quotation:  ‘The ache for home lives in all of us.  The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.’  — Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
  4. Quotation:  ‘How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.’  — William C.  Faulkner
  5. Quotation:  ‘Every day's an endless stream / Of cigarettes and magazines / And each town looks the same to me / The movies and the factories / And every stranger's face I see / Reminds me that I long to be / Homeward bound.’  — Simon & Garfunkel ‘Homeward Bound’

Michaelmas term 2021:  8 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fall
  2. Form:  Ballad
  3. Quotation:  ‘If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.’ — unknown
  4. Quotation:  ‘Dance, dance / We're falling apart to half time.’  — Fall Out Boy, ‘Dance, Dance’
  5. Quotation:  ‘As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.’  — John Green, ‘The Fault in Our Stars’
  6. Quotation:  ‘What am I now?  What am I now?  / What if I’m someone I don’t want around?  / I’m falling again, I’m falling again, I'm falling.’  — Harry Styles, ‘Falling’

Michaelmas term 2021:  25 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Hold
  2. Form:  Free verse
  3. Quotation:  ‘I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father.  I would try to put my arms around my father’s waist, hug him back.  I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life.  Then one day, I could do it.  I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.’  — Jodi Picoult, Vanishing Acts
  4. Quotation:  ‘Who says you cannot hold the moon in your hand?  Tonight when the stars come out and the moon rises in the velvet sky, look outside your window, then raise your hand and position your fingers around the disk of light.  There you go .  .  .  That was easy!’  — Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
  5. Quotation:  ‘I need a hero / I’m holding out for a hero ’till the end of the night.’  — Bonnie Tyler, ‘Holding Out For A Hero’
  6. Quotation:  ‘Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you.’  — Beyoncé, ‘Hold Up’
  7. Quotation: ‘“[…] to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.’  — Protestant Wedding Vows

Easter term 2021:  23 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fruit
  2. Form:  Your choice — surprise me!!  But some suggestions if you would like them are tanka, sestina, blues, terza rima
  3. Quotation:  ‘The greengages had a pale blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet.’  — Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer
  4. Quotation:  ‘How many kinds of green are there?  Barto said. 7 main kinds altogether, I said.  And perhaps 20 to 30, maybe more, variations on each of these kinds.’  — Ali Smith, Autumn
  5. Quotation: ‘maybe you would have / been a tortoise and I would / be a raspberry.’  — Clint Smith, ‘Chaos Theory’
  6. Quotation:  ‘Hands, knees, please, tangerine, come on back to me / You got what I need, tangerine, do this for me / Hands, knees, please, tangerine, sugar, honey, sweet / Got what I need, tangerine.’  — Glass Animals, ‘Tangerine’
  7. Quotation: ‘the garden outside / yearning for access to the garden within.’  — George Szirtes, ‘Comical Roses in a Cubic Vase’
  8. Quotation:  ‘Are the trees high enough, baby?  / Leave you so high your feet won’t touch the ground / Would you look up, baby?  / It’s pineapple purple skies / Promise everything gon’ be alright.’  — Miguel, ‘Pineapple Skies’
  9. Quotation:  ‘A glass of papaya juice / and back to work.  My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.’  — Frank O’Hara, ‘A Step Away From Them’

Easter term 2021:  12 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Window
  2. Form:  Cascade
  3. Quotation: ‘they say that it's you who came cracked / came shattered right out the box / but they don't know that / this is just something you do // to show how many of you there are / that none of you are the same / that the more shards there are // the more ways there are / to refract this light / that envelops us each day.’  — Clint Smith, 'what the window said to the black boy'
  4. Quotation:  ‘She didn't notice me at first, as she looked out across the grounds.  But then, of course, she did.  She gave a start back from the window and disappeared from view.  I wondered if that would be the last I'd see of her but she soon returned, with that mother of hers at her side.  The two of them stared down at me, Ethel's delicate features and the crone's distorted into matching grotesque looks that showed as plain as day their horror at seeing me returned to them like this, so soon after sending me packing to the realms of the dead.  Fixing my gaze on her as steadily as I could manage while still treading water, I twisted my ragged mouth up into a grin, and then I raised a hand and waved.’  — Naomi Ishiguro, 'The Rat Catcher II:  The King'
  5. Quotation:  ‘I have often looked at our family through lighted windows and they seem quite different, a bit the way rooms seen in looking-glasses do.’  — Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
  6. Quotation:  ‘I dwell in Possibility – / A fairer House than Prose – / More numerous of Windows – / Superior – for Doors –’ — Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in possibility’
  7. Quotation:  ‘Someone has brought a torch into the garden below.  A dusky flicker fills the panes.  His shadow in the window raises a hand; he inclines his head to it.’  — Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light
  8. Microsoft Windows XP shutdown sound:  https://youtu.be/Gb2jGy76v0Y

Lent term 2021:  3 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Ritual
  2. Form:  Villanelle
  3. Quotation:  ‘We race along the cliff path.  Oliver called it the Terror Run because he is afraid of heights.  It is a bit scary in places but even Sophy can do it now.  It’s an institution.  We run by the light of the moon.’  — Mary Wesley, The Camomile Lawn
  4. Quotation:  ‘Now I construct / A new silence I hope to break.’  — W.S.  Graham, ‘Approaches to How They Behave’
  5. Quotation: ‘the interesting, cute, and zany index - and are thus each in a historically concrete way about - capitalism’s most socially binding processes: production, in the case of the zany (an aesthetic about performance as not just artful play but also affective labour); circulation, in the case of the interesting (a serial, recursive aesthetic of international relays and communicative exchange); and consumption, in the case of the cute (an aesthetic disclosing the surprisingly wide spectrum of feelings, ranging from tenderness to aggression, that we harbor toward ostensively subordinate and unthreatening commodities).’  — Sianne Ngai, ‘Our Aesthetic Categories’
  6. Quotation: ‘she looks out at the empty, auditory wilderness of the fan-shaped auditorium, modelled on the Greek amphitheatres that ensured everyone in the audience had an uninterrupted view of the action / over a thousand people will fill the seats this very evening / so many people gathered to see her production is quite unbelievable / the entire run almost sold out before a single review has been filed / how’s that for demand for something quite different?.’  — Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
  7. Quotation: ‘lyric discourse is defined by the dialectical play of ritual and fictional phenomena, or correlative modes of apprehension that are nearly always available in every lyric.’  — Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism
  8. Quotation:  ‘'When you put on the mask the thunder starts.  / Through the nostril’s orange you can smell / the far hope of rain.  Up in the Nilgiris, / glisten of eucalyptus, drip of pine, spiders tumbling/from their silver webs.  // The mask is raw and red as bark against your facebones.  / You finger the stripes ridged like weals / out of your childhood.  A wind is rising / in the north, a scarlet light / like a fire in the sky.’  — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, 'Tiger Mask Ritual'

Lent term 2021:  24 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Omens
  2. Form:  Ecopoem
  3. Quotation:  ‘The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.’  — Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
  4. Quotation:  ‘Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew / It was the spirit that we sought and knew / That we should ask this often as she sang.’  — Wallace Stevens, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’
  5. Quotation:  ‘The birds around me hopped and played, / Their thoughts I cannot measure — / But the least motion which they made / It seemed a thrill of pleasure // the budding twigs spread out their fan, / To catch the breezy air; / And I must think, do all I can / That there was pleasure there, // If this belief from heaven be sent / If such be Nature’s holy plan, / Have I not reason to lament / What man has made of man?.’  — William Wordsworth, Lines Written in Early Spring
  6. Quotation:  ‘And I had done a hellish thing, / And it would work ‘em woe :  / For all averred, I had killed the bird / That made the breeze to blow, / Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, / That made the breeze to blow!.’  — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  7. Quotation:  ‘One can imagine that, at the apex of the Flood, when the globe was a ball of water, came the day of divine relenting, when Noah’s wife must have opened the shutters upon a morning designed to reflect an enormous good nature.  We can imagine that the Deluge rippled and glistened, and that the clouds, under an altered dispensation, were purely ornamental.  True, the waters were full of people - we knew the story from our childhood.’  — Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
  8. Quotation: ‘now the rivers of the land of the dead / Will flow with my prophecies.’  — Aeschylus, Agamemnon
  9. Quotation:  ‘The angel of history wears all expressions at once.  / What will you do?  Look, his wings are aflame for you.’  — Agha Shahid Ali, ‘For You’

Lent term 2021:  10 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  The friend
  2. Form:  Sonnet
  3. Quotation:  ‘I did not live until this time / Crowned my felicity, / When I could say without a crime, / I am not thine, but thee.’  — Katherine Philips, ‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship’
  4. Quotation:  ‘I want to call your name, but the word dies in my throat.  Oh, my friend, my friend!’ — Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
  5. Quotation:  ‘Let's go to the corner store and buy some fruit / I’d do anything to get you out your room.’  — Arlo Parks, ‘Black Dog’
  6. Quotation:  ‘Poor unhappy things.  Much as I pitied and faintly despised them, they had the knack of making me feel I was lolling helplessly through an objectless, boring life.  I never wanted to see them, or listen to them, or even to eat any of the delightful food they produced from air, or sea, or garden.’  — Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
  7. Quotation:  ‘The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally.  It was not like one’s feeling for a man.  It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up.  It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally’s.’  — Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Michaelmas term 2020:  18 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Movement
  2. Form:  Duplex (Jericho Brown)
  3. Quotation:  ‘If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed, now / It's just a spring clean for the May queen / Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run / There's still time to change the road you're on.’  — Led Zeppelin, ‘Stairway to Heaven’
  4. Quotation:  ‘So I remember when we were driving / Driving in your car / Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk / City lights lay out before us / And your arms felt nice wrapped around my shoulder / And I—I had a feeling that I belonged / I—I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone.’  — Tracy Chapman, ‘Fast Car’
  5. Quotation:  ‘Your body's poetry, speak to me / Won't you let me be your rhythm tonight?.’  — Sia, ‘Move Your Body’
  6. Quotation:  ‘Across the street there is a house under construction, abandoned to the rain.  Secretly, I shall go work on it.’  — Frank O'Hara, ‘Cambridge’
  7. Quotation:  ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils; / Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.’  — William Wordsworth, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
  8. Quotation:  ‘Normally we didn't converse or chat or encourage words of exchange on our runs other than the functional "Will we pick up pace here, sister-in-law?" or "Will we add a bonus mile at the end, brother-in-law?" or other suchlike exercise expressions.’  — Anna Burns, Milkman

Michaelmas term 2020:  4 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Hallowe’en
  2. Form:  Ode
  3. Quotation:  ‘Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— / What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore / Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”’ — Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The Raven’
  4. Quotation:  ‘Thus I; faltering forward, / Leaves around me falling, / Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, / And the woman calling.’  — Thomas Hardy, ‘The Voice’
  5. Quotation:  ‘Again she wished for the baby ghost - its anger thrilling her now where it used to wear her out.  / Wear her out.’  — Toni Morrison, Beloved
  6. Quotation:  ‘Come on, come on, don't leave me like this / I thought I had you figured out / Can't breathe / whenever you're gone / Can't turn back now, I'm haunted.’  — Taylor Swift, ‘Haunted’
  7. Quotation:  ‘It's beyond everything.  Nothing at all that I know touches it.’  — Henry James, ‘The Turn of the Screw’

Michaelmas term 2020:  21 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Point
  2. Form:  Free verse
  3. Quotation:  ‘PRESENT, n.  [1.] That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.’  — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
  4. Quotation:  ‘I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation.  It is too long ago.  I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.’  — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  5. Quotation:  ‘When you can do nothing, what can you do?.’  — Koan
  6. Quotation:  ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’  — T.  S.  Eliot, Four Quartets
  7. Quotation:  ‘For Occupation – This – / The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise –.’  — Emily Dickinson, ‘I dwell in Possibility’
  8. Quotation:  ‘So little to say / So urgent / to say it.’  — Leonard Cohen, ‘My Career’
  9. Quotation:  ‘What everything in me wants to articulate / is this little bit of a scar that dates / from the time O’Clery, my school-room foe, / rammed his pencil into my exposed thigh […] with such force that the point was broken off.’  — Paul Muldoon, ‘The Point’

Easter term 2020:  19 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Puzzle/s
  2. Form:  Ghazal
  3. Quotations:  ‘And what song shall this fisherman / who loves a jaunty tune / sing to lullaby his children / when dark shapes in their room / make the night a snarling monster / only father's voice can soothe / and who will soothe the fisherman / who navigates the blue?’  — Kayo Chingonyi, ‘Fisherman's Song’
  4. ‘I too, was beginning to lose my power of reason, my ability to see obvious connections and to retain even the most elementary sense of how to survive in this place.’  — Anna Burns, Milkman
  5. ‘What is it that hath been? that that shall be: and what is it that hath been done? that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’  — 1599 Geneva Bible
  6. ‘Tell me, what is that fills the sky and the whole earth and tears up new shoots, and shakes all foundations, but cannot be seen by eyes or touched by hands?’  — Medieval riddle
  7. ‘It is far easier for ladies to cut a figure in dances which require a variety of intricate bodily movements than in certain other stately dances in which they merely have to walk with a natural step and display their native bearing and their usual graces.’  — Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Books’

Easter term 2020:  20 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Birthdays
  2. Form:  The Golden Shovel
  3. Quotations:  ‘The birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me.’  — Christina Rossetti, ‘A Birthday’
  4. ‘Inside was a wireless and a gramophone combined - oh, the most wonderful thing!  When shut, it is like a fat suitcase, with a handle to carry it by.  The outside is a lovely blue, like linen but shiny.  There was a record case to match.  Nobody ever had such a glorious present.’  - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
  5. ‘The marvel of ten years too much to keep.  / “What is this lovely world, and who am I?”’ — Marjorie Knapp, ‘Tenth Birthday’
  6. 'According to my birth certificate, I turn 30 this year.  It's weird because part of me still feels 18 and part of me feels 283, but the actual age I currently am is 29.  I've heard people say that your thirties are "the most fun!" So I'll definitely keep you posted on my findings on that when I know.  But until then, I thought I'd share some lessons I've learned before reaching 30, because it's 2019 and sharing is caring.' — Taylor Swift, '30 Things I Learned Before Turning 30'

Easter term 2020:  6 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Girton
  2. Quotations:  ‘'My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends - / It gives a lovely light!.’  — Edna St.  Vincent Millay, ‘Figs From Thistles:  First Fig’
  3. ‘You:  An Achilles’ apple / Blushing sweet on a high branch / At the tip of the tallest tree.’  — Sappho (trans.  Anita George), from ‘Fragment 105(a)’
  4. ‘Whirl up, sea - / whirl your pointed pines, / splash your great pines / on our rocks, / hurl your green over us, / cover us with your pools of fir.’  — H.D., ‘Oread’
  5. ‘The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.  An amusing book might be made of it if some young student at Girton or Newnham would collect examples and deduce a theory,--but she would need thick gloves on her hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold.’
  6. ‘Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.’  — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Lent term 2020:  4 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Lapse
  2. Form:  Ekphrasis
  3. Quotations:  ‘And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.’  — George Eliot, Middlemarch
  4. ‘Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows’ — Leonard Cohen
  5. ‘I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:  Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.’  — Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
  6. ‘Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.’  — Samuel Beckett
  7. Words: clag; torpid; puff

Lent term 2020:  19 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Crossings
  2. Form:  Sestina
  3. Quotations:  ‘The road is wide / but he is called / by something / that knows him / on the other side.’  — Ruth Moose, The Crossing
  4. ‘Oh will you excuse me / I’m just trying to find the bridge!  / Has anybody seen the bridge?  / Please!  / (Have you seen the bridge?) / I ain’t seen the bridge!  / (Where’s that confounded bridge?)’ — Led Zeppelin, ‘The Crunge’
  5. ‘'Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes:  / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.’  — William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Lent term 2020:  29 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Faff
  2. Form:  Sonnet
  3. Quotations:  ‘Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.’  — Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends
  4. ‘My goal was always / to be shiftless [...] I liked the idea of sitting in a chair in front of your house for hours, doing nothing / but wearing a hat and drinking cola.’  — Raymond Carver, ‘Shiftless’

Michaelmas term 2019:  27 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Anticipation
  2. Quotation:  ‘She stains the time past, lights the time to come.’  — John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
  3. Form:  Free verse

Michaelmas term 2019:  13 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Transience
  2. Quotation:  ‘I put this moment... here / I put this moment... here / I put this moment / Over here! / Over here!’ — Kate Bush, ‘Jig of Life’
  3. Form:  Ballad

Michaelmas term 2019:  30 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Beginnings
  2. Quotation:  ‘This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.’  — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
  3. Form:  Terza Rima

Easter term 2019:  19 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Passage
  2. Quotation:  ‘'Things start and things end, and / Isn't it lovely in theory, but / I could never be / I could never be / I could never be ready.’  — Rebecca Sugar, ‘Steven Universe’
  3. Form:  Ovillejo

Easter term 2019:  8 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Leviathan
  2. Quotation:  ‘It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you cannot stand in the middle of this; the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.’  — Marianne Moore
  3. Form:  Chantey

Lent term 2019:  6 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Anticipation
  2. Quotation:  ‘I’ve revealed my entrails and shown my guts, there’s nothing left within me to reveal.  I will say no more.’  — The Kangxi Emperor's Valedictory Edict, 1717
  3. Form:  Speculative poetry

Lent term 2019:  20 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Rise
  2. Quotation:  ‘When there were no depths, I was brought forth.’  — Proverbs 8:24
  3. Form:  Aubade

Lent term 2019:  30 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Distance
  2. Quotation:  ‘It is a most wonderful comfort to sit beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.’  — Kenkō
  3. Form:  Villanelle

Michaelmas term 2018:  21 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Revelry
  2. Form:  Heroic Couplet
  3. Quotation:  ‘The three boys do not notice the night.  Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die.  They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them.  The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this.  Perhaps they are right.’  — Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

Michaelmas term 2018:  7 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Alien
  2. Form:  Concrete poetry
  3. Quotation:  ‘I had a terror since September, I could tell to no one; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.’  — Emily Dickinson, 1862

Michaelmas term 2018:  17 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Rejuvenation
  2. Form:  Haiku
  3. Quotation:  ‘We have taken a new home, and we must exhaust the past before we can finish with the present.’  — Samuel Delaney

Easter term 2018:  2 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Bloom
  2. Form:  List/catalogue poem
  3. Quotation:  ‘Grey mists lie where our bright sails flew.’  — Ian Hamilton Finlay, The End

Lent term 2018:  7 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Mystery / Mist-ery
  2. Form:  Ghazal
  3. Quotation:  ‘No.  Try not.  Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.’  — Star Wars Episode V:  The Empire Strikes Back

Lent term 2018:  21 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fancy (verb, adjective, noun, take your pick)
  2. Form:  Rhyming couplets
  3. Quotation:  ‘And he flew out of the window on his cooking ladle.’  — Grimms' Fairy Tales.

Lent term 2018:  7 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Shatter
  2. Form:  Lai
  3. Quotation:  ‘Alternative facts are not facts.  They are falsehoods.’  — Chuck Todd

Michaelmas term 2017:  8 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Ritual
  2. Form:  Meredithian sonnet
  3. Quotation:  ‘I, like a river/Have been turned aside by this harsh age.’  — Northern Elegies, Anna Akhmatova

Michaelmas term 2017:  25 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  The city
  2. Form:  Concrete poetry
  3. Quotation:  ‘Spending warm summer days indoors…’  — Ask — The Smiths, 1986

Michaelmas term 2017:  11 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Apocalypse

Easter term 2017:  14 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fairytales
  2. Form:  Aubade
  3. Quotation:  ‘'This is the end.’  — The Doors

Easter term 2017:  17 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Machines
  2. Form:  Prose poem
  3. Quotation:  ‘Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.’  — Douglas Adams

Easter term 2017:  3 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Dance
  2. Form:  Ballad
  3. Quotation:  ‘Misbehave more beautifully, more often.’  — Wayne McGregor

Lent term 2017:  8 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Lenses
  2. Form:  Sonnet
  3. Quotation:  ‘Lyra’s Oxford and Will’s would lie over each other again, like transparent images on two sheets of film being moved closer and closer until they merged - although they would never truly touch.’  — ‘The Amber Spyglass’, Philip Pullman

Lent term 2017:  15 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Mirrors
  2. Form:  Luc Bat
  3. Quotation:  ‘Everything looks perfect from far away / ‘Come down now’, but we’ll stay.’  — The Postal Service, ‘Such Great Heights’ (covered beautifully by Iron & Wine...)

Lent term 2017:  1 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Maps
  2. Form:  Ode
  3. Quotation:  ‘Why do you write like you're running out of time?.’  — ‘Non-Stop’, from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical ‘Hamilton’

Michaelmas term 2016:  23 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Space
  2. Form:  Rondeau
  3. Quotation:  ‘There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.’  — Leonard Cohen 1934-2016

Michaelmas term 2016:  2 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Ghosts
  2. Form:  Dramatic monologue
  3. Quotation:  ‘I threw creation to my king / With the silence broken by a whispered wind.’  — ‘Devil’s Spoke’, Laura Marling

Michaelmas term 2016:  19 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Orchards
  2. Form:  Haiku
  3. Quotation:  ‘Go then, there are other worlds than these.’  — Stephen King

Easter term 2016:  15 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme: the elements
  2. Form:  Tritina

Easter term 2016:  27 April

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Phone Calls
  2. Form:  Septilla
  3. Quotation:  ‘There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.’  — F.  Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Lent term 2016:  2 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fairytales
  2. Theme 2:  Easter
  3. Form:  Villanelle (some of the best examples are ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, ‘One Art’, ‘Milkweed and Monarch’, ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, and Empson’s ‘Villanelle’ and ‘Missing Dates’)
  4. Quotation:  ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.’  — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Lent term 2016:  10 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Paint
  2. Form:  Nonsense verse
  3. Quotation:  ‘You wrote your number on my hand / But it came off in the rain.’  — ‘Young Love’ by Mystery Jets and Laura Marling

Lent term 2016:  20 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Navigation
  2. Form:  Sonnet
  3. Quotation:  “I’m not any good at pottery / So let’s lose a ‘t’ and just shift back the ‘e’ / And I’ll find a way to make my poetry / Build a roof over our heads.”  — Billy Bragg

Michaelmas term 2015:  25 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Museums
  2. Form:  Heptameter
  3. Quotation:  ‘'What is that you express in your eyes?  It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.’  — Walt Whitman

Michaelmas term 2015:  4 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fire
  2. Form:  Pantoum
  3. Quotation:  Any line (or lines) from November Song — Stornoway

Michaelmas term 2015:  14 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Trains
  2. Form:  Kyrielle
  3. Quotation:  ‘It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.’  — Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness

Lent term 2015:  4 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Hibernation
  2. Form:  Prose-poetry
  3. Quotation:  ‘But the wild things cried, “Oh please don't go - we'll eat you up - we love you so!”  And Max said, “No!”  The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye.’  — Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

Lent term 2015:  11 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  The Scientist
  2. Form:  Rictameter
  3. Quotation:  ‘And the rest is rust and stardust.’  — V.  Nabokov

Lent term 2015:  28 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Siblings
  2. Form:  Sapphic stanza
  3. Quotation:  ‘You alone are enough.’  — Maya Angelou

Michaelmas term 2014:  26 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Candles
  2. Form:  the Double-Dactyl.
  3. Quotation:  ‘Would you believe in what you believe if you were the only one who believed it?’  — Kanye West.

Michaelmas term 2014:  5 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fight!
  2. Form:  An age old classic neglected by poetry group:  The Sonnet.
  3. Quotation:  ‘The sad truth is that evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.’  — Hannah Arendt

Michaelmas term 2014:  22 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Music
  2. Form:  the Kyrielle
  3. Quotation:  ‘In nature there are few sharp lines.’  — A.  R.  Ammons

Easter term 2014:  12 June

Prompts:

  1. Form:  ‘Fib’ or ‘Fibonacci poem’ :  Fib is an experimental Western poetry form, bearing similarities to haiku, but based on the Fibonacci sequence.  That is, the typical fib and one version of the contemporary Western haiku both follow a strict structure.  The typical fib is a six line, 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8 - with as many syllables per line as the line's corresponding place in the Fibonacci sequence.
  2. Form:  ‘Palindrome poem’: a poem that reads the same running forward as running backward

Easter term 2014:  30 April

Prompts:

  1. Form: any form you've always wanted to try but haven't been brave enough to!
  2. Theme: lost and found
  3. Quotation:  ‘The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster…’  — ‘One Art’, Elizabeth Bishop

Lent term 2014:  5 March

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Parties and celebrations
  2. Quotation:  ‘Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented.’  — Shakespeare, Richard II, Act V Sc.  5
  3. Form:  Ghazal
  4. Bonus theme:  Hermit crabs

Lent term 2014:  19 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Romance
  2. Theme:  The Sea
  3. Form:  Dramatic verse

Lent term 2014:  29 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  New beginnings
  2. Form:  Vers libre
  3. Theme:  Cryptography or Mystery

Michaelmas term 2013:  27 November

Prompts:

  1. Form:  Pantoum
  2. Theme and quotation:  Painting — ‘I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.’  — Frida Kahlo
  3. Poems for inspiration: [little tree] by e.e. cummings; The Muppet Christmas Carol

Michaelmas term 2013:  13 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme: mirrors
  2. Form: cento - a poem composed of bits taken from other authors, in a new form or order.  Poetic plagiarism?
  3. Quotation:  ‘I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz.  I need a howl; a cry.  When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words.’  — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Michaelmas term 2013:  30 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme: leaves
  2. Form:  Terza rima
  3. Quotation:  ‘When I remember it, I think of it as dancing.  Dancing with eyes half closed because to open them would break the spell.  Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this worldless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with otherness.  Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements.  Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.’  — Brial Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa.

Easter term 2013:  8 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Photography
  2. Form:  Clerihew
  3. Quotation:  ‘Be always drunken.  / Nothing else matters:  / ...’  — 'Paris Spleen', Charles Baudelaire

Lent term 2013:  6 March

Prompts:

  1. Learning/Discovery
  2. Easter/Ostara
  3. Inspiration:  ‘Anything but iambic’.  Write in a metre you might not usually write in!
  4. Form:  Elegy - a mournful or plaintive poem, a lament.

Lent term 2013:  13 February

Prompts:

  1. Form:  Dramatic Monologue
  2. Risk OR Cliché
  3. ‘I hold it true, whate’er befall; / I feel it, when I sorrow most; / ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’  — Alfred Tennyson
  4. ‘'It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.’  — Richard Dawkins

Lent term 2013:  30 January

Prompts:

  1. Nocturne-inspired by or evocative of the night.
  2. Form:  Roundel
  3. ‘…everything in the rubbish-heaped world / Is a bridesmaid at her miracle.  / Dunghills and crumbly dark old barns are bowed in the chapel of her sparkle.  / The gruesome boggy cellars of the wood / Are a wedding of lace / Now taking place.’  — Ted Hughes, ‘Snow and Snow’

Michaelmas term 2012:  14 November

Prompts:

  1. Witnessing — ‘I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus, / Underneath the mistletoe last night.’
  2. ‘If ifs, ands and buts were sweets and nuts, we'd all have a wonderful Christmas.’
  3. ‘Form is content-as-arranged; content is form-as-deployed.’  — Helen Vendler

Michaelmas term 2012:  24 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Sculpture (or indeed sculpting)
  2. Theme:  Magnets
  3. Form:  Prose Poem
  4. Quotation:  ‘A gutter of poetry flowed outside the yard, Making me think I was a bird of prose; For overhead, bagged in a golden cloud, There hung the fatted souls of animals, Wile at my eyes bright dots of butterflies Turned off and on like distant neon signs.’  — Karl Shapiro, ‘A Garden in Chicago’

Michaelmas term 2012:  10 October

Prompts:

  1. Form:  An Ode ‘An elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lengthy ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity, always serious and elevated in tone.’ (apparently)
  2. Theme:  Wealth ‘A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.’  — Jane Austen, ‘Mansfield Park’
  3. Theme:  Renewal/Decay:  ‘Something is in the line and air along edges, which is in woods when the leaf changes and in the leaf-pattern's gives and gauges.’  — Alice Oswald, ‘Mountains’

Easter term 2012:  13 June

Prompts:

  1. The Roundel
  2. The Sea
  3. Irish Proverb:  'Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir' - Time is a good storyteller
  4. Freedom

Easter term 2012:  9 May

Prompts:

  1. Trains / Train stations and/or Patience
  2. ‘Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.’  — Mary Frances Fisher, US gastronome and writer
  3. Form:  Sestina (examples include Ian Patterson's 'Sestina' as one that uses as line endings words that have several meanings, and Seamus Heaney's 'Two Lorries' where the line endings are words with, in principle at least, only one meaning)

Lent term 2012:  7 March

Prompts:

  1. ‘I see myself as a fish in the stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream’ — Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’
  2. Petrarchan sonnet: having an octave rhyming abbaabba, and a sestet rhyming cdecde (or variant thereof)
  3. Astrology (and maybe astronomy, too)
  4. Free verse.  It might also be interesting to think about this quotation from Auden’s ‘The Dyer’s Hand’:  ‘The difference between formal and free verse may be likened to the difference between carving and modelling; the formal poet, that is to say, thinks of the poem he is writing as something already latent in the language which he has to reveal, while the free-verse poet thinks of language as a plastic passive medium upon which he imposes his artistic conception.’

Lent term 2012:  15 February

Prompts:

  1. ‘The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.  Language is fossil poetry’ — Emerson, ‘The Poet’
  2. ‘The busy bee has no time for sorrow’ — Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’
  3. Translation (for any budding linguists in our midst)
  4. The hilariously-named 'Nonnet' (see here for details)

Lent term 2012:  1 February

Prompts:

  1. Collage - ‘A term adopted from the vocabulary of painters to denote a work which contains a mixture of allusions, references, quotations, and foreign expressions’.  See particularly sections of David Jones’s Anathemata, or Eliot’s The Wasteland
  2. ‘The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic’ — Charles Darwin
  3. ‘Scansion’, from the Latin ‘scandere’, ‘to climb’
  4. Form:  Villanelle

Michaelmas term 2011:  23 November

Prompts:

  1. ‘Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’  — Stephen Fry
  2. Narrative poetry - tell us a story!
  3. ‘Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!’  — Charles Dickens
  4. Form:  Haiku

Michaelmas term 2011:  2 November

Prompts:

  1. Prose Poetry.  This really is great.  There are a few nice examples in Heaney's ‘District and Circle’ if I remember correctly.  Anyway, Wikipedia is, as ever, the king of knowledge. 
  2. .  ‘A figure of speech in which a thing, a place, an abstract quality, an idea, a dead or absent person, is addressed as if present and capable of understanding’.  Think Wordsworth's ‘London, 1812’.
  3. ‘Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.’  — William Faulkner, ‘As I Lay Dying’

Michaelmas term 2011:  19 October

Prompts:

  1. ‘I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.’  — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Table Talk’, 1821—1834
  2. Form: the dramatic monologue (see Robert Browning's ‘Men and Women’ for some of the most famous examples).
  3. ‘English not being yet a language, I wrapped my lubber-lips around my thumb; Brain-deaf as an embryo, I was snuggled in my comfort blanket dumb.’  — Ciaran Carson, ‘Second Language’

Easter term 2011:  23 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme 1:  Ambivalence
  2. Theme 2:  Vorticism, which can be roughly defined as movement and machinery in language.
  3. Quotation:  ‘Thou shalt not use poetry, art and music to get into girls’ pants; use it to get into their heads.’  — Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip, ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’

Easter term 2011:  1 June

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Rain
  2. Quotation:  ‘One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.’  — Bob Dylan
  3. Form:  Pantoum

Easter term 2011:  18 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme 1:  Ovid, The Heroides
  2. Theme 2:  The Elements
  3. Form:  The Sonnet

Lent term 2011:  9 March

Prompts:

  1. ‘Revolution’ It's in the air and in the news at the moment.  Here's a few lines by Wordsworth, responding to the French Revolution:  “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!-Oh! times, / In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways / Of custom, law, and statute, took at once / The attraction of a country in romance!”
  2. ‘Intimacy’ Think about different kinds of intimacy and how poetry might be able to bridge the gaps between people; or not.  Here's a sample of Philip Larkin's bed-time chat to urge you to develop your own:  “None of this cares for us.  Nothing shows why / At this unique distance from isolation / It becomes still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind / Or not untrue and not unkind.”
  3. Form:  The “Complaint”: (a poem of protest or lament, typically at amorous disappointment, betrayal or desertion; in the decades around 1600 deeply caught up with the epyllion and sonnet-sequence, not least in Shakespeare); or Ottava Rima: stanzas of eight lines; iambic pentameter; rhyming abababcc.

Lent term 2011:  23 February

Prompts:

  1. Ekphrasis, which is ‘the intense pictorial descriptions of an object, especially an art object'.  Some examples of 'art objects’ you might like to describe are here, here, and here, but, of course, please feel free to use whatever you wish.
  2. syllabic verse, which is written not according to metre, but according to the number of syllables in a line.  An example is Marianne Moore’s No Swan So Fine.
  3. Springtime.

Lent term 2011:  2 February

Prompts:

  1. ‘Concrete Poetry’ - a form in which attention is paid to the layout, spacing and general visual-ness of the poem (see here).  This could range from just thinking more than usual about the white space around the poem, or creating an elephant with line length.  An example is George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’.
  2. ‘Paraphrasing’ or ‘Retelling.’  So - a return to a famous myth or story.  For example, something like ‘Leda and the Swan’ or Angela Carter's retellings of fairy tales in ‘The Bloody Chamber.’  See here or here.
  3. “Women don't know the offside rule.”  — Andy Gray

Michaelmas term 2010:  1 December

Prompts:

  1. “Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it.  Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it.”  — Richard Lamm
  2. “There has been only one Christmas — the rest are anniversaries.”  — W.  J.  Cameron
  3. And here's a little something to get you thinking about form, without me setting a form for our next meeting: “Poetry is not instruments / that work at times / then walk out on you / laugh at you old / get drunk on you young / poetry's part of yourself.”  — Frank O'Hara

Michaelmas term 2010: 10th November

Prompts:

  1. Dramatic Monologue: a speech in which a persona accounts an event/reveals their feelings at a specific dramatic moment - a form without a set verse structure.  See here.  Or anything by Robert Browning (my personal favourite is ‘Porphyria’s Lover’)
  2. “I’m glad I exist” — Wendy Cope (because we don't want any 5th week blues)
  3. The Christmas poem competition (the winner of which will be set to music courtesy of the college organ scholars)

Michaelmas term 2010: 20th October

Prompts:

  1. Alliterative verse (see here)
  2. ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’  — Paul Valéry

Easter term 2010: 2nd June

Prompts:

  1. Freedom
  2. ‘Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be safely and quietly insane each night of our lives.’
  3. Jazz poetry (see here)

Lent term 2010: 28th April

Prompts:

  1. ‘We all of us compose verse to some sort of tune.’  — Ezra Pound, I Gather the Limbs of Osiris
  2. ‘[...] I ask in all honesty,/ What would life be?/ Without a song or dance, what are we?’  — Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, Mamma Mia
  3. Sprung rhythm (or an approximation thereof).

Lent term 2010: 10th March

  1. Quotation:  ‘It is really about telling the story.  Good fiction is the truest thing that ever there was.  Facts are not necessarily the only truths.  Facts can be fiddled with by economists and bankers.  There are other kinds of truth.  It's about telling the story.’  — Arundhati Roy, The Chequebook & the Cruise-Missile
  2. Form:  Prose poetry.
  3. Theme:  (click to see larger version)

Lent term 2010: 17th February

  1. The fantastic Elaine Feinstein, from the fantastic poem, 'Companionship': 

    ...Today I was watching
    a grey squirrel fly in the beech trees when
    your words reached into me:  'You know,
    a poet isn't much of a companion.'
  2. The pentain, which is a five-line stanza.  I won't set any metrical or rhyme-scheme restrictions (but feel free to restrict yourselves!).  According to The Poetry Handbook, pentains are uncommon, but examples can be found in Larkin's 'Annus Mirabilis', bits of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and, of course, the limerick.
  3. Epic poetry: any aspect, character, scene or thing thereof.  Use or abuse this prompt how you will.  In case you opt out of writing an actual epic poem, plenty of writers have of course written dramatic monologues based on epic poems or their characters, or other reinterpretations.  Maybe take a look at this poem by W.  S.  Merwin inspired by Homer's Odyssey.  Oooh, or this one, by Louise Gluck!  Or maybe (re)read Chaucer's House of Fame.

Lent term 2010: 3rd February

  1. Theme:  (click to see larger version)
  2. Quotation:  'It is widely supposed that the naked human body is in itself an object upon which the eye dwells with pleasure.  But anyone who has frequented art schools and seen the shapeless, pitiful model which the students are industriously drawing will know this is an illusion.' — Kenneth Clark, The Nude
  3. Form: ottava rima. that is, 8 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc.

Lent term 2010: 20th January

  1. Theme: repetition.  Here are two links to get you thinking:
    1. (click to see larger version)
    2. or this
  2. Form:
    1. villanelle.  Here is a description
    2. for those of you who don't want to try a villanelle in 10 days, the other option is the tercet.

Michaelmas term 2009: 2nd December

  1. Theme 1: the following people were born and died on christmas day: born: annie lennox (1954); humphrey bogart (1899); pope pius vi (1717); sir isaac newton (1642) died: james brown (2006); johnny ace (1954); elizabeth petrovna [empress of russia 1741-1761] (1761); pope adrian I (795). 
  2. Theme 2:  ‘In the Middle Ages, boar’s head used to be a traditional Christmas dish.  This custom started when a boar attacked a university student and he saved himself by ramming a book of Aristotle's writings down its throat.  The boar choked to death and then he cut off its head and brought it back to his college.’ — from a website about christmas trivia. given its provenance it is almost certainly true. 
  3. Form 1: the english version of the sapphic ode: each stanza contains three lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a final line of four equally stressed syllables; rhyme scheme abab. can be used loosely.
  4. Form 2: limerick

Michaelmas term 2009: 8th November

  1. Theme: place
    below is a list of places, one, all, or none of which you may like to visit.
    • woodland's court, late at night
    • 'a' corridor (follow it right to the end where it starts smelling strongly of wood)
    • the motorway bridge on the way from girton to the co-op
    • castle mound
    • garret hostel bridge
    • the grand arcade
  2. Form: rhyming couplets

Michaelmas term 2009: 28th October

  1. Quotation:  ‘I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.’  — Woody Allen
  2. Form: dactylic meter

Michaelmas term 2009: 14th October

Easter term 2009: 17th June

  1. The Lawrence Room's collection of Eye Idols: 
    (click to see larger version)
  2. Theme: freight

Easter term 2009: 13th May

  1. Quotation:  ‘Throw your homework onto the fire.’  — The Smiths
  2. Theme: compass

Easter term 2009: 6th May

  1. Quotation:  ‘A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring.’  — Emily Dickinson
  2. Theme: salvage

Lent term 2009: 4th March

  1. Theme: hollows
  2. Quotation:  ‘I think everyone wants to be a writer.’  — Martin Amis

Lent term 2009: 18th February

  1. Theme:  (click to see larger version)
  2. Quotation:  ‘Stay me with raisins, comfort me with apples For I am sick of love.’  — “The Song of Songs (Which is Solomon’s)”, as read by Orson Welles

Lent term 2009: 28th January

  1. Theme:  Silence
  2. Quotation:  ‘If a man owns land, the land owns him.’  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Michaelmas term 2008: 19th November

  1. Theme:  (click to see larger version)
  2. Quotation:  ‘Fruit tree, fruit tree, no one knows you but the rain and the air.’  — Nick Drake

Michaelmas term 2008: 5th November

  1. Theme:  Obituary of Studs Terkel
  2. Quotation:  ‘“Begin at the beginning,” the king said, gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”’ — Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice's adventures in Wonderland’

Michaelmas term 2008: 22nd October

  1. Theme:  Letters
  2. Quotation:  ‘Exile's but another name for an old habit of non-residence.’  — Robert Graves

Easter term 2008: 11th June

  1. No theme

Easter term 2008: 21st May

  1. Quotation:  ‘Little by little, one travels far.’  — JRR Tolkien
  2. Theme:  Donkeys

Easter term 2008: 29th April

  1. Form:  Triolet
  2. Quotation:  ‘And when you're in a Slump,/you're not in for much fun./Un-slumping yourself/is not easily done.’  — Dr Seuss
  3. Theme:  Perfection

Lent term 2008: 27th February

  • Quotation:  ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.’  — Friedrich von Schiller
  • Theme:  Sound

Lent term 2008: 13th February

  • Form:  Sonnet
  • Theme:  Roses
  • Quotation:  ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.’  — Bertrand Russell

Lent term 2008: 30th January

  • Theme:  Enemies
  • Quotation:  ‘In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.’  — Douglas Adams

Michaelmas term 2007: 7th November

  1. Form:  Rhyme royal
  2. Theme:  Evolution
  3. Quotation:  ‘Clothes make the man, naked people have little or no influence on society.’  — Mark Twain

Michaelmas term 2007: 21st November

  1. Quotation:  ‘Men and women, women and men.  It'll never work.’  — Erica Jong
  2. Theme:  Notes

Michaelmas term 2007: 24th October

  1. Theme:  Steps
  2. Quotation:  ‘There's no place like home.’

Easter term 2007: 20th June

  1. Theme:  Endings
  2. Quotation:  ‘Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.’  — Russell Baker

Easter term 2007: 23rd May

  1. Theme:  Cutlery
  2. Quotation:  ‘[The poet] doth grow in effect another nature.’  — Sir Philip Sidney

Easter term 2007: 9th May

  1. Theme:  Circles
  2. Quotation:  ‘It was the mind's weight / Kept me bent, as I grew tall.’  — RS Thomas

Lent term 2007: 7th March

  1. a) [SENSIBLE EASTER THEME] Passion
    b) [SILLY EASTER THEME] Chickens
  2. Quotation:  ‘The painting has a life of its own.  I try to let it come through’ — Jackson Pollock

Lent term 2007: 21st February

  • Hereafter for Elsewhere:  An Ash Wednesday Sequence (music and readings in the Girton Chapel)

Lent term 2007: 14th February

  1. Theme:  Love poems, in all their guises, be they happy, sad, funny, sexy, depressing, short, long, a good size, scandalous, cute, manipulative, confusing, clear-eyed, teary-eyed, torn-up, good, bad, angry, sceptical, naïve, elusive, allusive, embarrassed, embarrassing, coy, naughty, frigid, filthy, unfair, continental, incontinent, impotent, infertile, in denial, bestial, pastoral, perilous, peerless…
  2. Form:  Sonnet

Lent term 2007: 24th January

  1. Quotation:  ‘Every mile is two in winter.’  — George Herbert
  2. Theme:  Orientalism

Michaelmas term 2006: 22nd November

  1. Quotation:  ‘War is not nice’ — Barbara Bush
  2. Theme:  Nature

Michaelmas term 2006: 8th November

  1. Theme:  Bonfires
  2. Quotation:  ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall.’

Michaelmas term 2006: 25th October

  1. Theme:  The line
  2. Quotation:  ‘Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.’  — G.K.  Chesterton

Easter term 2006: 22nd June

  • Form: any of villanelle, triolet, sonnet, heroic couplets

Easter term 2006: 10th May

  • Form:  Triolet

Lent term 2006: 16th March

  1. Theme:  Old age
  2. Form:  Limerick

Lent term 2006: 2nd March

  1. Theme:  Treasure
  2. Form:  Heroic couplets

Michaelmas term 2005: 23rd November

  1. Form:  Ballad
  2. Theme:  Drugs

Michaelmas term 2005: 9th November

  1. Form:  Prose poem
  2. Theme:  Geography

Michaelmas term 2005: 26th October

  1. Form:  Villanelle
  2. Theme:  Music

Easter term 2005: 21st June

  1. Form:  Sonnet
  2. Theme:  Lawn mower

Easter Term 2005: 19th May

  1. Form:  Tetrameter
  2. Theme:  Revision

Easter Term 2005: 4th May

  1. Theme:  Glove box
  2. Quotation:  ‘Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.’  — Victor Hugo

Lent term 2005: 16th March

  1. Theme:  Scissors
  2. Quotation:  ‘True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.’  — Kurt Vonnegut

Lent term 2005: 23rd February

  1. Theme: beards
  2. Quotation:  ‘The English have sent all their bores abroad.’  — Edward Bond

Lent term 2005: 2nd February

  1. Theme:  A post-it note
  2. Quotation:  ‘Too early seen unknown, and known too late.’  — William Shakespeare