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The Girton Poetry Group

Not Averse

Recent meeting dates, themes, forms

Lent term:  26 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Waiting Rooms
  2. Form:  Rhyme royal / Chaucerian stanza

Lent term:  19 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  That Old-Song Ache
  2. Form:  Terza Rima

Lent term:  22 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Otherworlds
  2. Form:  Concrete Poetry

Michaelmas term 2023:  13 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Whalesong
  2. Form:  Villanelle

Michaelmas term 2023:  30 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Slow-Burn
  2. Form:  Sonnet

Michaelmas term 2023:  9 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Moss and Mind
  2. Form:  Ode

Easter term 2023:  15 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Play
  2. Form:  Aubade

Easter term 2023:  1 May

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Lines
  2. Form:  Surprise us!

Lent term 2023:  20 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Fruit
  2. Form:  Double dactyl

Lent term 2023:  6 February

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Mundane
  2. Form:  Found poetry

Lent term 2023:  23 January

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Forward
  2. Form:  Villanelle

Michaelmas term 2022:  28 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Change
  2. Form:  Tanka

Michaelmas term 2022:  7 November

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Sacrifice
  2. Form:  Sonnet

Michaelmas term 2022:  24 October

Prompts:

  1. Theme:  Time
  2. Form:  Free verse

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