Verse Tutorial

What makes poetry distinct from other forms of literary expression, and indeed from ordinary language? This was the knotty problem students were invited to contemplate at the Verse workshop last Sunday. Examining formal and metrical structures in relation to diverse examples, we considered the consequences of variant readings, the aural impact of melody, and the historical continuities and changes that have marked the course of poetry in English. Students developed a keen sense of the vital and productive relationship that can arise between form and content, and finally applied their learning and their creative ideas to the production of their own verse texts:

Church Cove

An unexpected

Wave: wet jeans and water-logged

Wellington boots. Chill.

(Rebekah Ellerby)

9:03 to Oxford

Stay cow, chomping the lush grass

The sight of you, churning up the thick

Mud

Makes my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.

Still in the sultry air.

But your bulging black eyes squeeze out of view

As my hazel ones hurtle to greater fields.

(Rivkah Brown)

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Megan Murray-Pepper, English Tutor