Sharing poems for World Poetry Day

Hi everyone,
Since it’s world poetry day and I am a creative writing student I thought it was only fair to share some poems with you! I’ve been trying to decide what I should post and then today in my poetry workshop class, led by a guest poet Linda Black, we were introduced to a new type of poem.. You basically just find an article, piece of text, page from a book.. anything really.. and you pick lines from it and make a poem from those chosen lines. The beauty in this is that it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s all about choosing lines you like and putting them together in some way that appeals to you.

The first poem is have chosen to call ‘Tide’ and it has come from ‘Travels of a Victorian Photographer’ ‘Sleep: Beds and bed-clothes’ and ‘Learn to relax’.

Tide

A fire has burnt itself out,
slowly at first and then more quickly.
Ashes and charcoal fragments.
Unnecessary new vigour.

Tide of the wind.
Tide of the sea.
Singing higher still
neither too much nor too little

Clusters of berries, honeycomb, leaves –
felted together out of the autumn light.

No tension is free.
People talk of it as a bad thing.
I cannot drink enough.

The second poem I have called ‘The Little Tug’ and it is composed of lines taken from ‘A Room of One’s own’ by Virginia Woolf. And Modern Teaching page 124.

The Little Tug

They exist. The violet in its woods,
the violet in the vase
it lives in close association
with the human aspect

Here then was I. Call me by any name.
Call it by a prouder name than it deserves.

You know the little tug,
understanding why people live as they do.
Good fishermen put back into the water –
another consideration.

Golden and crimson
on the bank of a river.
October weather.
the human aspect.

Jazmin xx