BROCHURE

The Poet’s Voice Course (PVC) 2008

Feb – May 2008

Email Advanced Poetry Writing Course

Bob Commin and I will be offering a continuation of the PPP course under the title The Poet’s Voice. This apprenticeship aims to take you further up the writing mountain and offer you a deeper engagement with your craft and your calling. Our chief concern is not the academic approach to a poem, but a holistic one in which a meeting of reader and poet takes place in and through the text. (You don’t need to do the first course in order to participate in this one)

This is also a four month course in which participants work through assignments. It is structured in the nature of an ongoing conversation. You engage with us and you engage with the group as well. You are committed to keeping a poetry journal to record your four month’s reflection. The journal is a vital part of the process.

Participants choose two poets from a list of seven that they are passionate about (or you can come up with your own). You select five poems from each selected poet and engage intimately with those works.

There will be five assignments

B1 Imitation and Craft

Participants will be given an unseen poem from each of their chosen poets with a number of lines missing. The assignment is to write in the missing lines and then to check against the original.

In the second part of the exercise we present you with an unseen poem from the two poets rendered in prose. Your task is to sort out the lines and once again compare your version to the regional.

You will write up your observations for part one and two in a poetry journal.

B2. Copying out and learning by Heart

Participants will copy out by hand a poem from each of their favourite selected poets. They will learn these two poems by heart (not less than 15 lines each). Once again they write up and present their observations of these two activities in the poetry journal.

B3 and B4 Writing Poems

Participants write max 6 poems, 3 for each assignment. Your journal will reflect and make conscious the crafting process. You will also raise questions about the particular poems, problems encountered in the writing, insights, breakthroughs etc You also submit this text with the poems.

B5. The Poet’s Voice

In this assignment you will work on a presentation of your understanding of the selected poets, your own poetry and journal entries. You will offer to a group of friends an informal oral presentation. We can guide you with questions so it could be a dialogue if you prefer it. You will be putting on the mantle of poet.

Cost R2950

R1750 payable on registration – by 15 Jan 2008

Balance R1200 payable by begin March

Payment details: Dr R D Haarhoff

Standard Bank Current account 0828 59 248 George Branch

(add name and code PPP0208)

Poet’s Voice (PVC) Biography Sheet

This will be shared with your fellow travellers

Bio (200-250 words on you, your passions, your writing path especially in relation to poetry)

1. Submit one or two poems that you have written during the last year. (We won’t be commenting on this. We just want to see where you are. NO COMPARISONS PLEASE

2. What words or phrases caught your attention in the Poet’s Voice course flyer? What you would like to learn or master about poetry and hope that this course will provide?

3. Please respond to these two poems. Which carry energy for you? Why? What do they say to you about poetry? Whatever you bring is welcome.

Blossom (Mary Oliver) In April the ponds open like black blossoms, the moon swims in every one; there’s fire everywhere: frogs shouting their desire, their satisfaction. What we know: that time chops at us all like an iron hoe, that death is a state of paralysis. What we long for: joy before death, nights in the swale - everything else can wait but not this thrust from the root of the body. What we know: we are more than blood - we are more than our hunger and yet we belong to the moon and when the ponds open, when the burning begins the most thoughtful among us dreams of hurrying down into the black petals into the fire, into the night where time lies shattered into the body of another.

Fishing On The Susquehanna In July (Billy Collins) I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna or on any river for that matter to be perfectly honest. Not in July or any month have I had the pleasure -- if it is a pleasure -- of fishing on the Susquehanna. I am more likely to be found in a quiet room like this one -- a painting of a woman on the wall, a bowl of tangerines on the table -- trying to manufacture the sensation of fishing on the Susquehanna. There is little doubt that others have been fishing on the Susquehanna, rowing upstream in a wooden boat, sliding the oars under the water then raising them to drip in the light. But the nearest I have ever come to fishing on the Susquehanna was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia, when I balanced a little egg of time in front of a painting in which that river curled around a bend under a blue cloud-ruffled sky, dense trees along the banks, and a fellow with a red bandana sitting in a small, green flat-bottom boat holding the thin whip of a pole. That is something I am unlikely ever to do, I remember saying to myself and the person next to me. Then I blinked and moved on to other American scenes of haystacks, water whitening over rocks, even one of a brown hare who seemed so wired with alertness I imagined him springing right out of the frame.