SAW; Poetry

Monday evening saw an intimate poetry workshop and reading from Somerville alumnus Kate McLoughlin, an English literature lecturer at Birkbeck who has recently turned her hand to poetry and some students, including the newly elected Poet Laureate, Krishan Neelendra.

Kate’s recent venture into verse was spurned by two things; a 1934 poem by William Carlos Williams, called ‘Just a Note to Say,’ which is about a note left on a fridge from someone who has eaten someone else’s plums, and a trip to Barcelona where Kate saw a painting by Picasso, a response to another work by Velasquez.

William Carlos Williams, 'Just a Note to Say.'

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Kate began to wonder what it would be like to respond to the note. Her book ‘Plums’ is a collection of poems written from the mind of the person to whom the note was left. They are all of varied length, tone, style and include experimentation with the elements of the poem, after they had been stripped down and analysed, emulating what Picasso had done to the Velasquez painting. McLoughlin’s 58 variations explored many different ways of responding to the note. She changed the endings, the attitude of the writer in response to the note, played around with the concepts of forgiveness, sin, stealing and retaliation and altered the structure and form of the poems to create a hugely varied assortment of verse.

After Kate introduced her work, some of the students had the chance to read some poetry, whether written by themselves or another. There was a huge range. We began with some hilarity from Krish with a poem based on the tort law case of Donoghue v Stevenson, which concerned a woman who discovered a decomposing snail in a bottle of ginger beer, followed by a piece echoing Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ and based on a dream of his where he and a friend found a dead pigeon, before closing with the infamous ‘Trilogy.’ Next, we had some poems concerning relationships, a product of ‘doodling with words’ exploring not only relationships between couples and friends, but also the relationship that one establishes with a poet. Some Patois poems by Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Sonny’s Letter’ and ‘Inglan is a bitch’ came next, the reader communicating how a poem can be just as powerful when based on day-to-day experiences than on great themes such as love, hate or the meaning of life. The experiences in these two poems concerned the ‘stop and search’ law and a Jamaican immigrant’s difficulty to find work on arriving in England. Finally, we had a poem by Edward Thomas called ‘May 23^rd’, which was special to the reader for its evocative portrayal of idyllic, countryside living and the memories that this revived.