Week Two - Hovering In The Wind

The Week Two report is a little late. To those who maybe weren't there and have been waiting for the prompt - apologies.

The second session of the term was... well... amazing! Some of the work read out around the table made me feel like the beginner. It was, honestly, a treat just to be there!

The group was eleven writers strong, which meant that not everyone got to read all their work. We will take that on board in Week Three.

Two of the group reported successes, actually getting work in print. And we talked about setting up a session to discuss making submissions.

The On-The-Spot prompt was a phrase from the poem The Windhover. That phrase was "The mastery of the thing". The writers had to describe that moment something they had been trying/training to do finally came right. The idea is still a good one, if you want to give it a go!

The 52 exercise, from the book by Jo Bell, used The Windhover as an example of how to inhabit the being of another living creature. And the exercise was to do just that - choose a creature and describe - intensely - what it would be like to be that creature.

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THE WINDHOVER

by Gerard Manly Hopkins

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

   No wonder of it: shéer plód slowly, laboriously, and without break; these accent marks, inserted by Hopkins, tell the reader to place more accent or emphasis on those syllables when reading aloud makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

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Poetryfoundation.org

Jo Bell