April 2017 NatProWriMo

Day 1 saw me facilitating a poetry workshop at the Benwisken Centre in Sligo with a few other fools for poetry. Gathered by a fire we had some creative sparks, we fed the flames with shared techniques and thoughts.

My own thoughts were echoed by Poetry Ireland’s logo that arrived in an email on 31st March – Poetry Connects. The older I get the more I find that connection is a kind of cure all for what ails the world. More, poetry has a way of being both. It weds what Eavan Boland calls the ‘I’ and the ‘We.’ Or, another way, the personal and universal.

So after three hours and a shared lunch we set off for landscape, some of which fed W. B. Yeats’ own poetry. Some, which we hoped, would inspire our own poems.  We walked the glen around the mill ruins of Gleniff. We drove passed Diarmuid and Grainne’s Cave on the Horseshoe Drive; the fairy door was open.  The poets went to the ocean at Streedagh as the tide went out and we picked up fossils and held eons in our hands. We stopped for tea and coffee at Glencar and then walked up to the waterfall that figures in the imaginings of Yeat’s poem Stolen Child.

I found that ‘the line’, the hook, eluded me yesterday. I did write a verse, completely off workshop topic.

There is no shame

in imperfection

Even when the tutor blames herself

for lack of application.

 

For it is not for want

of inspiration.

Perhaps the brain’s gone lame?

Or am I just a poet dilletante

 

dabbling in literary shallows.

For many may toil, but

few may be hallowed

scribbling across this blank page floor.