an open field

‘What’s the word for the sky in your house?’ my granddaughter asked as I was putting her to bed.  ‘The sky in my house?’ And I looked up towards the ceiling, imagined the open space above it, between floor joists and the roof’s wooden rafters, and I saw what she was seeing, saw it confined there as if it had forgotten to move before we’d converted the derelict barn to a home. ‘Ah, the attic,’ I said.  Fifteen years later I live in a house with no attic and sometimes I stare at the sky and wonder about all that time it was living with me and I hadn’t known.   In his Afterword to The Wonder Code Scott Mason asks, ‘… where does wonder begin?’  And answers, ‘I believe it begins with a sense of discovery.’  discover (v.)   from the Old French  descovrir,  which meant, satisfyingly in the above context, to unroof, and also to unveil, to reveal.   We discover things when we lift the veils of self-importance, fear, ...

Plan your writing time for Spring 2018 with The Poetry School's new list of courses. I'll be leading Haiku Rebellion Studio again, an online course that runs over three to four weeks next April with lots of opportunity to practice and receive feedback on your own haiku. It sold out last time so book early! In the meantime, here's some background to my haiku practice and the course . Small is the New Big I started this blogpost with the question, How do you write a poem like a haiku? And then really wished I hadn’t. Because the next question that popped out of my brain was, How do you catch a moment on the page? No? Nothing? I’ll give you a clue: ¯¯ How do you solve a problem like Maria ? ¯¯ Apologies for the Sound of Music  ear-worm. Our minds are full of patterns. Habits, even. And while habits and repeated actions can be comforting, like reading the Sunday papers in bed or summer sunsets, the unconscious repetition of habits in our writing, a continu...