Musings January 2025

After some lovely family time over Christmas and New Year, it is good to get back into the swing of poetry.  I needed a bit of encouragement to get going so I signed up for an Arvon offer of five free poetry prompts suggested by Daniel Sluman each day. Daniel is running some other events as Arvon’s 2025 writer-in-residence so it is worth checking out the website. I was pleased to get some drafts done.

It has been exciting to hear about plans for the Launceston Poetry Festival 30 May – 1st June (which I plan to attend) and there still time to enter the Causley Trust’s  two poetry competitions which close on 28th February. I am one of the shortlisters for the international competition this year.

I am busy sorting out future readings and workshops over the next few months, spanning Redruth, Colchester, Stradbroke, St Albans, Newcastle and Leeds, so I am really starting to get about! I enjoy travelling and poetry is a good vehicle to take me to other parts of the UK. I have also been sounding out some bookshops in Brussels! I will be spending more regular time in Cornwall now I am a grandmother so am looking forward to that. I am not going up to Scotland for StAnza poetry festival 14-16 March as usual, but joined as a Friend ( £50 ) which gives one a digital pass to all streamed events – very good value, in my opinion.

My concrete poem Spiral has been featured on the back cover of the Lighthouse Magazine. I was very pleased to have this published; it was a challenge to get the poem  how I wanted it to look, reflecting one of Damien Hirst’s circular works incorporating butterflies. The poem is about the fate of the Amazon rainforest. You can read it here. I have also had a new poem Limbering Up in the latest edition of The Alchemy Spoon, as well as a lovely review of my pamphlet Once There Was Colour (Palewell Press) by Diana Cant. So it has been a good start to the year.

Some good advice from Daniel Sluman was to take a radically different approach to a poem that has got ‘stuck’. For example, one can change the form or perspective. This can be quite liberating. I had a poem which was a sonnet which is now beginning to morph into a dramatic monologue. Another poem in quatrains has been ‘exploded’ and is now fragmented. Rather than struggling to keep going with a form I had chosen, it was fun to completely throw words into the air. I hope all readers find inspiration returning as the days get longer…

Sue Wallace-Shaddad