Back pain is not the best poetic inspiration

I arrived promptly at Faber & Faber's offices at 9:45am yesterday morning for day two of a three-day poetry workshop, keen as a whippet to draw inspiration from mere proximity to Jo Shapcott and Roger McGough. (Does that sound totally sycophantic? I do hope so.) I placed my books and pen on the table. I turned to place my satchel on a spare chair and - swore unpoetically as my lower back went into spasm.

I spent the rest of the day in a state somewhere between agony and what seemed like eternal damnation. I grimaced throughout Jo and Roger's sessions and left at the end of the day unsure whether I could make it as far as the Tube station, let alone whether I could make it back the next day.

Last night I barely slept. I deferred the terror of retiring to bed as long as I dared by playing a long session of online poker with a pillow stuffed behind my spine. I finally tumbled into the sack in the early hours for a night of wakeful tossing, yelping and unrepeatable cussing. By 6am I was back on the computer typing random characters which refused to coalesce into a meaningful poetic constellation. A good friend (you know who you are, Katia) pointed out that all the best poets live pained lives. However I can attest that back pain is not conducive to poetic inspiration.

At 9 o'clock I packed my pillow and a day's provision of ibuprofen into a rucksack and headed out nervously for day three of the workshop.

What Jo Shapcott taught me

It's impossible not to learn from Jo Shapcott (On Mutability Costa Book of the Year 2010). Our workshop group at the offices of Faber & Faber in London worked through a series of exercises during Friday afternoon. These built on the work we had done with Daljit Nagra during the morning and continued to focus on specificity and concreteness, or as Jo put it, describing 'the cuppiness of this cup.' One consequence of this was that I wrote a poem, polished later in the evening and shared on my Poetrivia blog as 'In the mix,' that I could never otherwise have been conceived. A second poem, a sonnet called 'Getting into your pantry,' further stretched my poetic range; I had been challenged by Jo to write a poem about the 'Larder of ecstasy!' Job done.

The inspiration continued on Saturday morning (despite my acute backache which is a separate story) as Jo shared a couple of tips to get the poetic motor humming. The first tip is simply to assemble a group of unrelated words to be included in a poem. They might be chosen randomly from, say, a dictionary, or you could use Wikipedia's subject of the day as a theme to mix with a subject you already having mind - the odder the better. This forces you to look for unusual and often completely novel links. The seeded words can always be edited out later (after they have done their work). Jo's second tip is a way of expanding a poem that you feel ends too soon or fails to fully mine the seam of material available. She suggests putting the poem away overnight and taking it out the next day, covering all but the last line and then using that as the first line of a new poem. Again, the result can be edited later and might result in a longer, richer poem, in a sequence, or in two entirely separate poems. Go Jo!

Hobnobbing with Daljit Nagra

As if taking a time off the day job isn't reward enough for a life well spent, I spent this morning at the London offices of Faber & Faber (T.S. Eliot's desk is downstairs!) rubbing up against the awesome Daljit Nagra (Look We Have Coming To Dover!) trying to get a faint smear of his success, if not his abundant talent, to rub off on me. Only time will tell whether that worked. My head is buzzing. I think that's probably good.

Daljit is a kind and generous teacher (even though I'm paying Faber a small fortune for this three-day workshop), but it is hard to imagine a poet further removed from the personae who narrate his poems. This is such a relief since I have no desire to write in Punglish.