Over the past couple of years, we at Between The Lines have enjoyed developing and delivering Poetry workshops, hosting live Spoken Word events, and producing and presenting a Spoken Word Radio show. We’ve had the opportunity to listen to, read, and analyse a wide range of poetry from emerging and well-known local and international poets.
When we sat down to reflect on our past events and plan activities for 2023, it was clear that one of the things people enjoyed the most was the exploration, analysis, and discussion of poetry itself.
A writing workshop is perfect for someone who wants to brush up on their skills for work or pleasure, and writing poetry can be a fantastic tool for anyone who wants to explore challenging social issues or their thoughts and feelings. So we will continue to create poetry workshops.
But. Reading poetry is also a skill. And learning to love poetry after a lifetime of finding even the thought of it ‘boring’ or ‘difficult’ can take a little time and patience.
We are compiling this toolkit to help you explore, read, listen to, and love poetry. We’ll continue to add resources to it throughout the year and publish the full tool kit once complete.
Glossary of poetic terms
You don’t need to know or understand poetry jargon to be able to read and enjoy a poem. Though, poetic terms and their meaning can be really useful for analysing or deconstructing a poem, particularly if discussing it with others. Take a look at this A-Z glossary of poetic terms by The Poetry Foundation is very useful.
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) by Edward Hirsch presents readings of an eclectic mix of poems and poets, written in an accessible style. He said
“I write for both initiated and uninitiated readers of poetry. I like to spread the word … My notion was to make links and connections, to bring forward unknown poets, and to help people to think about poetry in a somewhat deeper way. It seemed to work.”
Edward Hirsch
Above are included a few pages from the book for quick reference. We’ll add a full free PDF of the book if we come across one.
The Poetry Foundation also reprinted the chapters from the book as pages on their website. You can read them here.
A few other articles/links on the topic
How to Read a Poem: “Stored Magic,” Total Transformation, and the Capacity for Creative Wonder
How to read poetry like a professor
Free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) are free online courses available for anyone to enrol. Here are some of MOOCs created/curated by the International Writing Programme.
Courses include:
- Stories of Place: Writing and the Natural World
- Moving the Margins: Fiction and Inclusion
- Power of the Pen: Identities and Social Issues in Poetry and Plays
- How Writers Write Fiction: Storied Women
- Whitman’s Civil War: Writing and Imaging Loss, Death, and Disaster
Leeds Stuff
LOUDSPEAKER Spoken Word Radio Show
That’s us! A 12 part Spoken Word radio show featuring over 100 poems, dozens of interviews and discussion about poetry. You can listen to all past episodes here.
Leeds Poetry Festival
A wonderful festival of poetry 10th-16th July 2023. You can find out more about the poetry competition and programme of events on their website.
National Poetry Centre project
This is super exciting for Leeds!
We’re in the early stages of developing plans for this fantastic new ‘people’s palace for poetry’, designed to fill a hole in the nation’s cultural life and based in Leeds.
They don’t have a newsletter sign up for updates but we’ll be keeping an eye on progress and will be sure to let you know!
National Poetry Centre website
Leeds University Poetry Centre
Other online poetry resources
This is an archived page so is no longer updated but has lots of useful articles and resources.
A series of interviews with poets.
Non-profit daily anthology of contemporary poetry.
Poems That Changed The World
| 01.02.2023 15.02.2023 01.03.2023 29.03.2023 12.04.2023 26.04.2023 10.05.2023 24.05.2023 07.06.2023 21.06.2023 06.09.2023 | A Litany For Survival by Audre Lorde Hold It Down by Gina Myers I look at the world by Langston Hughes red-rag and pink-flag by E.E. Cummings I Explain A Few Things by Pablo Neruda The Tender Place by Ted Hughs Home by Warsan Shire A Birthday Present by Sylvia Plath The Mask Of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley Di Great Insohreckshan by Linton Kwesi Johnson The Journey by Mary Oliver |
Audre Lorde
A Litany For Survival
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
“A Litany for Survival.” Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde, from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by the Audre Lorde Estate. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Check out Lorde’s bio on The Poetry Foundation, this lovely article about her work by Maria Popova and read her fierce and incredibly important essay ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’.
Gina Myers
Hold It Down
It’s 70 degrees outside but in the drugstore
Christmas music plays over the speakers as
I stand in line balancing my checkbook
in my head, stretching things thin until
my next paycheck when the rent is due.
The security guard cracks a joke, but
I wasn’t paying attention, so I just smile
& step forward in line. Images move
across the screen. When I think about money
it seems impossible. All over the country
people are moving into the streets
& we’re here in Atlanta starting a new life.
Darkness surrounds the latest revision
of our shared history. Everything clouded.
Yesterday I couldn’t tear myself from the news
& already today the events have been distorted,
the numbers downplayed. It’s late fall
& in the early morning crispness, the leaves
fall from the trees & cover the sidewalks.
This new feeling we lack a name for, struggle
manifested in the streets & in parks & on bridges
across the nation. The headlines read
“Protesters clash with police,” but as we watched
the live stream, we saw aggression only by officers
dressed in riot gear. We saw people tossed
on the ground, hit with batons,
a woman punched in the face, an eighty-four year old
woman’s face drenched in pepper spray.
The images endless in this land of the free.
I’m losing focus, distracted by the newsfeed
on the computer screen, hitting refresh.
The cat paws at my leg, demands its own attention.
This shift entirely unexpected but necessary.
Leaves blot the window. Every so often
I leave & start from scratch, imagine
damaged relationships & sick cities
where there was no damage & no sickness
greater than anywhere else. In Atlanta,
everyone drives. The bartender called us
“hardcore” when we said we’d walked there.
She said, “No one in Atlanta walks anywhere.”
Walking home from work in post-daylight
savings time darkness I pass no one on the
sidewalks. I pass the traffic backed up by
the stoplight. The weekend passes too quickly—
I wish it would last longer, which is what this all
is really about: time & my lack of control
over it, my inability to do what I want with it.
And there’s a greater futility at work
here too—a greater frustration in my inability
to control my environment or to stop my country
from killing its citizens. The police beat people
standing still, linking arms, holding cardboard signs.
Each day I think more & more about the past,
about where things began to go wrong, where I, too,
began to go wrong. Before I moved, before I
got sick, before I unfriended you on Facebook,
before I decided I no longer loved you,
before New York, before college—thinking back
to childhood when we could run fearless
through the neighborhood at night, when
we didn’t think about the future, when we loved
our country because we didn’t know better.
W. W. Gina Myers, “Hold It Down” from Hold It Down. Copyright © 2013 by Gina Myers. Reprinted by permission of Gina Myers. & Company, Inc.
Check out Myers’ bio on The Poetry Foundation, more of her work and latest news on her website.
Langston Hughes
I look at the world
I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.
I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.
Langston Hughes,
“I look at the world” from (New Haven: Beinecke Library, Yale University, )
red-rag and pink-flag
By E.E. Cummings
red-rag and pink-flag
blackshirt and brown
strut-mince and stink-brag
have all come to town
some like it shot
and some like it hung
and some like it in the twot
nine months young
www.best-poems.net/poem/red-rag-and-pink-flag-by-e-e-cummings.html
annehodgson.de/2009/01/16/pink-flag/
www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/e-e-cummings
I Explain A Few Things
by Pablo Neruda
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I’ll tell you all the news.
I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.
From there you could look out
over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!
More about Pablo Neruda – Poetry Foundation
The Tender Place by Ted Hughes
Your temples , where the hair crowded in ,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
of a twelve-volt battery — it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.
Whether your teeth were still whole .
The hand on the calibrated lever
Again feeling nothing
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel
Some squirm of sensation . Terror
Was the cloud of you
Waiting for these lightnings. I saw
An oak limb sheared at a bang.
You your Daddy’s leg . How many seizures
Did you suffer this god to grab you
By the roots of the hair? The reports
Escaped back into clouds. What went up
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve· threw off its skin
Like a burning child
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you
A rigid bent bit of wire
Across the Boston City grid. The lights
In the Senate House dipped
As your voice dived inwards
Right through the bolt-hole basement.
Came up, years later,
Over-exposed, like an X-ray —
Brain-map still dark-patched
With the scorched-earth scars
Of your retreat . And your words ,
Faces reversed from the light ,
Holding in their entrails.”
Ted Hughes – Poetry Foundation
Home by Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you would not be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one would put their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
wants to be beaten
wants to be pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one’s skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe it’s because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home unless home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
More about Warsan Shire here:
A Birthday Present
by Sylvia Plath
A Birthday Present
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
‘Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!’
But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed—I do not mind if it is small.
Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,
The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.
I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.
I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,
No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine——-
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,
Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center
Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.
More about Sylvia Plath here
The Mask Of Anarchy
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.
II
I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
III
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
IV
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
V
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.
VI
Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.
VII
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Read the full poem here
Read more about Percy Bysshe Shelley here
The Di Great Insohreckshan by Linton Kwesi Johnson
It was in April, nineteen…..eighty one
Down ‘n on dee ghetto of Brix-ton
Dat deh Babylon dem cause such a fric-tion
Dat it bring about a GREAT insohreck-shun
And it spread all over deh nay-shun
It was TRULY an historical occas-sion
When we run riot all over Brixton
When we MASH up plenty police van
When we MASH up the wicked one plan
When we MASH up the Swamp 81, fi what?
Fi make deh rule of dem understand
Dat we NAH take no more of dem oppression
And meh check out deh ghetto grapevine
To find out all dat I can find
Every rebel jus a revel in dem stahry
Dem ah talk bout deh power and deh glory
Dem ah talk bout deh burning and the looting
Dem ah talk bout deh smashing and the grabbing
Dem ah tell me bout deh vanquish and deh victree
Dem said deh babylon dem went too far
So wha? wi ad woz fi bun two kyar
And one or two innocent get marred, buh wha?
Thas how it go sometimes in a war, in star(?)
Thas how it go sometimes in a war
Dem say we burn down deh George we coulda
burn da landlord
We burn down deh George we never burn da
landlord
When we run riot all over Brixton
When we MASH up plenty police van
When we MASH up the wicked one plan
When we MASH up the Swamp 81
Dem say we commendear car and we gather
ammunition
We build wif barricade and deh wicked catch afraid
We sen out wi scout fog oh fine dem whereabout
Den wi faam-up wi passi an wi mek wi raid
Well now dem run down deh plan “call to action”
But dem plastic bullet an’ dem water can-non
Will bring a BLAM BLAM, will bring a BLAM BLAM
Nevermind Scarman…WE bring a BLAM BLAM
Read more about Linton Kwesi Johnson here
The Journey by Mary Oliver
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Read more about Mary Oliver here.
Suggested poems
This poetry discussion group is co-created which means that we’ll be discussing poetry selected by Denetta and I, as well as the group. Below are a list of suggestions from the group which we’ll review over the year.
If you’re part of the 23 Poems group, please take a look at these so we can select from them at the next meet-up. If you’d like to suggest a poem, you can email btlleeds@gmail.com.
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