By Esinam Asima
The English Department kindly offered a 5-week poetry workshop led by poet Lisa Kelly.
Lisa is a London-based poet and editor known for her debut collection A Map Towards Fluency (2019). She is also Chair of Magma Poetry magazine and co-editor of What Meets the Eye? The Deaf Perspective.
Lisa has led a previous workshop with the girls ranging from years 10 to12, where we have been able to explore the different methods to constructing poetry.
We started off with analysing poems such as Blackberries by Yusef Komunyakaa with a connecting theme: Fruit.
Blackberries
“They left my hands like a printer’s
Or thief’s before a police blotter
& pulled me into early morning’s
Terrestrial sweetness, so thick
The damp ground was consecrated
Where they fell among a garland of thorns.
Although I could smell old lime-covered
History, at ten I’d still hold out my hands
& berries fell into them. Eating from one
& filling a half gallon with the other,
I ate the mythology & dreamt
Of pies & cobbler, almost
Needful as forgiveness. My bird dog Spot
Eyed blue jays & thrashers. The mud frogs
In rich blackness, hid from daylight.
An hour later, beside City Limits Road
I balanced a gleaming can in each hand,
Limboed between worlds, repeating one dollar.
The big blue car made me sweat.
Wintertime crawled out of the windows.
When I leaned closer I saw the boy
& girl my age, in the wide back seat
Smirking, & it was then I remembered my fingers
Burning with thorns among berries too ripe to touch.”
Yusef Komunyakaa
Lisa asked us to think about ‘how a type of fruit might work as a metaphor for you and your feelings’. I must admit, this was an unusual task to take on since we had to place an emotion of feeling with the fruit and even place ourselves in the perspective of a fruit, descriptively recounting experiences some fruit may have.
The English Department hoped the workshop would give students more than just technical skills in poetry. It was designed to help build confidence in sharing opinions, spark creativity though unusual poems, and deepen our understanding of metaphor to express complex emotions.
Analysing published works and experimenting with our own writing, we were encouraged to see how everyday objects like fruit can be transformed into powerful symbol of identity, resilience and imagination.
Below are some poems created by students during the poetry workshop which feature in the collection of ‘Poems by the Priory’:
Blackberries
What makes the blackberry proud,
Is it the thorns that guard its crown?
The bramble bears a sweet surprise,
Beneath the stretch of the summer skies.
A mark, a bruise, a purple seal,
To prove the joy the wild can steal.
And those who reach through thorn to find
Will leave a little blood behind.
Each bite holds pride, both bold and deep,
A purple claim that Kings would keep.
There’s pride in fruit that scars the skin,
The purple proof of what’s within.
Angela Carraretto
Mirror Mirror On The Wall
I won’t have my happy ending.
I will never believe that
Love is real.
I prefer the idea that
Beauty never loved the Beast.
It is not true that
Life is about love and not wealth,
In fact,
Prince Charming is a fraud.
I refuse to believe that
Miracles exist.
Imagination
Is merely an escape from
Truth
I am sure
Fairy tales are misleading.
There is no way that
Fantasies can become reality.
I will never forget that
I was lost in Neverland –
Once upon a time
(now read from bottom to top)
Isabella Nossa
My sister is turning into a butterfly,
she unfolds her wings like delicate pages that have been folded too long
the pages lie smooth, ready for the first flight of ink.
she laughs and talks to people that i’ve never met
spreading her story to others.
Each word a flutter carrying her further.
Each chapter written in a place i cannot follow.
She turns her pages faster now, her story spills into lecture halls,
no longer filling our room, where the bedsheets remain creased with memory
i still lean towards the echo of her laughter.
Whilst she scripts herself into a new world,
her wings remain unbroken, smooth.
My sister is a butterfly.
Esinam Asima
Click on this link to see the full anthology of poems: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tf-wsdb9ol48Sbw8BrTsOfRV-7BQYnyR/view?usp=sharing