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The Lines We Trace

Friday, March 16th, 2018

The Lines We Trace is the latest poetry collection by Ann Vaughan-Williams.

The Lines We Trace, by Ann Vaughan-Williams (image by Russell Thompson)

“A feast for the eyes

and ears…The Lines

We Trace offers

glimpses into little but

very big moments

over the course

of a lifetime.”




Ann will be launching the book at Love & Dye on 14 April, with poetry, song, and refreshments.

Book Launch: Saturday 14 April 2018, 7.30pm

Love & Dye, 187 Worple Road, London, SW20 8RE
(2 minutes from Raynes Park Station, and on the 57, 131, and 200 bus routes).

Let us know if you’re coming on Facebook or email annvaughanwilliams@gmail.com.

Be a hero! Download, share, print the poster (A4, PDF).

About the Book

Ann Vaughan-Williams is keenly attuned to the voices and habits of those around her. She often deals with difficult moments in life, such as illness and loss, but there is also birth and renewal — all approached with her characteristic humour and joy. (Tamar Yoseloff)

The Lines We Trace is a feast for the eyes and ears. It offers glimpses into little but very big moments over the course of a lifetime: from the first flickerings of consciousness in Uganda to languorous excursions along the River Wandle to the most serene pleasures of grandmotherhood. (Alex M. Frankel)

£3 from the sale of every book will go to the Bwindi Watoto School for orphans in Uganda, which Ann visited on her recent return to Uganda.

Ann Vaughan-Williams (photo: Tish Kerkham)

About Ann

Ann Vaughan-Williams née Kerkham was born in Uganda in 1941 and came to Norfolk when she was fourteen. She worked in Coventry, then Tooting, and at Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital as a Mental Health and Psychiatric Social Worker. For many years she taught Creative Writing in Merton, Kingston and Richmond, and is an active member of South London’s poetry community.

She was an editor of The Long Poem Magazine for five years, has co-edited poetry anthologies with Merton Poets and Whatley Writers, and is the founder of Write Afresh, a weekly writing group primarily for adults with mental health issues. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.

Poems from The Lines We Trace have appeared in publications such as The North, Haiku Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, London Grip, Magma, and Slipstream, Sea Poems (an art pamphlet), and the London Rivers anthology. Her first collection was Warming the Stones (1992).

Audio

Listen to Ann Vaughan-Williams reading from The Lines We Trace.

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zq News April 2016: Words Aloud Sutton + Dance & Poetry Collaborations

Friday, April 15th, 2016

Words Aloud, Sat 16 April, 2–4pm

Sutton Central Library
I’ll be at Words Aloud in Sutton this Saturday with guest Lewis Buxton. I’m doing a slot, and the open mic is always excellent. Compered by Rachel Sambrooks. See their Facebook page for further details:https://www.facebook.com/events/455341517998768/

Publications and Collaborations

Quick Shifts dance collective

Quick Shifts Dance Improvisation Collective

One area of poetry improvisation I’m keen on exploring is movement—in terms of building up a relationship between speech and movement to give performances a more physical dimension, but also how posture and movement affect the way we speak while improvising. Getting performers pacing up and down the room can add nervous energy to their verbal improvisation, and simple things like whether they are looking at one another or up at the ceiling can dramatically change the dynamics.
So I was pleased to be invited to take part in a workshop with Quick Shifts, a dance improvisation collective based in Leicester, in February. We explored ways of incorporating speech into their performances, and one of these ideas formed the basis of their show on 3 March. I also benefitted a lot from seeing how people use improvisation in another artform where it is more established; for example, how they use the number of performers (solo, duet, triplet, etc.) as a central structuring principe.

Nottingham Poetry Improvisation Group

Earlier in April I met with Mark Goodwin for a session in Nottingham, where we recorded some duets and alternating solos (usually I work in bigger groups, so this was a good chance to explore techniques for working as a pair). We’ve both got the recordings, so there may be some alternative versions surfacing once we’ve got round to editing them. There are plans for more in Nottingham over the next few months, with probably a scratch event coming out of it at some point.

Obsessed with Pipework and Open Minds Quarterly

I was excited to hear last week I’ve got three poems in one of my favourite magazines at the moment, Obsessed with Pipework. ‘Story’ and ‘Lay-by’ are from my Poems from the Road sequence, and ‘Trickster Wind’ is about noises in the back yard. ‘Pills’ (which riffs off William Carlos Williams’ ‘This Is Just to Say’, but substitutes ‘pills’ for ‘plums’) appeared in Open Minds Quarterly 17:3.

Sutton Cultural Award

Next week I’m picking up an award, alongside Rachel Sambrooks, for our work on Sutton Stories, a project that ran from July to October last year as part of Imagine Festival of the Arts. It culminated in ‘a truly intergenerational event that gave the elderly a sense of connection to the community and emotionally moved many of the public’, in the words of the Festival Report. Thanks are also due to Joanna Steele, who put a huge amount of effort into the project and successfully managed to pull together all its different strands. There’s a blog post about the work I did with care home residents for the project here: http://www.zeroquality.net/zqblog/?p=747.

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Tea and Cakes with John Hegley

Thursday, October 8th, 2015

Sutton Central Library, St Nicholas Way, SM1 1EA
Saturday 24 October 2015, 2.30–4.30pm

John Hegley hosts this inter-generational poetry event bringing together re-imagined stories of Sutton. Robin Vaughan-Williams has been working with the residents of two care homes in Wallington to create poems about their lives, from hissing gas lamps and clunking meters to lavender fields and wailing sirens, and Rachel Sambrooks has been working with younger generations (adults and teenagers) on their response to these poems and the place they live in. There’ll be video poems, group poems, individual readings, comic verse from John Hegley, and of course tea and cakes.

The event is free and open to all ages, but booking is essential as tickets are being snapped up. Book your place via EventBrite.

(Read more about the first stage of the project here, with some of the poems from the care homes.)

See the full flyer

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Sutton Stories: Intergenerational Workshops

Sunday, August 9th, 2015

Here are the details of the spoken word workshops that form the second stage of the Sutton Stories project I’ve been working on for the Imagine Festival of the Arts (part 1 here). They’ll be led by Rachel Sambrooks, and I’ll be assisting with the first two.

There are two sessions for adults and two for 13–18 year olds, and they’re all FREE! We’ll be performing the work we produce at an event on 24 October hosted by John Hegley in Sutton Central Library.

In July 2015, writer Robin Vaughan-Williams worked with residents in two care homes in Wallington to explore their experiences of Sutton, from bicycles and trams to shops and libraries. In the poems they produced we discover a Sutton of hissing gas lamps and clunking meters, lavender fields and wailing sirens.

In the spoken word workshops we’ll be using the experiences of older residents as our springboard, exploring our experiences of the borough to connect past and present in new ways. We’ll be working on group and prompts for individual work, using different devising techniques to help generate ideas. We will be working towards some poems to perform at the final live literature event on 24th October hosted by John Hegley in Sutton.  We will also have time to practice, share and rehearse before the event.

Dates and Booking

Spoken Word Workshops for young people, 13–18

I. Tuesday 29 September, 4.30–6.30pm

II. Tuesday 6 October, 4.30–6.30pm

Spoken Word Workshops for adults

I. Tuesday 29 September, 6.45–8.45pm

II. Tuesday 6 October, 6.45–8.45pm

You’ll also need to be able to commit to a rehearsal on Sunday 18 October and the performance on 24 October.

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Sutton Stories: The Poetry of Memory

Sunday, August 9th, 2015

In July I ran a series of three workshops in a couple of care homes in Sutton as part of the literature strand of the borough’s Imagine Festival of the Arts, which takes place 16–31 October 2015. Because the Festival’s theme this year is ‘Sutton stories’, we were working around the concept of place, using residents’ memories of Sutton and other places they have lived as material for a series of poems.

It was a great pleasure working with the two groups, who enjoyed sparking off one another and seeing their words written up and re-purposed as poetry. I found that the best way to work was to base the sessions around a loose discussion, with me picking up on some of the things people said, writing those up on the board and asking a few guiding questions to help draw out their memories and experiences. Some of the poems are collective, with contributions from several members of the group, and some are individual in their origin.

I have edited the poems, but they all retain the words and voices of the speakers, and in only a few instances have I added words or lines of my own. The test of this was when we came to video the participants reading their poems; I’d show them the poem first, then ask if they felt it was their own voice, and the response was always a clear yes. One thing I’ve learnt is that memory is selective, with an aesthetic logic of its own—you can trust in the poetry of people’s memory.

We’ll be playing recordings of some of the writing at an event hosted by John Hegley at Sutton Central Library on 24 October 2015, alongside writing produced by younger generations in workshops this September. If you’d like to participate in these, you can sign up to the Spoken Word Workshops on Eventbrite. In the meantime, here are a few of the poems to come out of the project.

He Went to Church

My father bought a television set
from Broughton Radio, aged sixty-five.
One day he walked to church in the snow
sat down in a pew and died.
My mother went to pay the bill
but the technician said his debts were forgiven.

Sunday was a day of rest, and like good Christians
we walked to church in the pouring rain
trying to keep our straw hats dry.
Over Westminster Bridge, the flower lady
on Parliament Square. We let the buses go.
Saved our tuppence for another day.

Source: Joyce Buckingham

Croydon Airport

The airmen used to come down to our house on the corner
to shelter in the garden when the sirens went.

Their melancholy wail and terrible moans
stopped everything. We hid in muddy dug-outs.
No dogs allowed.

When I came out my shoes had gone
along with the house
so a workman lent me his boots.

This was a collective poem fusing together several wartime recollections from participants at Ryelands, but drawing in particular on the memories of Beryl Steward.

Beddington Lane

We lived on a new estate on Beddington Lane
on the site of a pig farm.
Used to go fishing for sticklebacks with my mum
over the Wandle and up the hill
four years old, paddling in the stream with my fishing net.
My dad’s dad lived in Wallington
the gas lights hissing. You had to pull them down
feed a sixpence to the meter
turn the thing round and it went clunk.
Spare coins on the dresser in case the lights went out.

Source: Pam Bollom

Libraries

There is an overwhelming amount of knowledge
in this large room full of books
filled with the voices of children singing
for half an hour on Thursday mornings.

A quiet, meditative space
time to think in silence
look things up, email
and pick up your Freedom Pass.

It’s like passing your A-levels
flying around the world
being on the top of the South Downs
a non-denominational chapel.

This last poem is one of the few pieces resulting from a structured session. We were talking about libraries. I asked about the things people do in libraries, how they’d describe a library, and finally we invented similes for libraries, and you can see pretty clearly how each line in the poem originates from one of these categories.

Thanks to the staff (especially Dawn and Marie) and residents at MHA Ryelands and The Abbeyfield Society, and to Joanna Steele, the Imagine Coordinator, for their enthusiasm and making it all happen.

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zqNews Apr 2015: Texas 2 London Skype poetry + Word’s a Stage poetry impro

Tuesday, April 7th, 2015

In this issue of zqNews, find out about two forthcoming events using Skype and poetry improvisation to make connections, and check out a couple of videos recently uploaded to YouTube.

Texas 2 London

Texas 2 London, my next Skype event, is happening this Friday, 10 April, in Colliers Wood, London. We’ll be linking up with a parallel event at the Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) in Texas with three featured poets either side of the Atlantic sharing their work. There’ll also be a chance for three open mic participants to perform in front of the Austin audience via the video link.

One our side we’ve got Matt Black, Agnes Meadows, and Kayo Chingonyi, and in Austin we’ll be hearing from three AIPF poets: Element615, Teresa Y Roberson, and Mr Dave.

I’ll be presenting alongside electro-pop poetry duo Project Adorno, and the Texas event will be hosted by Thom the World Poet. Thom is a gloriously spontaneous, unpredictable, and inspired poet and also committed to the principles of democracy in the arts. Check out his appearance at a previous Skype event on YouTube.

The evening kicks off at 7pm with the open mic (first come, first served), then we’re online with Austin from 8 to 9.30pm. For more details about the programme visit http://www.zeroquality.net/texas2london.html.

Friday 10 April 2015, 7–10pm
Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills, SW19 2RD (near Colliers Wood underground)
£3 on the door. Enquiries to 020 3730 8039.

Let us know you’re coming on Facebook.

Word’s a Stage Improvisation Project

Word’s a Stage

The last couple of months I’ve been working with four poets—Becci Fearnley, Sean Wai Keung, Andrea Queens, and Zahrah Sheikh—on putting together a performance using poetry improvisation techniques. We’ve got one more workshop to go, then the final event, where there’ll also be a collaborative performance from Apples and Snakes’ GasWorks group, will take place on Tuesday 14 April at Free Word (Farringdon) from 7.30pm (Free).

It’s the first chance I’ve had to work with a group over a sustained period on a poetry improvisation project, and the first time I’ve used improvisation to put together a performance rather than recordings, so it’s been an exciting and new experience for us all. The group has been amazing, fearless, and eager to rise the challenge, and I’ve learnt a lot from them myself during the workshops.

Our final piece is provisionally entitled ‘You are not the voices inside my head’ [later changed to ‘Grey Parrot Singing’] and circles loosely around the idea of ‘search’ and what happens to our voices in the age of social media. YouTube has been a significant source of material, from trolling to cat videos, self-hypnosis and political rants. The performance includes several improvised scenes, including free improv, pair work, a human-generated Apostrophe poem, and a warm-up that surprised us all by uncovering the poetry of numbers.

The project is coordinated by Apples and Snakes, and you can see the event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/836322796452518/

NWS in London

Andrew Kells at NWS in London

It’s been a busy few months what with Texas 2 London and Word’s a Stage coming up, and the Nottingham Writer’s Studio’s London showcase, which I hosted on 21 March 2015.

When I was Development Director at NWS we’d been talking about a London showcase to help bridge the gap between the London-centric publishing world and the strong writing communities in Nottingham and other regions, so all credit to my successor Pippa Hennessy for taking the first step in making this happen.

The readers were all contributors to one of NWS’s new ventures, a literary journal that has so far covered ‘crime’, ‘secrets’, and ‘a sense of place’. You can get hold of the journal in electronic form for free on Issuu: http://issuu.com/nottinghamwritersstudio.

It was great to hear the stories and poems I’d read in the journal straight from the writer’s mouth and to feel the enthusiasm in the room from both audience and readers. One of my favourite stories was Lynda Clarke’s rather gruesome tale ‘Stealing from the Dead’, and Andrew Kells and Liz Hart in particular electrified with their energetic performances.

Videos

Reuben da Cunha Rocha Skyping Nottingham, Oct 2014

I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube recently. Here are a couple you might enjoy.

  1. Brazilian poet Reuben da Cunha Rocha mesmerising the audience at Skype Me! Nottingham and the World, 18 October 2014: https://youtu.be/4iTPu4KvPtM
  2. ‘Frogger’, a poem that started out with dual origins in a 1980s computer game and an attempt at a perpetual cycling accident, but which ended up in the twisted fairground of the imaginationl, read here at Word of Mouth in Nottingham, November 2012: https://youtu.be/HiyH980Fv6Y

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zqNews Jan 2015: Texas 2 London, Death on the Road, and Word’s a Stage

Friday, February 6th, 2015

In this issue of zqNews, find out about my forthcoming video link between Texas and London, new audio tracks from Poems from the Road, and poetry improvisation projects in the pipeline for London and St Andrews.

Poems from the Road

Poems from the RoadI’ve uploaded two new tracks to my Poems from the Road SoundCloud playlist. There’s a fascinating interview I conducted with London Grip editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs about poet-cum-cricketing commentator John Arlott’s pamphlet-length poem ‘Death on the Road’, and ‘Travelling the Roads in My Red Mini’, a poem by Ann Vaughan-Williams exploring the voices that accumulated in her car during her time as a psychiatric social worker

The Poems from the Road podcast is now available on the Apples and Snakes SoundCloud page, so if you missed it in December, you can now listen to it at your leisure. And the additional materials that I wasn’t able to include in the podcast are up on my SoundCloud page until the end of February. Check out the Poems from the Road webpage.

I’m also planning to submit a 10-minute Poems from the Road feature to Radio Wildfire, so if you’ve any favourite poems from the show or additional material, let me know and I’ll consider them for the feature.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the show!

Texas 2 London

Skype Me! Sheffield and the WorldOn 10th April the Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) is coming to London with Texas 2 London at the Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills. AIPF is renowned as a melting pot of world poetry, and our three guests will be trading poems with poets in Austin via a live video link. On our side we’ve got Matt Black, Agnes Meadows, and Kayo Chingonyi, and on the Texas side there’ll be Element615 plus two more to be confirmed.

Take part!
There’ll also be a chance for you to perform your work at the AIPF. At 7pm we’ll have an open mic (offline), and three participants from the open mic will then be offered a short slot during the video-linked part of the evening.

I’m co-hosting with electro-pop poetry duo Project Adorno, and the hosts on the other side of the Atlantic will be the irrepressible and always surprising Thom the World Poet and James Jacobs. I’m collaborating with OpenHaus Arts on producing Texas 2 London, and it’s supported by an Arts Development Fund grant from Merton Council.

Friday 10 April 2015, 7–10pm
Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills, SW19 2RD (near Colliers Wood underground)
£3 on the door. Enquiries to 020 3730 8039.
More info: http://zeroquality.net/texas2london.html

Poetry Improvisation

Poetry ImprovisationMy December workshop at the Scottish Writers’ Centre in Glasgow got a great write-up, and I have several poetry improvisation projects coming up in the next couple of months.

I’m particularly excited about an Apples and Snakes project called Word’s a Stage that’s starting this Saturday. I’ll be leading a series of four workshops with four emerging writers to develop a performance for early April (exact date TBA). We’ll be using improvisation techniques to generate material and the final performance will be at least part improvised on the night.

This is a valuable opportunity to explore what we can do with poetry improvisation when working with a group over a sustained period of time. I’ve got some ideas about feeding off the audience (so the audience become part of the poetry), chorus work, and layered set pieces with background and foreground voices, but in the end it’s down to the individuals in the group to see how they interact and what we come up with.

Leaving the Comfort Zone
I’m also offering a poetry improvisation workshop at Scotland’s Stanza poetry festival in St Andrew’s on Saturday 7 March. This will be a day-long workshop during which we’ll devise material for a short performance at the end of it. I believe there are a couple of places left, so still time to book.

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Skyping Ahead

Wednesday, October 1st, 2014

Under three weeks to go now till Skype Nottingham on 18 October, and the programme is shaping up nicely. I’ve been enjoying some fascinating Skype conversations with participants in Brazil, Germany, and Austria, and am excited about their plans for the evening.

A couple of days ago I spoke with Reuben da Cunha Rocha, who took part in World Event Young Artists (WEYA) in 2012 and stole the show at the Festival of Words launch event that September with his incantational and, to my mind, slightly hallucinatory sound poetry inspired by the tribal rhythms he’d discovered on an island off the north-west coast of Brazil. Reuben da Cunha Rocha

WEYA was an amazing festival, bringing together some 1,000 young artists from around the world, including 30 writers. There was enormous energy over the ten days as artists from different cultures discovered one another’s work and started to collaborate and make new connections. Then everybody went home. So it was wonderful to hear that WEYA had had a lasting impact for Reuben, as he’d been encouraged to go on developing the kind of work he’d presented at the festival, and had gone on to collaborate further with several of the artists he’d met at WEYA. Now he’s coming back to Nottingham this October, two years on, and, coming full circle, I’m looking forward to seeing what he has to offer us.

I’ve also spoken with Klaus Tauber in Vienna and Johann Reisser, who lives in Berlin but is currently undertaking a residency in the German city of Rottweil. I’m pairing Klaus with Leicestershire poet Mark Goodwin, as although they don’t know each other, they are linked by the Austrian poet Karin Tarabochia. Karin is part of a group curated by Mark on SoundCloud called Air to Hear, which collects digitally produced sound and poetry, and Klaus will be incorporating Karin’s voice into his performance for Skype Nottingham, which he’ll be presenting live from the roof of the Vienna Volkstheater.

Vienna Volkstheater

Vienna Volkstheater

Johann Reisser organised an impressive event recently called Katastrophen/Formen, which involved bringing together WWI poetry from fourteen different countries for a staged reading. One of the things that interested him was how poets responded differently to the First World War in different countries. For example, I tend to think of British poetry from World War One as using conventional forms such as the sonnet to convey their traumatic content. But if you take a look at the poetry of German Expressionist August Stramm, translated here by Alistair Noon, you’ll see a very different, much more experimental approach to war poetry. The way his tornado-shaped forms wither down from top to bottom captures for me the whittling down of existence, and indeed of language, and the disorienting syntax suggests the disorientation of war.

Katastrophen/Formen

Katastrophen/Formen

Johann will be reading a poem on WWI by the poet Thomas Kling, who died in 2005, and I’ve paired him up with Ian Douglas, whose highly praised story of disaster in the North Sea, ‘Dead in the Water’, was included in the graphic fiction anthology To End All Wars. I hope this juxtaposition will give us a taste of the different ways that WWI is remembered in Germany and the UK.

Skype Me! Nottingham and the World takes place on Saturday 18 October 2014, 9–11pm at Nottingham Writers’ Studio (25 Hockley, NG1 1FP) as part of Nottingham Festival of Words. Tickets are £5 and available from the Nottingham Playhouse Box Office, online or by phone (0115 941 9419).

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Poetry Improvisation Workshop – Nottingham 26 July

Monday, July 14th, 2014

I’ll be running a poetry improvisation workshop at Nottingham Writers’ Studio from 10am to around 5pm on Saturday 26 July 2014.

The session uses group improvisation to explore ways of working together to create spontaneously. The session will include games, structured scenarios where we work with different poetic voices, and freeform improvisation that can take off in any direction. Some of the things I’ve done in improv sessions in the past include creating a human-generated Apostrophe poem, speaking in endangered languages, and producing a piece based on Snapchat.

If you’re used to writing poetry on your own with a keyboard or pen, this is going to be something completely different – it’s oral, collaborative, and spontaneous.

Poetry improvisation can be a great way to channel your inner voice, explore the possibilities of working with others, and build confidence in your spontaneity. It can also be used to generate pieces for performance or recording, and as a method for producing ideas for further development.

The cost is £75 or £50 (NWS members), which includes tea/coffee and biscuits, and there’ll be a one-hour lunch break (lunch not included).

Further details and booking info are available on the Nottingham Writers’ Studio website:
http://nottinghamwritersstudio.co.uk/event/group-poetry-improvisation-workshop-robin-vaughan-williams/

More about my workshops: http://www.zeroquality.net/zqme/workshops.html

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Poetry Improvisation Workshop, 28 February 2014

Friday, February 7th, 2014

Back in 2008 I was blown away by a poetry improvisation session I’d been to, along with other poets in the group I belonged to at the time. One of the members of the group worked for Point Blank theatre company, and had arranged for us to spend a day with theatre director Steve Jackson. He’d asked us to each memorise a poem, but apart from that we didn’t know what to expect. We hoped it would shake things up a bit, give us some different perspectives on our writing, and help us improve our performance techniques.

BOOK POETRY IMPROV WORKSHOP

BOOK WORKSHOP (free)

We spent the morning doing physical theatre exercises, but it was the afternoon, when we focused on the voice, that really produced amazing results. There we were, about five of us, lying spread out in Sheffield’s Open Performance Centre, shut off in our own little worlds, slowly reciting the poems we’d learnt and building on them, working out new directions for them. And then something wonderful happened. We started to respond to one another’s voices, picking up on words other people had said, incorporating them into our own narratives, and listening to our own threads become intertwined with those the others were spinning. We had started out as five disparate voices, but by the end of the exercise those voices had come together to form something utterly new, unique, and of the moment.

That is not an experience you often get as a poet. And the feeling was very different too—I tend to find myself using spiritual terms when I describe it. There was a sense of a deep but effortless connection, of a consciousness awakening, and I would say a kind of euphoria.

So that got me hooked. I wanted to do it again, to record it, see what we could come up with. I ran a poetry improvisation session with some of our group again, using a multitrack recorder so I could capture each voice on a separate channel. That resulted in some pieces like ‘Everything Changes‘, and we started to explore different ways of spontaneously building a poem together. I used some improvisation in the workshops for ‘Lost Voices‘, a collective poetry performance I was producing at the time. And then in my final radio show for SheffieldLive, Adele Geraghty and Sarah Thomasin joined me for a couple of structured poetry improvisations I’d devised, which produced ‘Are You My Friend?‘.

I’m now drawing on these experiences for a poetry improvisation session with Apples and Snakes on 28 February. We’ll be using a mixture of structured and freeform approaches to explore how poets can create spontaneously and collaboratively. If you’ve ever been to a creative writing workshop, you’ll know that people can come up with some amazing things in a five-minute exercise. To me that’s evidence that we can all improvise, but we often censor what we produce; we’re afraid to fail, wanting to check and edit before letting others see what we’ve written. Group improvisation is all about the process, finding the confidence in your inner voice, and opening yourself up to the voices of those around you.  It can be a powerful way of giving your creativity a kick and discovering new ideas. Some of what we produce might just be an interesting experiment, and some of it might be something we can work up into a recording or a performance.

If you’re up for something new and exciting, give it a go! You can find booking details on the Apples and Snakes website:

http://www.applesandsnakes.org/page/37/Power+Plant+Improvisation+for+Poets/1098

Workshop Title: Improvisation for Poets
When: Friday 28 February, 10am–3pm (with a break for lunch)
Where: Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Rd, London, EC1R 3GA
Tickets: FREE
Info: 020 8465 6154

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