Two weeks ago today I was in the middle of a wonderful Arvon course at The Hurst. The statue was the view out my window. We had a fabulous week with a fantastic group of poets, led by Helena Nelson and Cliff Yates. I chose this week because of the tutors and I wasn't disappointed. They gave so much of their time, created wonderful tasks for us and were so positive with their feedback and humour. The group worked brilliantly together and I wanted the week to go on for ever. It felt strange coming back into the real world and I'm still feeling a bit depressed to be dealing with mundane issues like food shopping and the next car service. I even started to wonder what it must be like to live in a community as a nun, so long as I wasn't the one on supermarket duty.
I'm now back in Portugal and our next Stanza meeting is on Saturday. We are all bringing poems that we think we'd like to read at our reading on December 3rd. I want to see if any themes emerge and think about how to orchestrate the event. For some of the audience it will probably be the first reading they have ever been to ... and they may ... just may ... think they don't like or understand poetry SO we have to choose our poems well.
Meanwhile I'm on two online courses with the Poetry School. One, Transreading Spain, I'm finding very challenging and I'm not quite sure I understand the latest assignment. I'm enjoying looking at Basque, Catalan and Galician poetry and it's good to be challenged, isn't it? So back to my books.
