Page 25 - Mansfield 2019/20

Growing our own
poems @Mansfield
Ros Ballaster Professorial Fellow in English Literature
Mansfield College is full of poetry: we talk about it in our tutorials, we read
it in study bedrooms, we compose it
on scraps of paper and beautiful lined notebooks. Never more so than this Michaelmas term 2020 when tutors and students (undergrads and postgrads) have had the opportunity to attend workshops led by poet Kate Clanchy.
Kate won the Forward Prize for her first collection, Slattern (1996), was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Book Award for her first novel Meeting the English and won the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing for Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. She is much in demand as a tutor of creative writing and especially admired
for the work she has done over decades nurturing young poets from disadvantaged and migrant backgrounds in state schools (and in particular Oxford Spires Academy). Most recently she edited an anthology Unmute: Young Voices from Lockdown (2020) and a handbook How to Grow Your Own Poem (2020) for aspirant bards.
So how lucky we are to have Kate work with us for an hour each Saturday afternoon: first under socially-distanced arrangements in person in College and then online.
Not so different from yoga it turns out. We start with a ‘warm-up’: each submitting
a line speaking to a prompt from Kate
and putting together a ‘group poem’. And then we have to work (with increasing concentration and attention) on our own poems taking our cues from an example
provided by Kate. We’ve worked on ‘praise’ poems (for individuals), poems about ‘what we miss’, poems about the lasting memories of stories from our childhood, ‘list’ poems. As we sit wrestling with words whether
on screen or on paper, Kate’s voice talks
us through the process, encourages us to focus on specific images and memories and make them concrete in language, guiding us to move on to the next phrase or phase, warning us to back away from the general and the specious. We are/I am amazed that I can indeed produce a poem – I can even experiment with rhyme schemes and meter – in 20 minutes.
We read our poems – or not if we aren’t happy with them or we are just unhappy. Some prefer to keep themselves hidden, some read their poems from the screen in close up and we can trace the lines in their eye-movements, there are pairs and groups of three sharing one screen and their creative processes at once. It’s a mix of staff and students. I’ve learned that
‘ So how lucky we are to have Kate work with
us for an hour each Saturday afternoon: first under socially-distanced arrangements in person in College and then online. ’
our Principal Helen Mountfield needs to have a pen between her teeth when she composes. I’ve got to know every feature of the faces and tone of voice of students I have never and will never teach.
We’re learning too to deliver our poems as readers, to make them part of our speaking voices. First poem first reading and you
are shaky and nervous, the poem very raw and close to your immediate feelings. A few meetings on and it has somehow become part of a shared past, part of our writing identity, something that belongs more to the group and to the world of poetry we are all so curious to be part of as more- than-readers.
Kate tweets some of the poems she helps to grow with the authors’ permission. @KateClanchy1 tweets a poem by Brennig Davies, a third-year student. It’s called ‘What I Miss When I’m Away’ and it made us all cry. It goes viral, being viewed 400,000 times. There is so much love for, and in, this hymn to home.
We will meet again next term and carry on growing our poems and growing
ways of relating to each other in the Mansfield community through poetry. In the meantime, and with her permission, a poem by Chantale, one of our number(s) has written the poem on the next page. For me, it captures the unusualness of the experience of a term of social distance at University and the absolute usualness of learning to be a student at Oxford.
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