Are you all working on your homework for Tuesday? Last week’s poetry workshop with Brian Whittingham was a terrific success, with a great turnout and excellent buzz.
Modest to a fault, Brian described his own masterpiece – The Window Cleaner – as “not necessarily all that good…”; but wow – what a hard act to follow. Most of us spend so much of our lives engaged in work of some kind or another, and yet somehow end up writing and reading about other things. Brian encouraged us to look at the dignity and drama embodied in work, via a whistle stop tour of his own career; born to a German mother and English father, Brian left school at fourteen and worked in the shipyards (where he learned to “drink, swear, and talk about sex”).
And it turns out we even had Larry Butler in the audience, who ‘volunteered’ to read out Ted Kooser’s excellent poem (from which we all have so much to learn), A Rainy Morning.
On Tuesday we shall air our attempts to live up to these daunting exemplars!
