EVENTS Poetry to make your prose sing
September's London Masterclass with Joseph Coelho was a fascinating event that showed us how to use poetry to explore elements of our works in progress, reports Mandy Rabin.
Joseph's debut poetry collection, Werewolf Club Rules, won the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education Poetry (CLPE CLiPPA) award, while his second collection, Overheard in a Towerblock, has been longlisted for the Carnegie medal, shortlisted for the CLPE CLiPPA award and is currently longlisted for the 2019 UKLA Book Awards — and was The Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week.
Joseph talks about his journey to publication. |
Joseph grew up feeling that "words were ours," and was surrounded at home by rhyme, song and word play
Joseph went on to join a performance poetry organisation, where he learned to write under time pressure. He found the more he delved into making poetry accessible to others, the more it became accessible to him. Performing one-man shows in theatres, halls and libraries gave Joseph a sense of empowerment and control over his own writing.
Joseph weaves his magic. |
He stressed how important it is to keep a sense of joy and wonder when we're writing and said that, rather than being afraid of people stealing our work, we should let the words breathe by performing them to ourselves and to others, sharing work safely in critique groups or online, or at poetry cafes and spoken word events.
He's a fan of writing quickly and said we should write for ourselves rather than keeping publishers in mind. He then showed us how, by making poetry a part of our own creative process, we can use it to learn what makes a story tick.
Writers use poetic devices to develop their own work in progress. |
Through these exercises, I gained useful insights into the main character in my work in progress, as well as an important theme, and I was impressed by the quality of the poetry produced by fellow SCBWIs, especially given the limited time we had to master the techniques.
how hard it is to translate highly formed poems that include homophones and rhyme for the overseas markets; how you write a picture book and leave space for the illustrator to interpret the story creatively; and is there really such a thing as children's poetry, or does all poetry have universal appeal?
I came away feeling inspired by Joseph's perseverance and the creative ways he managed to make a living out of poetry and get the attention of publishers, and with some great new tools with which to explore my own writing.
*All photos: Alison Smith
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Mandy Rabin is a writer of middle grade fantasy adventure fiction, represented by Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown Group.
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Fran Price is part of the editorial team at Words and Pictures, the online magazine for SCBWI-BI, and is Events Editor. Contact her at events@britishscbwi.org.
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