Last week I was asked to do a short Poetry workshop at the Lynmouth Pavilion, just a couple of hours working with anyone and everyone stepping through the door. I scratched my head a little and wondered what I should do to 'write these up' as they happened. Schools I work with have white boards and are generally tooled up for this kind of group note taking, but this was not going to work for the Pavilion.
It just so happened that I'd been hoarding these off cuts from the slating of our kitchen roof, and with a little chalk they had just the right space for a snatch of words.
And so Twitter 'Exmoor Style' came about, and here are the fruits of the session.
Each has a journey, a history, an emotion attached. Some are from children visiting Exmoor for the first time, others from residents and generations of visiting this place again and again.
One reads 'Chaos house of children' where two families, each with four children were staying in the same house over the week.
'Cream teas, yes please, neoprene squeeze'
Was about a family who's enjoyment of cream teas came to a head when trying to put wet suits on the day before!
A couple had visited Clovelly the previous day to see if the pub in the middle of the village really did exist. She has been looking at an old photograph of it on her fathers wall all her life and finding themselves with in stones throw they went to investigate. Well did it actually exist? Yes it did, but the photo was taken with The New Inn on the wrong side of the street. Had it been reversed in the negative? No the pub had switched to the other side of the street around 1914 for a larger premises.
I must confess I had a great conversation with one boy about the 'phony pony' (the one which is actually two men in a pony suit.) He asked me 'how can you tell?' I explained you must always look at the legs, they are a give away. He wrote this slide above as he loved how the ponies were free.
This slide is about lying down in the bracken or heather and how the sounds become very focused and totally about the immediate surroundings of perhaps just a foot from your ears.
The final slide evoking the history of visiting poets from ages gone Shelly, Southey, Coleridge and Byron.
It was a short session with great depth (you just have to ask) and is a great pre-empt for the Poetry Box Project due to go live on 1st June along the Barle river at Tarr Steps on the moors which is also funded by the Lynmouth Pavilion Project.
Thankyou to all who picked up the chalk.
