During the past few weeks we’ve looked East for inspiration with our work on haiku and Feng Shui. This week I thought we’d look West, to England and to Shakespeare. Before that, let me tell you what exercises we did last week at the VT Writers’ Group.

Colour
We decided to take “colour” as our theme. First we read and discussed a poem called Yellow written by Jackie Kay. The poem had lots of references to yellow as you might expect, which we noted and looked beyond to identify metaphors and similes. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term is transferred to something it does not literally apply to. For example, a metaphor from Yellow is “the hedge has its hair cut”. A simile is a comparison of one thing with another. An example from the poem is “two, white, sweet, pickled onions stare like blind eyes”. During the discussion and analysis one member of the group said that she thought Yellow was more like a piece of prose and not a poem at all. Other members agreed and this led to a debate about “What makes a poem?” and “What are the rules anyway?” Answers on a postcard please!

Reading other people’s poetry is a great way to get started, why not try it? Choose a poem and identify similes and metaphors.

Music
The discussion about poetry could have gone on for some time. Honestly, the things people will do to avoid writing! To move things on I played four pieces of music, each about two minutes long. My choices were:

The Gotan Project’s Epoca, which is Argentinian tango music.
Rachid Taha’s French/Algerian version of Rock el Casbah.
Liliana Butler’s Ashum Daje Mori from Serbia.
Down to the River to Pray, a gospel song from the American movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Exercise
Choose four pieces of music. Select pieces from different countries. Close your eyes and think about colour while the first track is playing. As soon as it’s finished write down the colours the piece evoked for you. Repeat three more times with the other pieces of music.

Read over (or out loud to someone if possible) what you have written then take a minute to decide what colour or group of colours you want to write about.

If you are still undecided assemble some colourful stimuli. We laid out a set of coloured pencils, some hair bobbles, a few postcards and some iridescent shells on the table while we were writing – they seemed to help.

Write 14 lines about your chosen colour. Try to incorporate at least one metaphor and simile.

Sonnets
Writing within a form is a good exercise. Sometimes a poem starts with writing about something close to your heart and sometimes it starts with trying to adhere to a particular form. This week we looked at the sonnet.

All sonnets have 14 lines. There are two main types of sonnet, the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean. Today we’re going to look at the Shakespearean sonnet which originated in England and has a particular rhyme scheme. Usually, the scheme is expressed as follows: ababcdcdefefgg, which means that in the first four lines of a sonnet, the first and third lines rhyme and the second and fourth lines rhyme. The same rhyme scheme is repeated in the following four lines and again in the four lines after that. The f?nal two lines rhyme with each other; this is known as a rhyming couplet.

One of the most famous Shakespearean sonnets is Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? The first four lines are printed below, note the rhyme scheme:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (a)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: (b)
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, (a)
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; (b)

You might like to look up the whole sonnet. Some examples of sonnets written by other poets are:

Farewell to Love by Michael Drayton
Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
Ozymandias by Percy Shelley
Bright Star by John Keats.

If you look at these four sonnets you will see that Drayton and Keats adhere to Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme but Barrett-Browning and Shelley do not, yet they are still writing sonnets. This difference could lead you (understandably) back to the discussion about "what are the rules?" but we all know that this is just a ploy to get out of writing.

Now take another look at the 14 lines you have written about colour, give them a title, check for coherence and rewrite it following the Shakespearean rhyme scheme. When you’ve done it, congratulate yourself on having written your first sonnet.

The Sofia Echo poetry competition
If this column has motivated you to write, you might consider entering the Sofia Echo Poetry competition. Send a poem of no more than 40 lines in English or in Bulgaria to features@sofiaecho.com by March 15 2008. The competition will be judged by the poet Kapka Kassabova and the top two poems will be printed in this space in the Sofia Echo.
www.kapka-kassabova.com

The VT Writers’ Group
This group meets weekly at the Veliko Arts Centre, 36 Ivan Vazov Str, Veliko Turnovo. For more information call Eileen Sutherland on 089/ 989 64 42.