Meeting a poet.
Thursday this week, I met Lemn Sissay, an English poet who held a fun poetry workshop at the British Council in Chennai. He has got to be single most inspiring/entertaining person I’ve ever had try to teach me something.
There were some 20 of us there that day, and he had all of us laughing nearly all the time while he went about the task of telling us little important things about a poem, saying, among other things, “If you must use a cliché, add an adjective in at any point, that will convey the reference to previous uses and will have more meaning.”*, and how to choose a name, “Choose any two random words from your poem and put them together.”* The interesting thing is that many poems written there that day could have put an entire team of literature analysts to work for months to examine completely their intricacy and meaning while…’scanning well’.
The most amazing thing was that he had absolutely no hangups and seemed to understand exactly what this bunch of people he’d never met wanted at any time. Thanks, Mr. Sissay :)
*Quotes are not literal, it’s what I remember to be the meaning of what he said.
Posted by roshan.george under Madras, Musings |