Update on Blogging Course

Thanks to all of you who shared your ideas on blogging and what you wished you had known when you started out! Unfortunately the course i was to be teaching this term has been cancelled due to lack of interest. It will hopefully happen next term and I'll save all your ideas until then and will credit everyone for their ideas. I now know not to rely on Edinburgh council having enough marketing in place for all their courses and will be doing much more active marketing myself next time round!

Oblivious

We are prisoners in our smart suburban houses,
our chic city apartments,
yet think we are free.

We ignore the cries of the lost and the poor,
the laments of the dying
wilderness.

We don’t listen to the gathering thunder,
the growling sounds
from underground.

We don’t see the towering walls
of debris and water
hanging over us.

We will awake too late
to begin scouring
paths of escape.


Thanks to Jemima for letting me use the line 'scouring paths of escape' from her excellent poem: Big Come Down.

Poetry Thursday

Haiku - reflections

Glass offices -
reflections of trees
and scudding clouds.

house windows -
birds confused by reflected
garden.


We walked round the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh this weekend and were delighted to see:

kingfisher -
electric blue reflection
in water.


For the interests of this post, I tried an experiment:

showing my rabbit
how beautiful she is -
reflection ignored.


Reflections for One Deep Breath.

Your Ideas, please!

I've been asked by Edinburgh Council to teach a course on blogging starting from the week after next (as long as enough people are interested!). So I thought this week's Sunday Scribbling prompt 'Ideas' offered an ideal opportunity to ask other Sunday Scribblers and other visitors to share ideas about blogging. Areas where your ideas would be most useful are:

1) When you first started blogging, what would you have found most useful to know?

2) Why do you blog?

3) What are the best things about blogging?

4) What do you find difficult about blogging?

5) How do you keep yourself going as a blogger - how do you think up ideas for what to write about? (I will be suggesting my students visit Sunday Scribblings of course!).

Please feel free to also add in other ideas about blogging that you think may be interesting to beginner bloggers. I will of course give you credit for any of your ideas that I share with my student. Thanks!

Stormy Weather - Trees

Edinburgh has had terrible weather the past few days, constant rain and gale force winds. In the middle of the Botanic Gardens:

tree torn up in storm

fallen across the pathway -

robinsong.

Trees have also been uprooted along the Water of Leith that runs through Edinburgh. Hopefully some of the dead stumps and branches will be left to grow fungi, lichen and moss. Hopefully one day I'll get some good photos of lichen and fungi, because there are some beautiful examples along our woodland, riverside walks.

The Book of Blood - Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver is one of the finest poets currently writing in Scotland, I've heard her read a few times and was interested to read her work on the page for a change. She writes beautifully with a real sense for the sounds and rhythms of language, she uses a lot of subtle internal rhyme. She writes about relationships between men and women and between humans and the environment. I find her attitude to nature often rather disturbing (see the Poetry Thursday post below for more on that!). However her best poetry is truly stunning, like the last poem in the book The Blue Butterfly, where she sees nature in a more pleasant light than she normally does, or in this wonderful extract from Pills, where a woman has come off her medication:

She'd kneel on the lawn,
skirt soaked, rediscovering
the shades of grass; each blade -
like the seconds lost -
separate, sharp., drawing blood
from her thumb. She'd gaze at organges
as people gaze at statues of Christ
on the Cross: the brilliant rinds -
packed with juice, flesh, pips -
exploding like grenades,
like brains, like trapped gases
at the surface of the sun.

Red in Tooth and Claw

I am currently reading Vicki Feaver's Book of Blood. I enjoy Feaver's poetry a lot, she has a great way with words, using a lot if subtle internal rhyme. However along with John Burnside another excellent Scottish poet, she shows a tendency to sense badness or evil in nature, sort of summed up in the cliched phrase 'Red in Tooth and Claw'. I find this a disturbing and inaccurate view to take, which inspired me to write the poem below.


Red in Tooth and Claw

Nature is darkly unknowable
Wildnerness is wild, untameable
Tigers attack, strike fear into hearts.

I would not live with grizzly bears
but nor would I pretend
essential evil in nature.

We are the ones who destroy our own nests
we are the ones who kill for fun
We are the ones with the reddest teeth

the reddest claws.


Cliches for Poetry Thursday