Poems made by hand

Swings and roundabouts. It’s going to be a much shorter than usual post this week, but homework will be set.

It starts, I suppose, with the poet Jane Draycott. It starts on a writing week with a writing task which we were given….subsequently, and unnervingly, it was never mentioned again. Jane D. never asked what we’d done, or even if we’d done it. I think I felt a bit miffed, because I did it religiously. Maybe I wanted a mark out of ten, or a smiley face. The task was this.

Each day, for five days, take a poem you think you know pretty well, a poems that means a lot to you. Each day for five days copy out a fresh poem by hand. Don’t type or keyboard it. Write it out by hand.

Or it starts with Anthony Wilson, and his wonderful Life Saving Poems and his jaw-droppingly…