Sixth Form Writing Enrichment
We have had a really creative few months in the Sixth Form Writing Enrichment run by Ms Cohen, with a great selection of writing in different styles produced by our talented students. Here are a couple of recent highlights for you to enjoy!
Amelie Knox in Y12 found our workshop on the style of Emily Dickinson fruitful and has written this ballad in response, echoing Dickinson’s distinctive broken structure and focus on sensual imagery and extended metaphor.
The dawning of summer
This very morning – Summer came
And ground my year to dust
With the gentle touch of – Lovers
She peeled the earth’s rough crust
And in this seduction she laid me down
And Kissed – my weary eyes
Spoke of splaying – Languid in the grass
As clouds meander by
Now the ground is newly Tender –
It reveals its Beading Sweat
Tendrils of heat reach greedily
With Ripeness they are met –
The trees are Lush and lucrative
The world - it Bears its Fruit
Days dripping with indulgence
The path of time dilute
Amelie also wrote brilliantly in our workshop on Simon Armitage’s The Making of the Flying Scotsman (a phantasmagoria), deftly applying Armitage’s idea of a fantastical assemblage of things to describe the formation of a mechanical object to instead explore the creation of a landscape.
The making of the Quantock Hills
The undulation of the land was born of a giant’s calloused thumb
Slipped underneath the sheath of the earth
nestled neatly between dartmoor and exmoor
She prodded affectionately from beneath
Leaving intricacies of skin imprinted
For the sea salt marshes, the gritty wetness
The soil soaked with amniotic fluid
Pooling and flowing and reaching its tendrils down to the core
Grasping the little patch of land with ever craving hunger
Reaching for the sky too until it hung low with beading droplets
And for the moth-eaten carpet of green, seeds
like there are grains of sand on a beach
And the seeds were her children, brimming with salt
Growing verdant from her nest of roots
Held fast from the wind and flourishing in the moist air
Where the trees grow thick they say it is her hair
Tracing the dirt, mingling, shivering in the breeze
And when the forests are storm-ravaged, windswept
She wears it defiantly in a tangled crown
Surrendering her fallen soldiers with gnarled grace
Edie Regnier, also in Y12, has written with us this term too. The poem below was written during our workshop on the fiendishly complex Sestina form. In this form six words are repeated in a set pattern across six stanzas, followed by a three-line envoi in which all six words need to appear in a set order. The limitations of this tricky form can prove very stimulating, as was the case for Edie in the poem below.
Merrily she burned until the steeple was gone
He stood, mourning the loss of his view
They stood in a circle as the smoke rose
Standing, swaying, but never still
The once petty rebellion had started a war
Merrily she watched as the church stood burning
The stained glass cracked from the frame burning
The once tall and majestic bell tower, gone
The boys sent out too young to fight in a war
Too harrowing for them to view
But onwards and upwards they marched, never still
As their world shattered, and smoke rose
The commander yelled fire! The barrel of a rifle rose
And as the bullet flew through another’s heart, it began burning
He stood and watched the man fall lifeless, finally still
The light flickered, the men surrounding him were gone
Lying in the mud, face down, an obstructed view
The boys too young to fight, now fighting their parents’ war
The parents sitting at home, fretting over the war
Pinning to their jackets a red rose
Showing their love for the boys with an obstructed view
The fire in their hearts kept burning
Even when they knew he was gone
And all the world went still
They leapt into action, never once still
This isn’t a game they told themselves, this is war
Trampling over fallen soldiers, long gone
As the smoke from dozens of overheated rifles rose
As the village of innocents behind them began burning
This is not a game they said, as they obliterated the view
But once the smoke had cleared, nothing remained but the view
They sank to their knees and cried, their first time being still
The dead surrounding them, the ill slowly burning
With fever. But pauses aren’t allowed in war
No rejoicing for those who never rose
For they were all long gone
She didn’t know how to view the war
But still, she pinned a rose to her lapel
And smothered the burning until it was gone
Well done to our talented writers!
Ms C
