Poems for a heatwave
5 poems for hot sweaty days
Dear writerly friend,
I hope you’re well, wherever you are in the world. And if you’re underneath the scorching heat dome that seems to have settled itself FOREVER over Europe and the UK, I hope you have your feet in a bowl of iced water, cool flannels on your neck and some suitably gorgeous person wafting ostrich feathers at your face. [Warning: Heat induced delusions may affect the quality of this newsletter.]
I’ve been up in that London this past week (and no one needs any fancy coloured heat maps to know that concrete makes things hotter.) Last Monday saw me up to the elbows in one of my favourite freelance projects: working at the brilliant Poetry By Heart finals event at Shakespeare’s Globe. One of my roles is to prepare young people to get up onto the main Globe stage and recite poems that they’ve learned from an online anthology. It’s just a glorious thing to see such enthusiasm for poetry and to witness these bright young things taking poems from the literary canon and making them their own. [Cue: tears every time!]
And on Sunday I had the joy of attending the Storytelling360: State of the Story conference at the British Film Institute. This involved a whole day of panel talks from amazing writers, producers, agents and other film adjacent folk. I took notes. You can read my highlights on my instagram post about it here.
On the train back to the Shire I got to thinking about writing and and stories and poems and how bloody marvellous it is that literally everything can be material. A team of geese flying by ends up as an image of freedom in the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. Coffee spoons turn into a metaphor about the pettiness of life in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot. Cold plums in a fridge become the entire basis of This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams.
And, then I got to thinking about poems inspired by the heat and I came up with these five gems that I thought you might like to dive into. They probably won’t cool you down, but they might remind you to keep your notebook to hand:
The Stopped Train by Jean Sprackland
In the Summer’s Heat and Midtime of the Day by Christopher Marlowe
The Pool by Andrew McNeill
Summer by Robin Coste Lewis
After Making Love in Winter by Sharon Olds
Let me know which you enjoy most!
Stay hydrated. Stay creative.
love,
Alison x
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