POETRY WORKSHOP
As sayings go
Alison Chisholm examines a draft of a poem that takes proverbs as its theme
Poetry sets out to communicate something the writer wants to share with a reader who wants to know.That ‘something’ can be as slight as I saw this and it made me laugh, as informative as a mnemonic to remember how many days there are in each month, as reminiscent as Wordsworth’s autobiographical The Prelude, or as vast as Milton’s epic Paradise Lost.
Christine Shanahan of Radcliffe, Greater Manchester embarked on the self-imposed task of setting out in a single poem her belief that there is a ‘natural way of things in the world for right and wrong’. With this mission in mind, she started a piece built around proverbs, those familiar sayings that share nuggets of truth, and she centred her thinking around the title of her poem.
Like many branches of the U3A, the one Christine attends has a writing group, and it was the tutor of this group who gave the prompt that kickstarted the poem. She began with a list of proverbs that offer similar messages, including ‘Don’t spit against the wind’, ‘Do as you would be done by’, and ‘You reap what you sow’. Each offers a similar message to ‘What goes around comes around’ – basically, ‘Don’t do wrong or it will come back on you’.