The Poetry Group I started online is now meeting face to face. It appears that some of our computers won't talk to each other and even when they do, all the messages get mixed up together and it's difficult to follow them. Also, many people prefer talking in person. So we're now meeting as and when as many members as possible are available, in a venue which is nice, if a little busy, which everyone can get to. It's a start.
We had started online with MacNeice - this largely elicited a negative response - form over content, too difficult... My attempts to argue for MacNeice were unsuccessful. People said they wanted something 'lighter' (undefined), and one or two people suggested John Betjeman, so we thought we'd give that a try.
In our comfortable-ish new meeting place, we started our discussion of Betjeman's poems. It did not go as I expected. Each person had chosen a poem to talk about. What happened was that people talked about really personal and often moving experiences, none of them happy ones. When we talked more, people recognised that their responses were not always really related to the poems themselves, and that their experiences had very much coloured their view of the poems.
It highlighted incredibly strongly how much we bring ourselves to every poem we read - the things that have happened in our lives, our beliefs, everything. This is not a revelation, of course, but I did find it surprising that this kind of discussion was in response to the poems of Betjeman, as did the others when I mentioned it. Everyone said they were happy with the meeting though, and felt that poetry had got them thinking, so that feels right and we'll see how it progresses.
We are moving onto Robert Frost next - I'm really not sure what to expect from that now!
