The design which evolved for our November 2nd afternoon performance of Stella Townson’s Cafe Days in Bath was so successful that I think we should plan to create something very similar for our Bath Heritage Week presentation in 2025. The three 2024 components were

• vivid, tightly edited prose paragraphs by Stella Townson capturing a small but significant stretch of time in a personally important place
• ‘photo poems’ created from the responses to the photographs by members of the Heritage Week audience

The February Challenge is to choose one or more of these components to create/compose at home and bring in on February 15th for sharing with the group. The place need not be Bath, of course, but it should be a place which matters enough to you that the writing will be vivid and engaging for an audience.

As you can see on the linked Page, the photo poem’s core characteristic was starkly managed economy. Everything had to stand simply on its own two feet within its own short line. The sequence had to be compelling, but it did not have to be logical. In some sense, every line was like the first line of a new poem. So when you have your own personal photo poem, why not explore developing some or all of the lines into poems of their own? Fourteen lines might even give you a crown of sonnets!

• bath stanza group
• discussion
• poetry
• poetry in bath
• poetry workshop