Our next meeting will be a workshop – details below. We will meet at the Firstsite café Wednesday19th June at 7pm and the workshop (details below) will start at 7.30pm in one of the meeting rooms.
Turning Japanese
Learn more about the art of Haiku poetry and how to improve your short form poems. The workshop will also provide an introduction to haibun, a combination of haiku and prose. This powerful literary form was popularised by the famous Matsuo Basho in ancient Japan.
There will be plenty of opportunities to write haiku in the workshop, and, if time allows, a short haibun.
Biog.
Dr. Tim Gardiner is a professional ecologist, poet and children’s author from Manningtree. His haiku have been published all over the world (including Japan), translated into 5 languages, and widely anthologised. His first collection of Haiku, On The Edge, was published by Brambly Books in 2017, while his debut haibun collection, The Flintknapper’s Ghost, was released by Alba Publishing in 2018.
Copies will be available for sale.
In the beginning, we focused on Wilfred Owen, his poetry and his death on the Sambre-Oise Canal in Ors on the Western Front in November 1918. This was because we were fortunate to be invited via Art Connexions, Lille, in 2010, to the initial stages of the re-imagining of La Maison Forestiere by the British sculptor, Simon Patterson. This house where Owen and fellow soldiers from the Manchesters’ spent their last night, just outside the village of Ors, is now a celebration of the poet’s life and work. It was the inclusion of an outside performance space in the plans which inspired our thinking about commissioning a poetry project to take advantage of this in the future.
We were grateful to the Suffolk Branch of the Western Front Association for donating seed funding, Mosaic Stanza, and Poetry Wivenhoe, to whom proceeds would be donated to further community poetry activities. We began by commissioning mainly local poets to submit work on the general theme of ‘Conflict’ and we also invited interested students on the M.A. Fine Art course at Colchester Institute to choose a poem from the final selection and respond with an illustration. The resulting anthology, edited by Stephen Boyce of Winchester Poetry Festival, so too have the doves gone (Jardine Press), was published in 2014 to coincide with the outbreak of hostilities a hundred years previously.
To commemorate the ending of the War in 1918, we commissioned a further anthology on the theme of ‘Reconciliation’ from as many of the original poets as possible. Towards the Light was published in 2018 and includes translations of some of the poems into French, German and Italian, in the spirit of reconciliation. This anthology was edited by Vivien Whelpton, an expert in the poetry of the First World War, and author of the acclaimed biography, Richard Aldington, Poet, Soldier and Lover. Proceeds from the sale of Towards the Light are to be donated to Colchester Refugee Action. 
The Project was brought to a fitting conclusion at La Maison Forestiere, in the performance space, as we had originally envisaged, by a reading on November 5th from both anthologies by some of the contributing poets, with the support of the editors, as part of a Battle Honours Tour, Wilfred Owen on the Western Front. This reading followed a moving ceremony at Owen’s graveside where a bagpipe lament was played, a German bugle owned by Owen sounded the last post, and there were readings of his poems. This was broadcast live by the B.B.C. on Armistice Day.
