Who wouldn’t be inspired to write a poem after a visit to Bempton Cliffs?
The dramatic white cliffs, the undulating coastline, not to mention the glorious seabird spectacle are enough to persuade even the most pragmatic amongst us to turn to rhyming couplets.
Thank goodness then for the Bridlington Poetry Festival which gave us the opportunity to encourage visitors to put their thoughts about the reserve down on paper
To spare the blushes of our more mature visitors, we thought we'd start whipping up some enthusiasm for verse amongst our younger visitors - so enter James Giddings, a poet with not only a way with words but a way with kids.
He held a drop-in workshop on Saturday and had lots of tricks up his sleeve to persuade the youngsters to express themselves. He kicked things off with some three line Japanese haiku poems. The best way to explain these is to show you an example - like this from a master of the form, Basho Matsuo, who wrote in the 1600s:
An old silent pond,
A frog jumps into the pond,
Splash! Silence again.
The kids were keen to have a go and they did a grand job - below is Ruby's brilliant effort on the subject of puffins:
Before you could say William Wordsworth, the kids had moved on to the 'Erasure' exercise (which sadly had nothing to do with the hit making 80s pop-duo). This cleverly involved turning a piece of pre-written prose into a poem by blocking out words. It kind of made you see poetry in everything, which is no bad way to view the world in my opinion.
We were delighted to have hosted an event as part of this well-established festival and to welcome so many budding poets to the cliffs. And James’ view of the day? Naturally, he put it in a poetic form:
‘The mist didn’t lift
but we did lots of haiku.’
Finally, here's one for the album...and hopefully the local press.