I decided I wanted to develop my writing skills in regards to poetry so my writing can be authoritative without having to be performed to bring life to it's words. I wanted to cultivate my writing to bring out it's own power on the page. I had high aspirations for them to create the same elegance and refinement in poems I have wept over in crumpled books. I wanted to finally make the transition from writing selfishly with the purpose of venting to make myself feel (a lot) better, to writing for an audience which invites them in to share these feelings alongside me.
I was hungry for knowledge regarding the theoretical skill of writing poetry.
So I asked around.... "Where do I go to become a better writer?"
I kept hearing the name Indigo Williams, and if I was serious about understanding the technical side of poetry then that was the person I needed to go to, and luckily for me she was having a workshop coming up in the next few weeks in London.
I was excited.
Here is some of her work so you can have a taster before I go on... Indigo William's Poem: Dark Black
So now you understand.
Indigo Williams was one of the first spoken word artists I most admired when I first learnt about the art of spoken word poetry only a few short months ago. I would see a chemistry lesson's worth of colours being exploded within fire as she would perform on her YouTube videos. She had something mysterious to me about the way she put words together and I could not miss the opportunity to be in a workshop with her and unravel first hand what made her writing so powerful.
I live in Nottingham. The course was four weeks in London with one week at an open mic at Come Rhyme With Me - (by the way an unmissable night of spoken word in London). I didn't care, I just had to find a way to be there for every session or miss out on something great. In my eyes this was the same as travelling long distances for true love, for which people would suffer intense rainstorms, exhaustion and spend their life savings, just to get to their love's front door. Except this time my "love" was poetry, as taught by Indigo. London was the rainstorm and I exaggerated a bit on the exhaustion and life savings by watching too many romantic movies.
But the question really is.... how far would you go for self-development?
Apparently I was willing to 1288 miles and this included the journeys back and forth over the five weeks. Now, if you are sitting at home and your self-development journey involves you going 10 minutes down the road, then you really have no excuse not to go!
My gut told me that this journey would be valuable and I am glad I listened. A whole new world opened up to me where dead poets, and those that were very much alive, started talking to me from the page telling me about structure, style and meanings in their poems. Between sessions, the Poetry Library in South Bank beckoned me in also out of the rainstorms (and often snow) and told me to keep warm from all the knowledge and experience these books had to offer me. I would get my list of books out that Indigo suggested to the class to read and I would get lost again in middle of London.
In the sessions we dissected poems like dead bodies. I use this smilie because we had to say something interesting about ourselves in the first session with Indigo and I said that I used to dissect dead bodies for my anatomy class for my science degree which always gets an interesting response from people (...big up King's College, Biomedical Sciences class of 2008!) So I feel this smilie is rather fitting for this strange reason.
Back to the point. Indigo's class was possibly poetry habit changing, like when you realise you are an addict and need help to break your old addictions, my hand is broken now to my old poetry habits. I now will read every new poem with a suspicious eye, knowing some poems would be bad influences on me to try to entice me back to my old way of thinking but I will laugh at those poems and move forward to better poems with a promise and a future. Now I am able to analyse and break each poem down knowing how to interpret a poem and the elements and stylistic qualities it used to create it's central voice.
After all of this intense learning, I must admit that the secret highlight for me was listening to Indigo's theories of life and looking at how her brain puts together the different truths of life into one thought provoking sentence. All I am saying is that you need to get yourself down to Indigo's next set of workshops to experience this yourself.
If you are a poet you will learn from someone who is experienced and willing to give you all of her knowledge for the minimal price of the cost of the workshop. If you are not a poet then after Indigo's Artisan workshops you will become one. Any human being will benefit greatly from her life lessons. You will leave feeling awe-inspired and either not want to leave the building when she is still in there to share her passion of poetry or be scrambling for the nearest pen and paper to start writing for your next class.
Find all about Indigo from her website: http://indigowilliams.co.uk
She post a lot of insightful posts on her Tumbler: http://thestufflifeismadeof.tumblr.com
She is very opinionated on her Twitter: https://twitter.com/Indigowilliams
...and check out her videos on YouTube for some more good stuff.
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