Writers’ Pantry #48: Words, Words, Words

Don’t we love them! They are our most basic tools of trade. Perhaps, dear wordsmiths, the most wonderful thing about them is that there are so many different ways we can use them. 

The town of Murwillumbah where I live (in New South Wales, Australia) is home to Poets Out Loud, a series of performance opportunities initiated and managed by poet Sarah Temporal (whom I’ve featured  in our previous incarnation at Poets United). One of its initiatives is the Youth Slam, where Sarah and others coach school-age poets in how to present their work live, culminating in a competition.
 

Because of the pandemic, they’ve been held on video this year. The 2020 winner, 18-year-old Pancho Symes, is a young man who clearly loves to have fun with words elaborate and fantastical. He recites his humorous, almost nonsensical poem, The Confederacy of Ants, as if it were utterly serious – which is part of the charm. It’s full of multi-syllable words, intricate phrases and marvellous rhymes, and it tells a story too.

If you’re on facebook, do find the Poets Out Loud page (at this link) and then find the video introducing Pancho. Or if you’ve an hour to spare, enjoy the whole Youth Slam here at the Poets Out Loud website. I promise you, it’s a joy and a revelation. Or you can find individual entrants on YouTube.

I’m also impressed by the runner-up, 16-year-old Georgia Smith, who presented, with gut-wrenching fervour, a powerful piece on relationship violence. The vivid originality is here also, and the clever rhymes – but these words are direct, strong, and mostly one-syllable. Two terrific poems, so very different, each suiting the words to the theme. And, if you decide to enjoy the whole hour, there’s a variety of other poetic choices in just this one small geographical area and one brief space of time.

This is what I love about our P&SU community, too: always such a rich variety of styles, moods, forms, subject matter … so many different ways, not only of using language but of exploring it to find its utmost expressive possibilities.

I’m primarily a poet so I tend to focus on poetry, but the limitless ways of using words apply as much to prose – from the powerfully spare sentences of Hemingway to the richly complex style of Lawrence Durrell, from the careful details of plot, personality and social observation in Austen to the wide-open Joycean ‘stream of consciousness’.

If there are limits, we – the whole collective of poets and storytellers all over the world, throughout all of human time – haven’t found them yet. We keep on finding ways to 'make it new'.

Exciting, eh?

Feel free to excite us (or soothe, inspire, amaze, arouse, agitate, alarm, delight, surprise, chill or warm, etc.) with your writings – old or new, poetry or prose, in any style, on any topic. If it’s prose, please keep it within 369 words, excluding title. Then share it with the rest of us via Mr Linky, which will stay open for a week. Happy reading, folks! And don’t forget to check back for participants linking towards the end of the week.

Meanwhile, next Wednesday, Magaly will invite us to write new poetry or prose where the central theme revolves around one or more of the following five words: 1. Allyship (n. active support for the rights of a minority or marginalized group without being a member of it), 2. Blursday (n. a day of the week that is indistinguishable from any other), 3. Covidiot (n. a person who disobeys guidelines designed to prevent the spread of Covid-19), 4. Doomscrolling (n. the action of compulsively scrolling through social media or news feeds which relate bad news), 5. Virtue-signalling (n.  the public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue).