She gathers canal-side poetry scraps
A harvest that she can share
Hiding poems between bookshop pages
Or in the drawers of antique furniture

She once designed the perfect dating app
Where sunsets replaced selfies
And poetry replaced profiles

Sometimes Sam lets her pay
A haiku for a cup of coffee
If he likes it enough.
In a perfect world, a sonnet would buy a square meal

So many poems to pass around
She makes them into paper boats
And casts them off in the Calder

Background

I love writing groups. The best ones turn writing into a social activity as well as challenging their members to try new things. I’m very pleased that I found my group in Todmorden.

I don’t write poetry, but this was a response to a recent writing group challenge, to write poems set in Todmorden about connection. I’m not sure how to justify this as a ‘poem’ rather than a piece of prose with weird line breaks, but I’m mostly pleased with it1.

The dating site here was inspired by a friend telling me about queer dating site Lex, which featured text-only profiles, like old-fashioned personal ads pages. My friend made Lex sound a lot more fun than the other sites.

Recommendations

The reason for the writing group’s poetry challenge was that we’re doing guerrilla poetry for the Todmorden Book Festival. Poems produced by our group will be put up in a trail around the town.

The events for this year’s festival are very strong. I’ll be missing my friend Naomi Booth’s workshop on November 8th this time around because I want to attend one by microfiction writer David Gaffney. I’ve also booked a series of talks throughout that weekend. I’m particularly excited to see Joan Smith, 60 Years of the Pennine Way, and Northern Weird.

It’s exciting that Yorkshire seems to have so many literary festivals on. But there are definitely more than I can get round to.