Wednesday’s Writing with Water: Embodying Writing workshop at Gallery North, Hailsham, for Waterweek was a huge success! The Vital Water exhibition provided us all with a wide variety of sensory stimulus material and gave us space to explore and expand, as we were a large group in a small building!

Here are some pics from the event, including the final collaborative poem created using a line from each person’s writing, which is now on display in the Vital Water exhibition.

You’ll also find a selection of poems from the workshop below the pics.

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Participant Diny van Kleef wrote this poem from the workshop: http://www.dinyfvk.co.uk/misinformed-poet/inspired-by/

Can you spot Diny’s line in the collaborative poem above?

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Fonts of holiness – by Andrew Durling

In this font I write of fonts.
Fonts man-made, natural, virtual.
Fonts for baptism, blessings, beatification.
For perhaps fonts can be anywhere, anytime, of any kind?
Perhaps all water is sacred if
Held, gathered, chanelled, concentrated in
Ponds, lakes, rivers, fens, waterfalls, or
The ten thousand forms water can take?
Perhaps water anywhere, in any kind of embodiment,
From grail to gyre,
Can be a font, can sanctify with water’s holiness,
Emanating in concentric ripples through the
Flotsam and jetsam of mind’s riffles?
So shall we gather at the river
Flowing from the holy well
And watch it run softly as it forever glides,
Until we fall like rain into the universal font?

Poem by Andrew Durling, with gratitude for inspiration from the Waterweek crew, Sally-Shakti Willow, William Wordsworth, Robert Lowry, T.S.Eliot, and numerous other unknown sources.