Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I engineered people into four groups by giving each person a piece of paper with an abstract shape on it. They then had to find other people with the same shape to form a group and discuss the various objects the shape could be. I hoped this ‘warmer’ would stimulate people to think about shapes in a non-representational way. The shapes were indirectly linked to the next part of the exercise  
    
   Each group was asked to create a sculpture in a process of seventeen movements (a repeated movement counting as one), and the final sculpture was to be kinetic, or not.
  

   A theme (earth, air, fire or water) was given to each group along with a storyboard to record the process so they could practise for their performance to the other groups. The theory was that those watching the performances would be inspired to write haiku. In practice, the stimulus did not work for everybody, but it did for many.
   

   The sculptures themselves were magnificent. I still have strong images of all four in my mind. Two people told me that they had never ‘performed’ before and felt empowered by it.
  

  One of the positive aspects of workshops is that there are always extra outcomes to those you write in your ‘aims and objectives’.
Some questions which might arise from this workshop are:

1. Do different types of stimuli encourage different types of haiku?
2. Can writing a haiku from movement and sculpture be considered writing from actuality?
3. Is it possible that writing from this stimulus triggers the imagination in a way that does not happen when writing from actual actuality?

From my experience of the day, the answer to all three questions is ‘yes’.