There’s a twist in the exercise. (which I’ve used in Ode to a Postbox). And it’s this.
The most common object in the modern world is potentially the most sacred because its restoration to sanctity is totally unexpected. The poet has traditionally helped to keep the sacred alive by associating the world’s great symbols – a tree, the ocean, the sky – with simple feelings of compassion, humanity, love, non-violence, noble resonance. Big ideas have most often been expressed in straightforward language (naturally I mean the direct intensity of Shakespeare, not the gibberish of a lawyer or a government). But as oceans, trees and skies die in front of us, and the world and all its strange wonders are desanctified, our exercise is to seek out the overfamiliar and disregarded, the rejected, marginalized and faceless even, and to load these obscure players in life with larger significance. Here is a work of unification and of ‘invisible legislation’, to paraphrase Shelley.
Email your entries, with ‘Poetry workshop’ in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk by midnight on Sunday February 25. The shortlisted poems, and Aidan’s responses, will appear on the site soon afterwards.
Link to the Guardian article