Free Verse Poems

The next exercise that the participants did involved them using their 10 words as a basis for a free verse poem. For this exercise they were allowed to add words and could also either stay close to the dance performances or begin to move away to a different but connected experience. Some of the poems written by the participants are presented here (it is worth noting that these are unedited and unrevised).

Pre-planned symmetry
Couples move in synchronicity
Performing in their disparate parts
Love as a performing art
A strange crash of themes
Alienated all of what we dreamed
And brought us back into the physical
And my own inner spaciousness alone
[Susan]

When representing 'family'
There will always be room for comedy
An un-matched move may lead to frustration,
Soothed by the satisfaction, the repetition,
Of the mechanical; once, twice, again.

To show melancholy, you need not be
Alone; misery loves company.

Which catches the eye, and keeps it?
Something jagged and confrontational?
Or something hypnotically slooooow....

Loneliness needn't mean stillness, just as
Rivalry needn't mean hate.
Poetry is emotion in motion, a dance,
Always keep moving,
Even when you're lost.
[Greg]

Matrimony equals control
has it forgotten what originally led its participants to attract?
does it speak of itself as utterly cliched?

First eye contact
it was like we were .... reflections
and when we talked we had so much in common!
We made opportunities to become intimate
We made opportunities to get to know each other
We forgave and forgot
Those things that repelled

We scoured each other with touches
and looks
and words
pinpointing with ever-increasing certainty
the future co-ordinates of our relationship

We got engaged because there seemed
to be enough evidence to support the grid references in our heads
Is matrimony subject to inflation?
Can it manage the space between income and
interest repayment?
[Ben]

Knife-edge tension
ticking, tocking
minaturised movement
encapsulated in the fixation on
obsessively compulsive
ticks

Building slowly towards release
The embodiment of action and reaction
And when it comes the sheer joy of
Unfettered fluidity

In the raw, feral state,
Exalted
[Morven]

Lowry people alone
Inhabit a stark landscape
Bewildered, strange country
Agonising, painful sadness
Reflection
bleak desolation
Lowry people together.
[Glynn]

Motherless and muted,
automata floating in space,
the imbeciles of a dying order.
Tired children,
mortherless and muted.
[John]

We were always machines
but we played at being real
so convincingly and for so long
we began to believe it ourselves.
[Mike]