Minutes of the meeting at La Rosa Hotel on Thursday 27 June 2019.
Present: Jonathan, Louise, Adele, Ian (chair).
Apologies: Lesley, Pip, Louise, Sue Thomason, Jenny, Jenny Burns.
Topic: Members’ work-in-progress.
Matters Arising
Ian reported the state-of-play with the retrospective exhibition of books proposed at the last meeting. It would take place on 11 September, 2019, and be billed as the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.
Members’ Readings
Ian — read a poem entitled A Written Constitution for the Universe. Members appreciated the ponderous legalistic style of the piece. The ensuing discussion ranged over General Relativity and the impossibility of a unified time-standard for Earth and Mars, time zones and local time on Earth (and why ships avoid crossing the International Date Line at weekends), the Christian, Jewish and Muslim calendars, and the gorgeous Brian Cox on BBC TV.
Louise — read a further instalment from her reminiscences of life in the 1960s as a trainee radiologist, and how to survive on £7/week. She couldn’t manage it without moonlighting as a cleaner at a factory: a job which her supervisors considered incompatible with the hygiene requirements of medical staff.
Jonathan – read three recent poems:
Stargazing (Poem of the Week) – bewailing the absence of the basic requirement for a properly appreciation of the night sky: absence of blinding lights; a secret garden; a private island.
Eyeless In Gaza – treating the agony of the Palestinians in their blockaded city,
Delphi – describing a bus journey to the legendary classical city and the famous historical sights passed on the way.
Adele – read a poem: In Fear Of Matty Dale, about a reclusive farmer, and his dog, who both became childhood bogeys for her and her contemporaries.
She also brought us a poem that had appealed to her recently: the tongue-in-cheek Ten Rules For Writing Poetry (…there are only nine!)
The meeting closed at 1:50 PM.
Whitby Writers Group 