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So Adelaide’s Writers’ Week has been and gone but not without plenty of book-buying, meeting poets and attending the odd session here and there. The first was ‘Searching for Sylvia Plath’ facilitated by the fabulous Felicity Plunkett.

With around 10 biographies about Plath already, why do we need another? Well at a 1,000 pages, this appears to be the definitive one. Written by Heather Clarke over 12 years, Red Comet covers every aspect of Plath’s life, from when she began writing her first poems at 5, through repeated medical trauma and self-medication to her somewhat fraught relationship with Ted Hughes, its a culmination of endless hours in the Plath archives trawling through her journals, letters and photographs. It’s only since her untimely death that Plath has been recognised for the trailblazer she was, a professional writer with a strong work ethic who immersed herself in a world of words, including these rather profound ones when feeding back on the work of her mother’s friend:

Let the wind blow in more roughly.

The next session I went to was ‘Poetry in the Age of Absolutely Everything’ with UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, again in conversation with Felicity.

Appointed in May 2019, Simon talked about how the role of Poet Laureate changed after the death of Ted Hughes to more of a working role spanning 10 years rather than a lifetime, establishing the Laurel Prize for eco and nature writing during his. Simon shared entertaining stories from his 256 mile Walking Home project in 2010, which involved walking the Pennines the wrong way giving readings and surviving on whatever was given by his audience, as well as some of the poems he wrote, often with rhyme and rhythm synonymous with a purposeful trek. Simon also held the Oxford Professor of Poetry for four years, publishing a collection of essays during his time to explore how this form takes new directions down old roads, with some debating:

poetry’s constant anxiety about its own existence.

In between these sessions, I joined award-winning author Ellen van Neerven‘s ‘Desire in Poetry’ Masterclass, which examined the different ways this can be expressed through example poems, insightful discussion and a series of writing prompts. And of course, Writers’ Week isn’t complete without a visit to the book tent where I bought a few somethings to keep me going.