Day 4 and departure

I'm missing my Cove Park pals with their newly-freed voices. I'm usually very keen to get home to Shetland but I was prised out of the Party Pod with reluctance on Saturday morning. We'd gathered on the balcony to watch a submarine pass up the loch: exercised our vocal range at it and dispelled its spectre, as much as you can, with pancakes.

On Friday we performed our own poems to the group, with Kristin making a series of challenges to stance, muscles, expression, content as we did. Many of us have never performed a poem hanging over with our bums in the air while being shook out like a blanket, but most of us have now. We heard each other's poems come clearer, sometimes deeper, big messy currents of breath and sometimes weeping passing through...I don't want to dwell on the tears really, which seem to be the natural consequence of removing muscular blocks and tensions in the resonating parts of the body, of relaxing and opening the throat. Having done so invariably changed the quality of the poems we were speaking. Most of us experienced our poems as we had felt about them when we first wrote them and I think most of us shucked off something that had been bowing us down or compressing us. And as an audience we often heard a poem that had sounded 'difficult' or impenetrable reveal itself and become a live, emotional thing...

I've been waking up the last couple mornings with a different face. Maybe I wake with this face every day but it stiffens and clumps throughout the morning. I practised 'throwing my arms away' and 'shaking the flesh off my bones' between Glasgow and Edinburgh and caught myself resettling my weight as I waited on the tarmac at the airport. The week's work has certainly challenged the tendency to body dysmorphia that I think most of us suffer to some degree or other. I'm not really thinking much yet about how Kristin's course may affect my public readings, although I'm slightly more open-minded about giving any than I have been for a long time. But I've got resolutions, of course: to learn more poems by heart, to continue to try and connect imagination and breath and bone, and to test out what I've learnt on singing and speaking and...well, being...

I'm grateful to Creative Scotland for Professional Development funding that allowed me to attend this course. And also to the excellent Cove Park and Bloodaxe folk for administering strategic prods that persuaded me to go through with it...

Well reunions are tricky things, but I figure if it's going to work anywhere it might work in Shetland??