What has the Hall Writers’ Forum ever done for me? by Darrell Barnes

What has the Hall Writers’ Forum ever done for me?

Can it really be five years have gone since first the Forum started? Goodness me! I often wondered if I’d hold my own against so many others skilled in verse when I could only rhyme. But I was wrong: the Forum welcomes talent far and wide.

A challenge got me started. It was wide: write a fable, now that Æsop’ s gone, about our modern times. What could go wrong? Write in terza rima (new to me I’d never come across that form of verse before, yet now I claim it as my own).

Challenges to stretch the mind: I own they’ve broadened my perspectives far and wide. What fun to play with novel forms of verse! I little thought from sonnets I’d have gone to write a pantoum, villanelle. For me at first it seemed unstructured verse was wrong:

I couldn’t understand free verse. How wrong to think it less demanding than my own attempts at discipline I forced on me. Modern forms evoke a care as wide as my own love of metre. Had I gone to follow others’ writing, would my verse

have blossomed more? At any rate, my verse needs the Forum’s fertile soil. It’s wrong to think it never would take root, but gone to flourish undiscovered on its own; instead it blooms! My eyes are opened wide by all the help the Forum gives to me.

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So what’s the Forum ever done for me? Exposed my mind to other forms of verse, engaged in deep discussion with a wide circle of opinion, right or wrong. I’ve learned to fight my corner on my own. Without the Forum, I wonder where I’d gone.

So - five years gone, five years have meant for me expression of my own delight in verse, and, if it’s wrong, who cares? The Forum’s wide.

Darrell Barnes

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