Tees Valley Writers

Joanna Boulter

Joanna Boulter is a Darlington-based poet, writing teaching and founder member of the Vane Women writing collective. She settled in Darlington in 1989 and is a founder member of Vane Women writing collective based at Darlington Arts Centre. In 1995 Joanna gained an MA in the History of Ideas from Northumbria University, and in 2002 she achieved a distinction in Newcastle University's MA in Writing Poetry.

She received a Tyrone Guthrie Award from Northern Arts 1997 and won a Northern Promise award in 2002 to develop a long sequence of poems, Twenty Four Preludes and Fugues on Dmitri Shostakovich, which was shortlisted for the Forward / Felix Dennis prize for First Collection.

Joanna has given readings across the country and teaches creative writing classes for women in Darlington. She is currently continuing her interest in music by writing the libretto for a symphonic song cycle to music by the composer Andrew Webb-Mitchell.

A Bowl of Words

after Rupert Spira’s Poem Bowl (inscribed clay)

Imagine a bowl.

A bowl wide as the shell of an ear, to catch
the first murmurings of the Ur-poem,
that chanted incantation of waking minds,
the song that carried stammering into speech.

What language this is means nothing — a mix,
an infusion of total language. This is the bowl
in which oral poetry was first brewed,
passed around gatherings, hand to hand
and mouth to mouth. Here at the edge is the dip
for sipping, lip after lip. And here you place your finger,
then trace the hardly decipherable spiral round
to stir back deep into the lees of poetry.

Imagine a bowl of words. Lift it, and drink.

© Joanna Boulter