Congratulations to Roy Mcfarlane, our beginners poetry tutor, whose latest collection came out recently. The Way of the Poet is part memoir, part writing companion, part journal. It explores what it is to be a poet in the modern age, giving creative advice to poets at all stages, as well as delving into the ideas, stories, events and experiences that shape a writer and have informed Roy’s own work.
The reader can take guidance and encouragement from this exploration of creative practice across eighty inspiring daily entries, a “journal of my love of poetry” as Roy explains. The book is also infused by his love for jazz and deep engagement in film and literature as well as many of his favourite writers: “I’ll be ruminating and engaging with the likes of Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, James Baldwin, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, Jackie Kay, Benjamin Zephaniah and many others along the way.”
Through a series of daily meditations on the poet’s way, Roy poses the question what makes one a poet? as each chapter references The Poet in action. Roy also reflects on his own story – his adoption, his parents’ emigration to England in the 1960s from the Caribbean, his childhood and youth growing up in the Black Country in the West Midlands, and landmark events in Black British history – the arrival of Empire Windrush at the docks at Tilbury in 1948, Malcolm X’s visit to Marshall Street in Smethwick in 1965, the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 – and how these events have fundamentally shaped him as a writer.
Throughout, Roy’s passion for poetry, and its power to change how we see the world and live in it, seeps from the pages: “And I recognise that, with all my desire to write to make this world a better place to live in, the truth of the matter is I’m fundamentally writing about me. Like Emily Dickinson said, “I am out with lanterns looking for myself”. And in writing to change the way we might live with one another, profoundly it’s probably I – me – that’s changed, affected as I become one with poetry.”
As well as teaching our Beginners Poetry courses Roy is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Kemptown Bookshop’s Poet in Residence. He was a former Birmingham Poet Laureate and National Canal Laureate and has published four collections, all with Nine Arches Press, including The Healing Next Time which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize.