It was good to see so many at the recent meeting - and good to have such a fruitful outcome to the 'business' meeting held beforehand.

It was, rightly, decided that we should have a Poetry Aloud bank account and this will have been done by the time of our next meeting.  But it was not thought necessary to form a committee as we could not imagine taking major decisions - e.g. about our venue - without consulting all who attend, anyway.

It was suggested that we should have a half hour discussion before every second or third meeting so that anyone could put forward ideas about what we might do in addition to the monthly readings, or how we might move forward.  We will have the first such meeting at 7.00pm before our July meeting, on Tuesday 27th. 

Colin pointed out that we could use the website to float ideas beforehand so that discussions are focussed and informed. 

A development that I think would be worthwhile is the formation of an email 'critical' group.  The meetings are welcoming and supportive, which hopefully builds up confidence, but I would also value a forum in which a group of us could work at enhancing our skills. 

One way of achieving this is to have a small group who commit to exchanging poems once a month, and commenting on what the others have sent.

It works like this:

- Each member sends the group organiser a poem at the beginning of the month 

- The organiser collates the poems and sends them out, without names attached

- Each member sends the organiser a comment on each poem (except his/her own of course!) within a set period, say 2 weeks

- The organiser collates the comments and sends them out, with names attached.

So at the end of the process, which has only taken a couple of weeks, everyone gets to know who wrote each poem, and what the other members thought they might do to improve their poem.

It is important that the comments are positive in tone, but honest reactions - the aim is to help a friend make a good poem even better, whenever possible.

The system works well with 5 or 6 people in a group.  If there are more the workload becomes such that one can dread the arrival of the poems rather than looking forward to it!  It also helps if the members feel that they are at roughly the same point on the path towards becoming good writers.

We could, of course, have more than one group if enough of us wanted to get involved.