Peter Wallis, Workshop, 1 July, 2019 'Don't just think about it, get up and start doing it!' 'Not everything you think you know is true.' 'Don't just look at a flower - smell it.' 'Listen, watch and look.'                        “Then undercut all of them in a final line.” These little wisdoms from Peter's first exercise stuck on our glass doors until some faded. Others curled up in the heat. But not before we had deeply absorbed the way in which a final line can alter a poem. Peter is essentially a ‘wordster’, and his seven exercise were all quite different. Each one designed to jig us out of a conventional to a more original/dynamic diction. We filled in gaps in a skeleton of innocuous words from which 9/10ths of the poem had been deleted. ‘There’s … There’s … They are’.  The crunch came with thought-provoking final lines, ‘but it’s way too early / to tell.’ There was the search for ‘impossibles’. What is more- or as- impossible as a bracelet made of tears? People certainly came up with the unexpected. ‘Ways to loose a balloon’ evolved from a poem by Craig Raine. ‘On a spoon, oh how badly you want it to balance.’ Ideas lulled with lightness were once again, undercut with the final line. ‘Muscle for audacity’ was a phrase Peter used more than once. Words that surprised us might well arise from being less consciously aware. Bunging in everything, then pruning back.