The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
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Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Writing Game M A KING AS MALL TRUTH Instead of electing to write on a high-minded subject in a self-consciously poetic way, let something small and everyday choose you. This could be a thing or even a word. Write the word or place the object in the centre of a sheet of paper, and write notes freely around it. Think about where it has come from and where it is going to make notes on any memories it triggers in your mind compare it to other things using simile, or transform it into something else through metaphor; use all your senses to describe it – do not use only visual description or comparison. Now freewrite about it, and underline any unusual phrases that occur. Try to combine all this material by using the form of address of a letter, but writing in lines. Think of the objector word as a cause for celebration that you are asking somebody else to share, and do not stray off the subject. A I M An obsessive and concentrated effect using something concrete and recognisable allows greater flexibility than writing about something abstract. Ina sense, you are writing about what you know. However, there is latitude for discovering a lot more along the way, and you can learn to allow this sense of uncovering the mystery of what you think you know. Subjects and ways of saying The poet John Redmond believes that many new writers limit themselves by writing what he calls the default poem a simple lyric formula an ‘I-persona’ describing its state of mind and feeling as though chatting with the reader across a coffee-table’ (2006: 17). He is right that a contemporary poem can of course be far more adventurous and bold in address – in the way the poem is expressed and to whom it is said. And it can be pointed out that, historically, poems have not behaved themselves in their registers, and could also be promiscuous about their intended audience. They have been known to swagger; slander; rave lilt boast play yarn rage and seduce. If you want to explore these possibilities, open The Norton Anthology of Poetry (NP; see Preface) and read, then try imitating – respectively – Lord Byron’s Don Juan (excerpts, 837); John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s The Mock Song (552); Christopher Smart’s ‘Jubi- late Agno’ (excerpt, 678); Green Grow the Rashes by Robert Burns (747); Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (excerpts, 1060); Edward Lear’s limericks (1041– 1043); Robert Frost’s Home Burial (1228); Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ by Dylan Thomas (1572); and John Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed’ (It is what your poem is, not what your poem says, that makes it work. That also goes for subject matter. There is no subject off limits, as the examples above Writing poetry 203 show. Yet it is not what you write about that matters most it is how you write it. And because poetry takes many drafts to get right, it is how you rewrite it. A poem about, say, tomatoes, written with verbal panache, will deliver greater energy than a high-minded but clumsily written poem about angst. You could argue that too few poets make their cause poetry because too many are chasing hearses and ambulances, or using a poem as a kind of mirror on which they breathe their own feelings. The problem is that some new writers have been taught to view poetry through over-serious and personal spectacles and they have also been taught that poetry has an association with conveying truth, the whole truth and nothing but. This association is partly a result of its strong relationship with the spoken word partly through the persuasiveness of certain poets, critics and teachers and partly because poets in some cultures were indeed regarded as the community’s shaman. Good poems, of course, capture elementary truths, or allow these qualities to refract through certain tropes of language. Precise and playful images, for example, are prisms emitting the light of observation over and over again during reading, even if all the images are doing is celebrating something as mundane as the tomatoness of tomatoes, as in Pablo Neruda’s famous ode on that very subject. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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