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
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| Writing Game S Y LL ABLE SANDS ENS ES Choose a place as your subject – for example, a school, a church, a town, a shop, a restaurant, a mountain. Freewrite on this subject, then transform what you have written into a seven-line poem, each line of which has seven syllables. Choose an emotion as your subject – for example, love, envy, anger, sorrow, hatred. Ask the chosen emotion these questions and answer them in lines of poetry (do not mention the emotion What colour is it What animal would it be What weather is it What time of day is it like, and why What does it smell/sound/look/taste/feel like Transform your answers into a seven-line poem, each line of which has seven syllables. The final stage is to push the two poems together to make one poem of seven lines, each line of which is seven syllables. A I M You will need to lose fifty percent of each poem. This is an exercise in precise patterning in knowing what to leave out and in leaning two ideas against each other to make something quite new leap from that pressure. Subverting form New writers will do well to get the hang of a form before gunning it down, although it is an effective workshop exercise to create a poem in which the structure ambushes the subject. The structure of the poem could, as it were, tell a different story from the poem’s words. While the sonnet is generally associated with love as its subject today, a good sonnet about contemporary war would surprise and subvert the form. A series of drastic limericks would similarly turn that form inside out. Writing poetry 207 Writing Game D A R KS IDE LIMERICKS Read the limericks of Edward Lear (NP 1041). Write a sequence of fifteen strict limericks which deal in the darkest or most taboo types of human behaviour or with a subject matter, such as terminal illness, which would conventionally be realised through a serious form, or form of address. Test these out by reading them aloud to people if they do not get a laugh, you have succeeded. A I M Some forms of poetry, such as the limerick or triolet, become associated with a humorous mode of address. By turning the tables on the subject matter you introduce a tension into the form that will both incense but also compel readers. Shaping a sequence and collection Shorter poems are sometimes set in a sequence, unified by one or more threads, such as narrative, form and theme. This unity need not be frictionless: the shorter poems maybe dissonant with each other in someways. For example, each part might take a different point of view, and the sequence as a whole provides the arena for this variousness. Taken further, some poets order their collections carefully so that the poems in it, individually and as a whole, resonate in someway with each other and with the title of the book. In this way, the book itself becomes a type of poetic form (although you should be warned that many readers simply and naturally dip into a poetry collection rather than read it as they would a novel). Begin reading your poems with these ends in mind. For example, do some of the poems share the same concerns, or even images, and might they be brought together in someway to make a more powerful piece Are there leitmotifs in sound between poems that would be clearer if the poems were grouped in some sequence By shuffling and reshuffling your poems, is there some kind of narrative running through them, and might this be a sequence, or the best order, for your portfolio of coursework or first collection If so, what title might illuminate these connections, or even challenge and subvert them? Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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