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Creative writingThis game shows you how to chop it properly Poetry, I said, is pervasive. This game also helps you to
see the poetry in many different types of writing.
Writing poems requires a similar excess of exposure in order to create discrimination. Once again a volcano
vomits sky-high showers of ash, but there maybe a small number of diamonds scorched into being. In the same way, you will probably
write a lot of poetry to get a little. For example,
read this poem byDonald Hall called Exile (along with its footnote in NP 1753):
ExileA boy who played and talked and read with me
Fell from a maple tree.
I loved her, but I told her I did not,
And wept, and then forgot.
I walked the streets
where I was born and grew,
And all the streets were new.
The footnote tells us that many versions of this poem exist and a much longer version has appeared in print. Imagine the ash and scorched earth of language around these six diamond-hard lines. If we were to replay Anatole France’s analogy between carpentry and creative writing, the space around this poem is waist-high in wood-shavings. You might write and rewrite a lot of good poetry to gain something with which you are satisfied, even temporarily – and, even then,
like Donald Hall, you might still change it. Nowhere is the editor’s razor sharper and more frequently in use than in rewriting poetry. When that razor is not applied, the result can be shovel-loads of scree and ash. Think of the scholarly editions of the complete works of any major poet and the diamond- to-ash ratio therein. Yet weak, leaden or plodding poetry is the path to good writing, even though the ratio between them might seem horrendous at first.
One way to make this process more palatable for you is to make it challenging
and even entertaining, and playing with form and pattern is probably the best way forward.
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