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
| Shaping language Form As with the forms of fiction, the choice you make with the form and structure of poems will inevitably begin to shape what you can do with them and it will shape the expectation of your reader even before they begin reading. Suppose you were blindfolded and handed a vessel shaped like a wineglass but containing water. Your mind prepares itself to expect wine and, depending on the fluting of the glass, even a type of wine, or champagne. When you take your first sip, part of your mind still tastes that premonition of wine. It is the same with poems the shape before a reader disposes them to expect a shaped experience, even if the words in the form’s vessel are water. A sonnet shape sets up quite different expectations from a haiku. The thirty-nine-line sestina tastes quite different to a terza rima of the same length. But forms are not vessels that shape language passively. As Theodore Roethke asserted, ‘‘Form’ is regarded not as a neat mould to be filled, but rather as a sieve to catch certain kinds of material (Kinzie, 1999 : 345). For the writer, the glass is broken it must be melted and reblown every time you write in its form. 204 Creative writing Rather than walk you through examples of metre and form, I direct you to the excellent books on form in my Recommended reading, and to concise examinations of these matters in NP (2027) or The Norton Anthology of English Literature (NE2; 2928). In my experience, the clearest and most thorough text for writers is a book intended for aspiring readers . . . of poetry, which seems a Writing poetry 205 very strong place for us all to start Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form ( 1979 ). Free verse There is nothing free about free verse. It will not liberate a country or open a prison, and to write in free verse well is often harder than writing in form. The free in free verse refers to the freedom from fixed patterns of metre and rhyme, but writers of free verse use poetic devices like alliteration, figures of speech and imagery. As James Fenton puts it: Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism . . . Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle – it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords . . . But if the land looks overgrazed, one should feel free to move on Unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Any ingrained antagonism to form in poetry is usually an indicator that the poet hasn’t read very much poetry. Free verse has along history, and is as ancient as Anglo-Saxon verse. To move on, let me say that free verse can be written quite brilliantly, but I would argue that good free verse is harder to write than good formal verse. At best there should be no sense of a disjunction between the old shapes and the new, or apparently new. Fenton also points out that DH. Lawrence stands out as a practitioner whose unmetred poetry was clearly better than his metred poems (see NP There is a no-man’s land between where his poems stop and where his prose begins. For examples to imitate, read Snake (see NP 1286) and ‘Bavarian Gentians’: Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark . . NP 1291) Syllabics You can try writing in syllabics right now by creating a haiku – a three-line poem of seventeen syllables in which the syllable count of the lines is five–seven–five. Read this poem by the author about a bird called a ‘Redpoll’: 206 Creative writing As if she had spilt from cherries, from holly, from a shake of nightshade. The line break between line two and line three shakes the nightshade-bush of the poem as the bird flies from it. Haiku are small open spaces for precise, often resonant, observation. Syllabics as a whole area means to organise your lines of poetry by using a strict number of syllables in a constant and continuing pattern. It is a means to organise a poem into being. The found poem The European Larch in Chapter Five uses syllabics. Rhyme can be used with subtlety, as in the syllabic masterpieces of Marianne Moore (see NP: 1328). Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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