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Creative writingWriting GameP
E RF OR MINGY OUR WRITING AS VISUAL ART Write a poem on a kinetic subject, such
as hard rain then light rain, the flight of doves,
cloud movement in storm, panthers attack, a clock. Rearrange – and revise – the poem so that the words imitate the shape and action of this subject.
The next step is to display your word-paintings. Create posters and postcards you might even paint them on walls or sew them into screens.
A
I M Some poets arrange their poems so that their shape imitates the subject.
In the past, these were displayed in public ways they were even sewn into fabric.
The French poet Apollinaire created ‘calligrammes’ that performed the same trick of blending the visual with verbal.
SubversionsSome authors will not commit to writing at all their poems and stories are memorised for oral delivery. Some books do not even look like books. The novelist BS. Johnson published a book as a box in which the loose chapters could be read in any order. Raymond Queneau’s
Cent Mille Milliards de po`emesplays a similar game, making the reader an active
rewriter of a literary concept,
a collaborator in experiment and design. Some ancient Persian and Hebrew poetry was composed of shapes and marks that formed visual images, such as a lion or rider with horse. William Blake printed poems within his own vivid visual representations of the poetry. Guillaume Apollinaire’s
Calligrammes con- tains poems that look like pictures made of words arranged so they
depict the image described, such as Its Raining or Mandolin Carnation and Bamboo’.
Kenneth Koch took this even further by creating poems as comic strips,
story- boarding the action of the poems. One of the most interesting developments is the rise of the graphic novel as a serious literary endeavour. Writers such as Alan Moore and Peter Blegvad meld powerful storymaking with resonant images. Any of these are bold literary concepts performances in their own right. Some of these subversions have become so successful (graphic novels make for effective Hollywood movies) that they are part of the mainstream.
You might think about concepts of your own, using the traditional architecture of a book as a starting point and subverting your reader’s expectations.
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