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 K E N NI N GSA kenning is a compound poetic phrase that takes the place of the name of a person or thing. It comes from the Old Norse, to express a thing in terms of another. In Old English, the sea would be called a ‘whale-road’. A book could be called a word-hoard’. Create some kennings and use them in short poems or haiku. A I M Kennings exist today in everyday speech – for example, ‘railroad’. Compression of image and language is important to poets, and kennings are an effective game for creating new images and metaphors, for finding fresh ways of seeing the world through language. Inside poems Poems are verbal contraptions perpetual-motion machines made of words and, as Kenneth Koch reminds us, Each word has a little music of its own. In writing poems, you hear, see and feel every word, space and punctuation mark intimately. You may even find your voice in the spaces between words, or the open space around the poem. Why do we create these little self-sustaining machines made of words and their noise Some poets write to preserve moments of significance, often small and apparently trifling instants or perceptions. As Wisl awa Szymborska says of a butterfly’s shadow passing over her hands: Seeing such sights I lose my certainty that what is important is more important than the important 57) 200 Creative writing Observation and memory areas talismanic to poetry as character and story are to fiction. Poems create little worlds of perceptual and temporal clarity. Robert Frost described a poem as a momentary stay against confusion. As Sylvia Plath put it: a door opens, a door shuts. In between you have had a glimpse a garden, a persona rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city. I think of those round glass Victorian paperweights . . . a clear globe, self-complete, very pure, with a forest or village or family group within it. You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute. It will never be the same in there – not the fir trees, nor the gables, nor the faces. So a poem takes place. (Herbert and Hollis Plath is right that our poems try to create a small and clear world that goes on recreating itself every time somebody reads it. Plath also wrote fiction. Like the best short stories, writing poems is one of the few open spaces in literature where you have the opportunity to make something resonant, complete and independent, even if that happens only a half a dozen times in your writing life. What of the world around a poem Denise Levertov believed, Insofar as poetry has asocial function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.’ What does it feel like to awaken in this way? Writing Game W I SHES AND CU RS ES Write two poems in free verse but using repeated phrases as a restrictive device to pattern your poem. Write one poem using the phrase I wish that . . .’ at the beginning of every line. Write another poem in the form of a curse – choose something that has upset you deeply and curse it with this poem, each line of which begins with the phrase, I curse you with . . AIM These are good beginner exercises. They produce vivid and energetic phrasing, and establish the use of a patterning device such as a repeated phrase. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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