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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| Concept as performance What is a book anyway Some books never appear on shelves. This does not mean they have vanished on the audience’s radar. Not all types of creative writing are created to fit the pages of a book. Writing can perform as a spoken or musical art, as a species of visual art, or as a form of electronic art. Books can be downloaded from the Internet. Their process of composition and reception might depend entirely on this medium hypertext novels writhe with multiple plots and endings in the layers of text hiding behind a link poems move kinetically on the page of a screen, making and reinventing themselves. Their existence does not mean that the end of the book is nigh, as some cultural commentators claim. Their existence means there are more concepts possible for writers willing to exploit another open space. 226 Creative writing Writing Game P 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. Subversions Some 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`emes plays 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. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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