Building Poetry Muscles via attending to detail. Sit yourself down in any location: your room, kitchen, den. A laundromat, a park, on a bus, in a car and record a list of details. No need to editorialize. Art galleries are great for this. You can also use books. Open up a how-to-repair manual, a poetry book, a National Geographic and start recording details. Buy yourself a Flip Dictionary: absolutely wonderful for writers as it contains gigantic lists that writers need: all the lakes in Siberia, brain surgeon terms, diseases of the liver, poisonous plants, names of wind, plus it's a thesaurus. Why didn't they call it Flip Thesaurus?
Homework:
Create a list poem on any topic or re-vise the one you did in class today. Type it up. Ensure that your details are sharp. No room for vague ideas. Edit for areas where you rushed. If you say car, change it to Ford Galaxy. Tree? Change it to pine or the pine we planted last summer. Appeal to all five senses. How does the colour green sound _- a single violin, tender shoots pushing through the damp earth. How does green feel--my father's hand, one callus on the thumb from the hammer. How does green look? I remember Wednesday, riding the number six bus, ribbons in my hair. Don't worry too much about the conscious connection at this point. Aim for clean, fresh language. Write it. Edit. Revise. Bring it to class on Monday.
Type it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment