How to Grow Your Own Poem (eBook)

Kate Clanchy (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
256 Seiten
Swift Press (Verlag)
978-1-80075-181-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem'... Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written - their own poem. Kate's big secret is a simple one: to share other poems. She believes poetry is like singing or dancing and the best way to learn is to follow someone else. In this book, Kate shares the poems she has found provoke the richest responses, the exercises that help to shape those responses into new poems, and the advice that most often helps new writers build their own writing practice. If you have never written a poem before, this book will get you started. If you have written poems before, this book will help you to write more fluently and confidently, more as yourself. This book not like other creative writing books. It doesn't ask you to set out on your own, but to join in. Your invitation is inside.

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story 'The Not-Dead and the Saved' won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students' work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing; and in 2020 published How to Grow Your Own Poem, which Hollie McNish described as 'the best book I've read about how to practise writing poetry'.

Textauszug

 

No ideas but in things: William Carlos Williams

Poems are many different shapes, but all poems are figurative. That is, they use images – similes or metaphors – to connect things with other things and to make a memorable picture.

Everyone uses images in everyday speech too. We shout metaphors in insult and wit, exploit them to explain statistics or get elected, embed them into our languages in cliché, utilize them daily in a thousand ways, so it is perhaps a little strange that the ability to create them is not one we explicitly cherish or cultivate in language education. As a teacher, I’ve observed that most five-year-olds can effortlessly create an image for a shining haiku, but that many sixth-formers, especially the most academic, will turn in a cliché instead because their ability to associate idea and thing in an original way has never been given any exercise or credit. You too may well have buried your image-making capacity as you went through the education system, especially if you are very clever, and wanted to oblige. This chapter focuses on digging up that rusty ability, knocking off the clay and polishing it up to a shine.

Image Generating:

The Surrealists’ Game

When I work with groups, I almost always play a game which helps to reconnect people to their image-making ability. I did not invent this game: I was taught it by the poet Carol Ann Duffy. She did not invent it either, though. In fact, it is rumoured to have been invented by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and his group, and to have been played over espresso and absinthe in the Spanish desert in order to work up some new ideas. It probably is best in a group or pair, but you can also play it on your own: rational self against inner five-year-old, calling up your subconscious as if with a Ouija board. If you are on your own, you’ll have to be extra serious about it. Absinthe is optional, but if you are going to do this, set aside an hour, and follow the exercise through carefully.

You’ll need some paper, either small notelets or A4 torn into quarters, and you’ll need at least sixteen of them. Make them into a nice little pile. Find a pen.

Remember the difference between an abstract and a concrete noun.

Concrete nouns can be found by the senses. Remember all five of yours: sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing. Five wise monkeys. Eyes, fingers, mouth, nose, ears.

Abstract nouns can’t be sensed. They are ideas – racism or fame – or feelings – doubt or hope.

Think of an abstract noun – hope – and write it on your first piece of paper.

On the second piece of paper, pretend briefly to be the dictionary, the definition of that noun – a faith or wish that circumstances will improve in the future.

Now do the same with a concrete noun, and your third piece of paper, e.g. bird.

On the fourth bit of paper – the definition of that noun – vertebrate with feathers. Descended from dinosaurs.

Now repeat: abstract noun, definition, concrete noun, definition, and again, nouns and definitions on separate bits of paper.

You will need at least eight nouns and definitions.

When you have enough, gather the nouns in one pile, and the definitions in another, and shuffle both.

Now take the first noun off the top of its pile, and match with the first definition.

Hope is a vertebrate with feathers. Descended from dinosaurs.

Bird is a faith or wish that circumstances will improve in the future.

Was Emily Dickinson playing the Surrealists’ Game?

It seems possible.

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

Fame

Fame is a bee.

It has a song—

It has a sting—

Ah, too, it has a wing.

Emily Dickinson

Rachel really was playing the Surrealists’ Game during one of my classes. She started with ‘Want’ matching with the definition of ‘snake’. Then she made over Want into a person.

Want

Want is quiet but it sticks around.

It takes a seat before it makes itself known.

Want’s eyes glint, and its tongue flickers.

Want will listen, and wait, and study,

it learns everything. It learns you.

Want smiles and soon after it laughs –

not with you.

Want mocks in whispers and sometimes

(if you are unlucky)

Want will shout.

Rachel Gittens (sixteen)

Langston Hughes, one of the founding figures of Black American literature, also shows how a surreal analogy – in this case ripening fruit – can be political and powerful. He’s writing about Harlem in the 1930s, when the hope of Black Americans in the first decades of the twentieth century were being destroyed. It’s all about the senses: textures, smells, tastes.

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

Your Turn

Try a poem.

Write down an abstraction that interests you: desire, or Schadenfreude, or Brexit. You can use a place or time like ‘Harlem’ if you like. Now, use a concrete metaphor to define it.

So maybe your poem makes an abstraction into:

a person (like Rachel Gittens)

or a creature (like Emily Dickinson).

Or something else,

even a food (like Langston Hughes).

But your poem makes an idea into a thing.

Your poem is short.

It doesn’t rhyme.

It isn’t a haiku.

It isn’t an acrostic.

It’s just you,

making an abstract idea concrete,

expressing an association that’s real for you.

Trusting that it will be real for other people.

Surprise yourself.

Write it down.

Sharpening Your Images:

The Five Senses

As you write and rewrite, it helps to have an inner store of questions you always ask of your own writing.

A good one is: does my writing appeal to the senses?

Remember all five of them:

Smell

Taste

Hearing

Touch

Sight

Five wise monkeys. Eyes, fingers, mouth, nose, ears.

All of the senses are in this Carol Ann Duffy poem – they are what makes it alive.

Hard to Say

I asked him to give me an image for Love, something I could see,

or imagine seeing, or something that, because of the word,

for its smell, would make me remember, something possible

to hear. Don’t just say Love, I said, Love, love, I love you.

On the way back, I thought of our love, and how, lately,

I too have grown lazy in expressing it, snuggling up to you

in bed, idly murmuring those tired clichés without even thinking.

My words have been grubby confetti, faded, tacky, blown far

from the wedding feast. And so it was with a sudden shock of love,

like a peacock flashing wide its hundred eyes, or a boy’s voice

flinging top G to the roof of an empty church, or a bottle

of French perfume knocked off the shelf, spilling into the steamy bath

I wanted you. After the wine, the flowers I brought you drowned

in the darkening light. As we slept, we breathed their scent all night.

Carol Ann Duffy

Your Turn

Lean on Carol Ann Duffy’s poem to make your own.

If you like, play another round of the Surrealists’ Game.

Think of an abstraction – nationalism, capitalism, philosophy – or an emotion – love, sadness, loss – that you’d like to write about.

That abstraction is your title. Carol Ann Duffy has ‘Love’.

Now, go through the senses.

What does this abstraction smell of, to you?

Love smells of:

a bottle

of French perfume knocked off the shelf, spilling into the steamy bath

—

What does love taste of?

the wine

Trust your personal associations. Build them up on the page. You are allowed more than one answer. If you find the answers a little embarrassing – if they make the hairs on the back of your neck lift – then definitely write them down.

What does love sound like?

a boy’s voice

flinging top G to the roof of an empty church

What does love feel like?

we breathed their scent all night.

What does it look like?

like...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.6.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Creative Writing • how to write a poem • Poem • Poetry • writing advice
• ISBN-10: 1-80075-181-8 / 1800751818
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80075-181-1 / 9781800751811