All entries for Wednesday 19 January 2011

Poetry Session Extravaganza

Today marked my first ever poetry seminar, and it was beautiful. Here are the results of some of the workshop type things we did, to peruse at your (nobody reads this) leisure. 

Our first task was to write a poem with three stanzas about a word we liked; the first of which would be an alternative definition of the word, the second being a synaesthetic interpretation, and the third a question to ask of the word and its reply. I chose "fastidious" because a) I really like it and b) I've been thinking about some lines from a Tony Harrison poem: "Paging angels set down this/ Fastidious and human kiss" which I have a little crush on. Fastidious kisses are beautifully tangible. But I digress.

FASTIDIOUS

n. The officious assistant of a catholic priest

whose lack of an acknowledged title within the clergy

leads him to deploy

unwarranted "h"s in his speech.

For example: "I saw the fastidious today

and he said 'Hit hwas quite the hevent of the hyear.'"

A sizable sticky lemony toffee-

or a kind of velvety purple.

Fastidious, where are you going?

To the river in Paris

where I will brush the leaves

from strangers' coats.

I like the last three lines and the word "sticky" for some reason. The second task involved hacking up an existing poem and rearranging the words to make a shiny new one. I'm not sure about the results of this one, but physically the cut-and-pasted poem looks pretty cool.

the great bay

rose

against the flames

tongueing glass

with spiteful eyes,

pinkening

The sudden World.

I really don't like this. It sits inelegantly on the tongue however you say it. But I might mess around with hacking up some other poems because it is refreshing to use a new vocabulary. It's possible to become too attached to certain sounds or images so this kind of restriction shakes things up a bit.

I am making a resolution to do a bit of reviewing and non-fiction work on here because a blog wholly about me and my "development as a writer" is the most boring thing I've ever heard of. So no more poems that aren't assignments unless someone pays me, which seems unlikely. Furthermore I would like to blog less. That's all for now.

Kirsty Judge : 19 Jan 2011 23:43 |  Tags: Modes Of Writing Poetry |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem