How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life: A Writing Exercise
If you're looking for a starting point for writing, why not look again at a story which already exists? Take a family story, perhaps, or a myth, a fairytale or story from the bible, or maybe a well-known novel, and then retell it from another perspective, or a different character's viewpoint. Choose a story which fascinates you, which draws you back to it, for whatever reason.
Jo Shapcott has done this with her poem, 'Mrs Noah: Taken After the Flood'. She builds on a story we already know, giving Mrs Noah a voice and a previously untold story of her own. Though 'The ocean/is only a memory', Mrs Noah is haunted by sensual thoughts which surface, thoughts of 'big paws which idly turn to bat the air', of a 'rough tongue, the claws, the little bites / the crude taste of his mane.'
Here's the whole poem, taken from 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem or How Reading Modern Poetry Can Change Your Life by Ruth Padel: :
Charles Wright, in his introduction to 'The Best American Poetry 2008′, says poetry is 'the fox under our shirts that gnaws away at our hearts', a description which aptly captures the fierce intensity of poetic language. I often find that a poem will provide me with the inital spark for a story, with that image or idea which 'gnaws away'. Another poet whose work has struck a chord with me recently is Esther Morgan . I keep going back to her poem 'Bone China', from the collection, The Silence Living In Houses You can read the poem here.
You might like to choose a particular poem which you draws you back again and again. Or, you could try the following steps with 'Bone China', and see where they take you.
With the poem in front of you:
(1) Find sections of 1-3 lines which leap out at you.Write them down, or underline them.
(2) Break the 1-3 lines down into key words/phrases/images. Now, one by one, do a mind map of ideas, associations, memories, images, questions for EACH.
Give each mind map its own page and give yourself plenty of time. Let your mind roam. Keep going. Keep musing.
(3) Now… whose point of view or experience interests you most? Perhaps there is even someone on the edge of the text, connected in some way but not mentioned…
(4) Are you interested in creating a new version of the same 'story'? (set in a different period, a different place?) Or perhaps a new 'branch' of the original story?
(5) Whose voice or which pov?
(6) Now write, quickly, for 10 minutes. See what unfolds.
Share this on Bebo
Blog this on Blogger
Share this on del.icio.us
Share this on Facebook
Post this to MySpace
Tweet This!
