Christopher James's workshop: The winner of this year's National Poetry Competition invites you to explore the beauty of collisions in this month's ex
Series: Poetry workshopPrevious Index Christopher James's workshopThe winner of this year's National Poetry Competition invites you to explore the beauty of collisions in this month's exercise
Christopher James guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 April 2009 11.01 BST Article history
An asteroid on a collision course with the earth. Photograph: Frank Whitney/Getty Images Photograph: Frank Whitney/Getty Images
Christopher James was born in Paisley in 1975 and studied at Newcastle and UEA where he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing. He has won the Ledbury and Bridport poetry prizes and is the winner of the National Poetry Competition 2008. His debut collection, The Invention of Butterfly (2006) is available from Ragged Raven Press.
Take a look at his workshop on collisions .....
I find a fizzing, unpredictable chemical reaction takes place when two completely opposing images, ideas or phrases and are told to work together - like putting Richard Nixon and Barbara Cartland in a room then telling them they have 60 minutes to write a song together. How do they size each other up? Who writes the music? Who comes up with the opening line? Introduce another element and you have further mayhem. Imagine they're alone at the top of the Eiffel Tower at night. How do the lights of Paris inspire them – will the result be a woozy heartbroken lament with a Gauloise burning steadily next to a microphone? Will Nixon write an angry punk riposte to his critics while Cartland pounds away on drums?
Poetry is a search for the new: new ways of looking at things; new places in the mind no one has been to before. There's a place for the mundane, but only when it's offset by the extraordinary. The ear needs to be startled in the same way as the eye and the mind. Look at this line from Ian Duhig's remarkable poem, "The Lammas Hireling":
"Stark naked but for the fox-trap biting his ankle"
The line is as jagged as the trap itself, riddled with sharp 'k' sounds, while the shock comes from the fox-trap completing the image. The mind, eye and ear are expecting an item of clothing as the pay-off, not a gruesome lump of serrated metal. The surprise is doubled, then compounded, by the "biting" – whether intended or not, the image is a fox sinking its teeth into the tender flesh of the ankle. Different elements collide to create a startling and new image. Later in the same poem, we encounter another collision:
"His eyes rose like bread"
For a simile to work it must ring true. But for it to really hit home, it must also have the ability to surprise. This example not only satisfies the first requirement, but has a strangeness that unsettles and adds to the potency of Duhig's description.
I was fortunate enough to chance upon one of these similes in my own poem, "Farewell to the Earth", when a man is buried, "with a potato in each hand / on New Year's Day when the ground was hard as luck". The language isn't ornate but the effect is new – simply through the collision of sense and sound.
The exercise
Choose one from the following list of people:
Roger Bannister
Ringo Starr
John Betjeman
Zola Budd
Jaqueline du Pre
Wernher von Braun
Katherine Hepburn
And one from this list of places:
the Mississippi Delta
the source of the Nile
the surface of Mars
the Isle of St Kilda, Scotland
the Great Barrier Reef
a motorway service station
the Yorkshire moors
And one from this list of situations:
Has lost a wedding ring
Has been stood up on a date
Has just discovered a great secret
Has given up everything to sell flowers
Has toothache
Has just fallen in love
Has spotted a UFO
Now use these three elements as the tripod for your poem. For example: Katherine Hepburn has just been stood up for a date on the Great Barrier Reef. What is she feeling, thinking? What time of day is it? How did she get here? Is she hot or cold? Tired or exhilarated? It's entirely up to you. You might find the exercise takes you into a creative dead end – try a different combination.
Feel free to choose any form you like. You don't have to rhyme, but I'd like you to think about making some beautiful collisions in the language as well as the character, place and situation you choose. Use the language from your imaginative settings to frame your similes and metaphors. And rhyme, especially internal rhyme, can flow naturally, particularly if you read the poem aloud as you write it. If a line looks too long on the page, it probably is too long. Read it aloud and see if you can tighten it up.
The objective is not to come up with a perfect poem. It's to send your writing mind to a place it has never been before. The exercise may produce nothing more than a line that can be transplanted elsewhere. But what's there to lose – except a few minutes from your lunch hour?
Please submit your entry (pasted into the email, rather than as an attachment) to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk before midnight on Sunday 22 April
Christopher James guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 April 2009 11.01 BST Article history
An asteroid on a collision course with the earth. Photograph: Frank Whitney/Getty Images Photograph: Frank Whitney/Getty Images
Christopher James was born in Paisley in 1975 and studied at Newcastle and UEA where he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing. He has won the Ledbury and Bridport poetry prizes and is the winner of the National Poetry Competition 2008. His debut collection, The Invention of Butterfly (2006) is available from Ragged Raven Press.
Take a look at his workshop on collisions .....
I find a fizzing, unpredictable chemical reaction takes place when two completely opposing images, ideas or phrases and are told to work together - like putting Richard Nixon and Barbara Cartland in a room then telling them they have 60 minutes to write a song together. How do they size each other up? Who writes the music? Who comes up with the opening line? Introduce another element and you have further mayhem. Imagine they're alone at the top of the Eiffel Tower at night. How do the lights of Paris inspire them – will the result be a woozy heartbroken lament with a Gauloise burning steadily next to a microphone? Will Nixon write an angry punk riposte to his critics while Cartland pounds away on drums?
Poetry is a search for the new: new ways of looking at things; new places in the mind no one has been to before. There's a place for the mundane, but only when it's offset by the extraordinary. The ear needs to be startled in the same way as the eye and the mind. Look at this line from Ian Duhig's remarkable poem, "The Lammas Hireling":
"Stark naked but for the fox-trap biting his ankle"
The line is as jagged as the trap itself, riddled with sharp 'k' sounds, while the shock comes from the fox-trap completing the image. The mind, eye and ear are expecting an item of clothing as the pay-off, not a gruesome lump of serrated metal. The surprise is doubled, then compounded, by the "biting" – whether intended or not, the image is a fox sinking its teeth into the tender flesh of the ankle. Different elements collide to create a startling and new image. Later in the same poem, we encounter another collision:
"His eyes rose like bread"
For a simile to work it must ring true. But for it to really hit home, it must also have the ability to surprise. This example not only satisfies the first requirement, but has a strangeness that unsettles and adds to the potency of Duhig's description.
I was fortunate enough to chance upon one of these similes in my own poem, "Farewell to the Earth", when a man is buried, "with a potato in each hand / on New Year's Day when the ground was hard as luck". The language isn't ornate but the effect is new – simply through the collision of sense and sound.
The exercise
Choose one from the following list of people:
Roger Bannister
Ringo Starr
John Betjeman
Zola Budd
Jaqueline du Pre
Wernher von Braun
Katherine Hepburn
And one from this list of places:
the Mississippi Delta
the source of the Nile
the surface of Mars
the Isle of St Kilda, Scotland
the Great Barrier Reef
a motorway service station
the Yorkshire moors
And one from this list of situations:
Has lost a wedding ring
Has been stood up on a date
Has just discovered a great secret
Has given up everything to sell flowers
Has toothache
Has just fallen in love
Has spotted a UFO
Now use these three elements as the tripod for your poem. For example: Katherine Hepburn has just been stood up for a date on the Great Barrier Reef. What is she feeling, thinking? What time of day is it? How did she get here? Is she hot or cold? Tired or exhilarated? It's entirely up to you. You might find the exercise takes you into a creative dead end – try a different combination.
Feel free to choose any form you like. You don't have to rhyme, but I'd like you to think about making some beautiful collisions in the language as well as the character, place and situation you choose. Use the language from your imaginative settings to frame your similes and metaphors. And rhyme, especially internal rhyme, can flow naturally, particularly if you read the poem aloud as you write it. If a line looks too long on the page, it probably is too long. Read it aloud and see if you can tighten it up.
The objective is not to come up with a perfect poem. It's to send your writing mind to a place it has never been before. The exercise may produce nothing more than a line that can be transplanted elsewhere. But what's there to lose – except a few minutes from your lunch hour?
Please submit your entry (pasted into the email, rather than as an attachment) to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk before midnight on Sunday 22 April
posted by temporal at 4/08/2009
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