Week 1, Lit109/Introduction to Creative Writing: The Language of Poetry, the language of literature

Transcription

1 Week 1, Lit109/Introduction to Creative Writing: The Language of Poetry, the language of literature Requirements and Introductory Exercises, Reading List distributed at the end of the session for next seminar. Aim of the seminar: Introduction to course, course criteria, workshop requirements with some introductory warm-up exercises 1. Introduction to the module, criteria, requirements 2. Warm-up activity: interviews. a) What s the point of poetry? Why do people read poetry at all nowadays? b) What s a good poem? c) In pairs tell us each other about yourself, about your writing career as a poet up till now, about your thoughts on your own writing style etc d) Now: write a blurb for the first poetry collection from the information you have gathered in your interview about the other person. 3. Read the following extract by Agnes Nemes Nagy on poetry s task. Read the extract and explain with your own words what you think she means regarding the language of poetry : The poet is the specialist of emotions. In practising my craft I ve discovered that our socalled feelings have at least two layers. The first layer conveys known and acknowledged emotions with such names as joy, fright, love, and indignation. By general agreement these have more or less fixed meanings; they have a past, a science, and a literary history. They are citizens of our hearts..the second layer is the no-man s land of the nameless. If I stop at the corner of Blue Ball Street around six in the evening and see the edge of sunlight falling on the Castle at a certain angle, and the olive trees of Vérmező casting their shadows in a certain way, I am always shaken. This impulse has no name. Yet we have all stood at the corner of some Blue Ball Street..How many times am I obliged to give a conventional name to a nameless emotion! And not just to oil the screw-threaded logic of general consensus. Sometimes in dull embarrassment I ruin the thing myself and splash the Nameless of Blue Ball Street into a puddle of autumn melancholy or into a tub of historical enthusiasm. Autumn melancholy and historical enthusiasm are naturally citizens in our hearts. I believe that one of the poet s duties is to obtain the rights of a citizen for as many of the nameless as she or he can. ( ) Roughly and approximately that s what I usually say about the nature of poetry, for that s roughly and approximately what I think about it. Yet it is obviously not easy to recognise our own thoughts and emotions, let alone find the right words for them. Still, I don t think it would hurt to re-examine and perhaps amend what I ve just written. As railroad men tap with their little hammers at intervals

2 along the underframe of a long train, so it doesn t hurt to tap along and test our own convictions Now, try and write a paragraph on what you think is poetry s task today. Some poets say poetry makes nothing happen, some say it helps us live, some say it is therapeutic, some that it is fun, some that it helps us to survive, some that it helps us remember, some that it helps us to forget. What do you think? Write a piece of automatic writing: 5. Now. Last mini exercise: think of a line you wrote (sometime in the past) half awake at night and hardly remembered the next day can you unravel your forgetfulness and recreate the poem you have lost? Try.. Homework and preparation for next seminar: Finish activity 5. Reading: Read Dog by Krisztina Toth and W. S. Graham s On Roger Hilton s Watch and Karen Solie s Migration. Write a short reflection on what you think the poem is trying to convey/do. Read Ruth Padel s passage on Making Strange: The Leap of Metaphor 2 Gertrude Stein, Rose is a Rose... in WN Herbert & Matthew Hollis (eds), Strong Words: Moderns Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2000) As a more extended homework: choose a collection of a contemporary poet s (best to pop into a bookshop etc) and explore its world. Task will be to write a short review of it (not for next seminar, though) And Agnes Nemes Nagy on The poetic Image, see appendix 1 Nemes Nagy, A Preface for my Poetry Collection, Cf. Nemes Nagy s concept of autumn melancholy and historic enthusiasm with Middleton s idea of nostalgia, which, in my view, parallel each other: There is a particular beauty to old used artefacts. The beauty is perhaps touched by nostalgia but not limited by it, not deformed by it. An old spoon can certainly survive the grip of feelings that I put around it. To me it transmits a form of life, in Middleton, Seventeen Hiccups on The Question of Novelty, in The Pursuit of the Kingfisher Essays (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993), Padel, The Poem and the Journey, (Vintage, 2008) 34-37/

3 In it there are two images photographed together, which become visible on the picture with two contours, two heads, two different connotations. Let s say the poet allows herself to invent the two-million-five-hundred-and-eleventh simile about the moon. In this simile there will be the moon and the yellow chrysanthemum, with which it was compared. Two yellow heads, two tufted stains will be visible on the photographic disc of the simile, more or less overlapping each other, moved away from their own outlines. This perpetual duality or diversity is deceptive; they drift away and they emerge. Each object will relinquish something of its own identity, emerging into the other temporarily, or for longer, and will bring about a third entity; the simile itself. This doubted oneness, this doubted identity, this somewhat fusible identity creating something new: this is one of the secrets of the psychological significance of the simile. The simile is nevertheless a process, the process of partially intermingling two objects the unity of two signs in mutual recognition which creates a new sign. The simile perpetually flows as a miracle of fixed fluidity, like some saint s blood long-dried up in front of the eyes of the believers. With this dual nature the simile denies and doubts the dissection of the world s phenomena into separate objects. Its territory is that thin layer, that fog which encircles the contours of the identity of objects, that epistemological evaporation which conceals or carries the possibility of these differences merging into one, as on a universal screen. 3 3 Nemes Nagy, A költői kép, 123.

4 Week 2: IMAGERY, POETIC IMAGE, TROPE Imagery, Poetic Image, Trope: we ll be exploring the system of metaphors: the structure, the components and the various operations/intentions of poetic language (Reading: more to be confirmed and distributed) Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose is a rose in WN Herbert & Matthew Hollis (eds), Strong Words: Moderns Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe), Ruth Padel, Making Strange: The Leap of Metaphor, in The Poem and the Journey (Vintage, 2008) 1. Check homework, writing material from previous seminar 2. Discussion: Contemplate on the meaning of the following statement: to leave the greatest distance between words.the greater the distance the deeper the abyss the poem creates. (Agnes Names Nagy) a) Discuss what this statement might mean in your own interpretation b) Read Krisztina Toth s Dog and W. S. Graham s On Roger Hilton s Watch and Karen Solie s Migration. How does Nemes Nagy s axiom on the task of the poetic image manifest in Toth s poem? c) Read the extract below on imagery by Nemes Nagy. Compare it with Padel s essay, Making Strange: The Leap of Metaphor. 4 In it there are two images photographed together, which become visible on the picture with two contours, two heads, two different connotations. Let s say the poet allows herself to invent the two-million-five-hundred-and-eleventh simile about the moon. In this simile there will be the moon and the yellow chrysanthemum, with which it was compared. Two yellow heads, two tufted stains will be visible on the photographic disc of the simile, more or less overlapping each other, moved away from their own outlines. This perpetual duality or diversity is deceptive; they drift away and they emerge. Each object will relinquish something of its own identity, emerging into the other temporarily, or for longer, and will bring about a third entity; the simile itself. This doubted oneness, this doubted identity, this somewhat fusible identity creating something new: this is one of the secrets of the psychological significance of the simile. The simile is nevertheless a process, the process of partially intermingling two objects the unity of two signs in mutual recognition which creates a new sign. The simile perpetually flows as a miracle of fixed fluidity, like some saint s blood long-dried up in front of the eyes of the believers. With this dual nature the simile denies and doubts the dissection of the world s phenomena into separate objects. Its territory is that thin layer, that fog which encircles the contours of the identity of objects, that epistemological evaporation which 4 Padel, The Poem and the Journey, (Vintage, 2008) 34-37/

5 conceals or carries the possibility of these differences merging into one, as on a universal screen. 5 Writing task: Follow-up: Automatic/Creative Writing exercise: browse through Toth s poem once again. Now I would like you to write a poem/a piece/stream of consciousness. The writing should try and create an extended metaphor/image/idea/allegory where you combine two pretty distant thoughts/images together (see in Toth s poem the semi-alive dog representing an abstract entity, that is, a disintegrating and unhappy relationship). and write about it. If you are stuck, here some examples: A train journey / time B) your lover s voice in your final telephone call /farewell C) a wrought iron railway bridge across the Thames / bridging past and presence D) an underground trip / unconscious E) a trip down into the catacombs in Rome (e.g.) / death F) a prehistoric fossil, a pebble or a shell you have found in the sand. Etctec./memory Homework: 1. research the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke 2. complete now your poem of allegory Some suggested editions: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, Introduction by Robert Hass (Vintage; Reissue edition 13 March 1989) Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, Letters to a young poet: Box set, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell Rilke, Rainer Maria, On Language in Letters on Life, trans. Ulrich Baer (New York: The Modern Library, 2005, 2006) Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton (New York London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1934, reissued 2004) Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, What are Poets For, and On Language in Poetry, Language, Thought (Perennial, 2001) W. S. Graham, What is the Language using Us for? in Implements in their Places (New Collected Poems, Faber, 2004) 5 Nemes Nagy, A költői kép, 123.