One of the exercises I gave my CPIT students recently was the classic "reanimating clichés" (i.e. take a cliché and treat it as though literally true. Explore it. Give it life again). I've always enjoyed it, and have managed to get a couple of perfectly acceptable poems from it in the past. One (light) poem …
students and Paul Muldoon’s “Quoof”
The session before last, I showed my CPIT students a range of different modern sonnets, ending with the least typical of all, Paul Muldoon's Quoof. It caused quite a lot of discussion. Among other things, why a poet would risk such an out-there image as my hand on her breast like the smouldering one-off spoor …
Micro-review – Renegade’s Magic
Finally got around to finishing the final book in Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy, Renegade's Magic. Hmm. It's definitely better than the second book, Forest Mage. And possibly even better than the first, Shaman's Crossing. But the ending is quite weak, and is virtually identical to the ending of Fool's Fate (and, for that matter, to Assassin's …
Michael Pollan for Universal President
This is a micro-review of three books that make me come over all evangelical. All three by the same author: Michael Pollan. Oh boy. The first, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is a book that you have to read. I'm serious. Get a copy. Beg, borrow, steal or buy one now, and start reading. Especially if you are …
Epigrams and limericks and rhyming games – oh my!
My second session with the new Creative Writing course group. (Hi guys!) Today we were looking at the way that rhyme works in modern poetry, so we did the usual theoretical stuff (defining "perfect", "slant", "masculine", "feminine", "light", "eye/sight" and "wrenched" rhymes), using Carol Ann Duffy's Betrothal, Don Paterson's Imperial and Archibald McLeish's Ars Poetica as examples. …
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A Dark Feathered Art 