Joanna Preston: Tasmanaut Poet
I've decided that this year I'm going to have a go at NaPoWriMo. No, not NaNoWriMo, NaPoWriMo. (Inter)National Poetry Writing Month. What on earth is (Inter)National Poetry Writing Month? It's a challenge. A celebration of poetry that coincides with the American National Poetry Month celebrations. And it's very simple: write a poem every day for the …
Continue reading "NaPoWriMo – another mad (but brilliant) idea"
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 …
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 …
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. …
Continue reading "Epigrams and limericks and rhyming games – oh my!"
Yesterday was the final class in my first series of tutoring for CPIT. Good fun! Although got through the material a lot faster than I expected. (Either I'm a brilliant teacher, or they were desperate to get me to shut up and go home...) One of the things that we did – a couple of …
A Dark Feathered Art 