I hope this discussion inspires you to think more deeply about how you could write about particular landscapes (or waterscapes) and stimulates you to research a really interesting contemporary writer and her ideas about poetry and places.
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In the end, it’s not just about flowers.
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Content-wise flash fiction, however short, will have a narrative arc while flash poetry will catch a moment with maybe implied narrative. In fact, flash poetry will have more in common with a photograph than with a piece of prose.
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So your tutors are giving you good feedback, and you’re happy with what you’re writing, but what’s the next stage in sharing that with other people? People you don’t know, people whose opinions matter, people who are part of a wider community of poets? In this series I’m going to write a few posts about […]
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One of the reasons I read literature in translation is to extend my sense of the possible – to get a sense of what English-language writing might be missing.
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I hope to produce a poem that is full of light and life, that is itself an ecosystem made up of many different sights, sounds, creatures, memories and ideas.
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So your tutors are giving you good feedback, and you’re happy with what you’re writing, but what’s the next stage in sharing that with other people? People you don’t know, people whose opinions matter, people who are part of a wider community of poets?
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Parody is enormous fun. It’s a very good way of finding out about other writers’ styles, although you have to choose someone with a distinctive voice. I think the greatest gains are to be had writing poetic parodies. You discover new verse forms, new ways of looking at things, new ways to use images, alliteration, metaphors
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The name itself is surely a contradiction in terms – how can a poem be ‘prose’, when ‘prose’ is the very word used to describe writing that’s not poetry?
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For decades I was terrified of poetry. It all seemed so incredibly technical and difficult. I didn’t see the point; I wanted to tell a story. So when I did my MA I made myself face up to this and do the poetry module, even though the scriptwriting one beckoned as I’d already had five radio plays broadcast. What’s the point of doing a course if you don’t learn something new? I struggled. It hurt. I came to realise that this was something I had to actively learn.
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