I was tasked with finding a poem not longer than 12 lines and thought I had only found one in 1987! However in sorting through old first draft folders I found a ‘coda’ type poem which for some reason I had left off the sequence from 1999 collected here as ‘Skeleton at the Plough’….
Month: September 2014
The Negative Owl – Mark Strand
First lecture by Sarah Jackson and a surprise….a poem from a book I had not really paid attention to but had purchased many years ago…probably because of the cover. The image does indeed turn out to be a negative image of Bewick’s ‘White Owl’ engraving from page 89 of his ‘British Birds’ from 1809. It entirely appropriate…
A 12 line poem….The Fallen Tree 1987
A simple enough task…choose a poem you have written that not longer than 12 lines and bring to discuss in first session. Fine only I decided I would stick to rule and proceeded to search backwards through everything IÂ had written until I found something that could be a poem and under 12 lines…I searched and…
Creative Writing reading list…
Thursday was the induction day at Clifton. Rory Waterman, David Belbin, Georgina Lock and Andrew Taylor introduced themselves to the students and the course structure was laid out. I was impressed with the layout and I have quite a lot of work to do…deadlines are good as I would default to laziness if did not…
Starting with short stories…
Decided to concentrate on short stories to start with…my favourite poets Burnside and Carver both write short stories too….some of these I collected 20 years ago…about time I read them! Thanks to Jez Noond for some more recent additions to the que including Grace Paley and Amy Hempel. Some obvious missing collections here..D.H.Lawrence..Richard Ford, Russell Banks,…
Is that all there is……
Well that has made me think…..after a thorough trawl my entire ‘fictional prose’ output amounts to three false starts and 1500 words. That is all there is… So maybe choosing the’fiction’option as second choice of a range of pathways on the M.A. may have been a mistake. The other option is ‘Script for film and…
A Crow in Barley….the novel I never wrote…
22nd July 1990. Unemployed and back home in Didcot, for sale Oxfordshire with my parents….aged 31..not good. So what do I do..apart from a lot of off the cards building work and fencing and green party activism…this..I start writing a rural novel…..obviously.. Hand typed ( I didn’t type) on an old 60’s Office Remington I…
1985 Carver Short Stories……my most important purchase?
Some time in 1985 or 1986 possibly during a very cold winter, as I recall sheets of ice around a phone box on Plymouth Hoe, I purchased a new book in a Plymouth bookshop. This is significant because I very rarely purchase anything at full price having been trained in second-hand shops from art school…
My book challenge fail..Faction?
Firstly it not a collection of short stories DOH…. Well my weekly book challenge failed miserably but I did read one book in the week which a first for me in a long while :-). The chosen book was John Berendt’s ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ a strange choice randomly picked up…
The 10 books that left a lasting impression challenge….
1. The Victor Comic 1966 My step-grandfather was illiterate and had the Victor comic in his farm labourer’s cottage to help him to learn to read..I remember reading it to him when he in his sixties as he puffed clouds of tobacco around my head from his pipe….I was 7. 2.  Ian Allen Combined Locoshed Book…