luka
Well-known member
To steer the craft
An exercise. If you allow your attention to float freely, undirected but alert, just note what impinges upon your consciousness, and write it down. Red curtain. Night behind the window.
What we want, is the sense of delight and surprise Fernando Pessoa speaks about in his poem, the startling reality of things.
The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day
Every thing is what it is
And its hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.
At this stage we will limit ourselves to what comes in through eye and ear, through these sense portals, so we will orient ourselves outwards, attention moving beyond and away from us, and we will keep a light touch, not burrowing down into any given impression, but moving, quite quickly, from one to the next.
But be precise and concise. Don’t sketch the impression. Don’t look for poetic language. No metaphor. No folorn, lonely trees, no broken skies. Look for precise, descriptive language, concrete, definite language that can convey what you perceive to a reader. Don’t invent anything. and at this stage we don’t want our moods and emotions to colour the scene. Don’t be creative, whatever you do. These precepts from the Imagist Manifesto are helpful
To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact
word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in
vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.
To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor
indefinite.
concentration is of the very essence of poetry.
Peel your eyes away from the screen and look around the room, or, if it’s still light where you are, look out of the window. Move the camera of your binocular vision as much as you want, not looking for anything, but just allowing the eye to be snagged on this or that object.
Do register colour and the irreducible facticity of colour. Red. The experience of red. How red vibrates. The temperature of red upon the eye.
Get a sense of the light and the cloud it is filtered through if it is filtered through cloud, and how the light affects the colours you can see, how vivid or how dull they appear. How sharp and distinct the outline of objects are at this moment. Whether there is clarity or whether there is a kind of haze or murkiness. Is the window clean or is the light interrupted by smeared and dusty glass?
Do register form, curves, straight lines, hollows and bulges, creases and ridges, folds and valleys.
An exercise. If you allow your attention to float freely, undirected but alert, just note what impinges upon your consciousness, and write it down. Red curtain. Night behind the window.
What we want, is the sense of delight and surprise Fernando Pessoa speaks about in his poem, the startling reality of things.
The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day
Every thing is what it is
And its hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.
At this stage we will limit ourselves to what comes in through eye and ear, through these sense portals, so we will orient ourselves outwards, attention moving beyond and away from us, and we will keep a light touch, not burrowing down into any given impression, but moving, quite quickly, from one to the next.
But be precise and concise. Don’t sketch the impression. Don’t look for poetic language. No metaphor. No folorn, lonely trees, no broken skies. Look for precise, descriptive language, concrete, definite language that can convey what you perceive to a reader. Don’t invent anything. and at this stage we don’t want our moods and emotions to colour the scene. Don’t be creative, whatever you do. These precepts from the Imagist Manifesto are helpful
To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact
word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.
we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in
vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.
To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor
indefinite.
concentration is of the very essence of poetry.
Peel your eyes away from the screen and look around the room, or, if it’s still light where you are, look out of the window. Move the camera of your binocular vision as much as you want, not looking for anything, but just allowing the eye to be snagged on this or that object.
Do register colour and the irreducible facticity of colour. Red. The experience of red. How red vibrates. The temperature of red upon the eye.
Get a sense of the light and the cloud it is filtered through if it is filtered through cloud, and how the light affects the colours you can see, how vivid or how dull they appear. How sharp and distinct the outline of objects are at this moment. Whether there is clarity or whether there is a kind of haze or murkiness. Is the window clean or is the light interrupted by smeared and dusty glass?
Do register form, curves, straight lines, hollows and bulges, creases and ridges, folds and valleys.