~M~
Board Administrator Username: mjm
Post Number: 31092 Registered: 11-1998
| Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008 - 6:51 am: |
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. Dearest Membership -- Here is the eleventh in The Poet's Note Card series. These Note Cards come from a book entitled The Mind's Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry, by Kevin Clark. Mr. Clark is a winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award, is a university professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, and a widely published poet. This book on the teaching of poetry writing is concise, practical, and has been designed specifically for a college-level term. It includes a progression of lessons, example poems, and stimulating exercises. While most advanced poets already know these things, it doesn't hurt to review them. Or to learn them if you are a beginner to the craft of poetry making. I'll try to bring you a Poet's Note Card every so often. While you might not agree with every point Mr. Clark makes, I do hope these note cards serve to help those who are new to poetry by providing some basic foundation of information on which to build. Oh, and I do recommend that you acquire the book. It's an excellent textbook, especially if you would like to attend a college-level poetry writing course, but cannot for whatever reason. The link above (click on the book's title) will take you to the WPF BookShop and the Amazon description of the book. Thanks for reading! Love, M (Administrator) ------------------------------------------------- The Poet's Note Card -- #11 from The Mind's Eye: A Guide to Writing Poetry by Kevin Clark Unreal Realities 1. Surrealistic poetry often uses dreamlike images to portray the workings of the subconscious mind. 2. No good poem is entirely surreal; there must be some link to what we think of as “objective reality.” A surreal poem which is nothing but surreal may seem irrelevant to all but the writer. 3. There are generally two types of surrealist poetry: Dada (originated primarily by French visual artists) and Jungian or “deep imagery” (founded primarily by Latin and South American writers). 4. Dada is a type of surrealism that deliberately defies reason by making use of nonsense images; Jungian poetry combines both realistic and fantastical events to create a dreamlike world. 5. In American poetry, “deep imagery” is a Jungian type of poetry that features weird or incongruous images that, in turn, are designed to strike a buried instinct (or an archetype) in the reader. 6. Some poets employ a kind of surrealism that is inherent in the concept of “dreamtime,” a state in which human beings have access to ancestors and higher truths. 7. Dreamtime surrealism is much like magical realism, a genre in which the rational and the nonrational can balance each other. . |