The exercise
1. Go on an animal hunt. Don't just restrict yourself to warm-blooded animals - fish, reptiles, amoeba, will do equally well. This could be an actual field trip, or an expedition into your memory or imagination. Observe and make notes on your animal: its appearance and behaviour and habitat. Maybe it has a smell or a distinct cry.
2. Note anything else that occurs to you that connects with your creature: dreams, legends, an event, your feelings about it. Maybe do some research in the library.
3. Go through your notes highlighting anything that is memorable and interesting enough to go into a poem. Think about the way you want to approach the poem: its possible form and voice. Maybe you feel so close to the animal that you want to enter its skin and take on its voice.
4. Write a draft of your poem. Try and get into that state of "breathless concentration" that Hughes describes.
5. Wait until at least the next day and look at your poem coolly, critically, checking that the language is alive and that the form fits the meaning. If you are like me this process can take weeks or months or even years.
(The Book of Blood - what a goddamn perfect title! Also, feast your peepers on that front cover tailless stout-bodied amphibian!)
1 comment:
I found myself actually rather unimpressed by the article... the poem on the bats seemed fairly unsophisticated and too "what happened to me today," and I didn't really feel that the line breaks were usefully placed. Also, "The Books of Blood" (just a slight variation on her title) was a better title when Clive Barker published a series of short story collections under that name many years ago.
However, the "instructions" seem fairly interesting... I especially enjoy the emphasis on research and on revising, though writing from the animal's point of view seems a bit too much like a "writer's trick" to me.
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