During a poet's workshop yesterday I discovered a love of "form" i.e. writing poems with some constraint to them, rather than simply off loading my soul's mumblings without a care for metre or rhyme (see 'Poetry - Intellectual vs Soulful' blog post). It was rather refreshing and I discovered a craving for experimenting more with word creativity. This is what he said about alliteration: 'It's a battle between you, the writer and what you want to say, and the constraint (i.e. having to write with only words beginning with a certain letter). The skill is to make it look like you are writing what you want to say (rather than your words having been obviously directed by the constraining letter).' I had a go and here is the result: 'W' being my spontaneous, unplanned constraining letter:Wild are the winds of my wanton words,
Wrapped around Wednesday's wicked wrangling of wanting word whores.
What, when, who and why,
Waste not words or do and die.
Copyright EH 2012.
He also spoke of 'Oulipo' the French poetry group founded in 1960, which sought to add constraints to writing in a reaction against the Surrealists. Their idea was that the more constraints you have, the deeper into your consiousness you will go in order to write around it, hence you are freer than the Surrealists ever were. How fascinating! He offered us a poem where we had to guess the constraint. No-one managed it but once said it seems obvious. Only the vowel 'e' was used. This is called Univocalism. I'll offer an attempt of my own when I can get my head around that one...
