Well, it's reading week, and I've nothing much to report except that we're now four days into NaNoWriMo and it hasn't killed me yet. I've been trying to fit the 1667 words-a-day around an essay that's due in a couple of weeks, so it's been a bit hectic, and the NaNoWriMo words are definitely not the finest bunch of syllables I've ever produced. Nevertheless, they are words, and I'm pleased I haven't fallen behind yet. Mostly I've been belting out out the word-count in very short sessions without any editing as I go, and I don't want to imagine the horrors that await me when I eventually reread. Today I had the day off, so I devoted the afternoon to my daily chunk of prose. I've got another workshop submission due in about ten days and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone if I concentrated. I ended up with 1700 fairly usable words, and if I can do that again over the weekend, that'll be my workshop sorted, and at least 3000 of the 50000 won't be garbled nonsense. I'm back to Birmingham tomorrow and Friday for work, so I suppose I'll be NaNo'ing on the train while half-asleep. Well, serves me right for signing up to this in the first place. Now for some ice-cream before bed!
Spooky Rapping Amis
Happy Halloween, Internet! Now, I promised you a Martin Amis post, and dammit, I'll give you one. It's thematic too, because Martin scared the pants off us all last Tuesday morning in a pre-Halloween surprise tactic, by, well, performing an impromptu rap. Have a watch of this, and imagine the song at the end performed in a very posh voice by a sixty-year old white man, who would ordinarily be spouting Shakespeare in sonorous tones. Brilliant.
Anyway, he started off this week by talking about genre, and asking us whether we each felt our writing was an example of realism, science-fiction, magical realism, etc.. There was quite a wide range of responses - I'd definitely say my own prose is in the realist tradition, though I do love to read some good SF. He talked more about Don DeLillo and postmodernism - he called it an 'evolutionary genre', with the potential for huge boredom. He added that literature doesn't, in his opinion, improve; it just evolves. I liked that. He referred to the postmodern elements in his novel, Money, and quoted Kingsley Amis as saying 'you shouldn't bugger about with the reader.' Back to the notion of realism - he said that Nabokov advised writers to 'caress the details', meaning that you should write what you know, but in the way that you, as an individual, know it - and that with this, you would be imprinting yourself on the world. He told us that Rushdie reckons writers have an inbuilt bullshit detector - you'll feel physically ill if you're going wrong in your work. He said this happened to him, writing London Fields and trying to get a character to move in a direction that he later abandoned. He's a big believer in the physicality of writing; more than once he's said that if you feel stuck, just get away from the work and do something else, and your body and brain will fix it up without your conscious intervention. He talked a little about satire; writing as exaggeration, mockery through ridicule - and claimed that people feel mockery as much as they do pain, that this is present in all great tragedy - the hero's exposure to the ridicule of the crowd, or the other.
We talked about the 'units' of writing - the phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter - which echoed a similar discussion we'd had our tutor the previous day. Amis spoke about the importance of having as 'aesthetic sense of the paragraph' and emphasised that the writer has to show that s/he is in control of the text at all times. He spoke for a while about our set text for the week - Bradbury's The History Man, which I found very funny, but which other people didn't like at all. I'm not sure Amis himself liked it; he seemed to assign it merely so he could use it to exemplify a selection of practices that he thought writers would be better off avoiding - following a dialogue scene with another dialogue scene, and using long, dense, dialogue-filled paragraphs.
Then he told us all how he dislikes drama and doesn't rate it as an art-form; poetry is highest, on his scale, followed by prose, and the poor old theatre barely gets a look-in, with the exception of Shakespeare, whom he categorises as a poet rather than a dramatist, anyway. He called drama, 'collaboration through dialogue', referred to Moliere and his contemporaries as '19th century wasters', and said that setting drama up against prose was the equivalent to letting Scunthorpe play Manchester United. We all must have looked a little agape, because our tutor was quick to leap in with the qualification that this was 'a view that not everybody shares.' But he does like a controversy, does our Prof. Amis, and this is the week that he had a rant in the media against Katie Price. So there you go.
Anyway, he started off this week by talking about genre, and asking us whether we each felt our writing was an example of realism, science-fiction, magical realism, etc.. There was quite a wide range of responses - I'd definitely say my own prose is in the realist tradition, though I do love to read some good SF. He talked more about Don DeLillo and postmodernism - he called it an 'evolutionary genre', with the potential for huge boredom. He added that literature doesn't, in his opinion, improve; it just evolves. I liked that. He referred to the postmodern elements in his novel, Money, and quoted Kingsley Amis as saying 'you shouldn't bugger about with the reader.' Back to the notion of realism - he said that Nabokov advised writers to 'caress the details', meaning that you should write what you know, but in the way that you, as an individual, know it - and that with this, you would be imprinting yourself on the world. He told us that Rushdie reckons writers have an inbuilt bullshit detector - you'll feel physically ill if you're going wrong in your work. He said this happened to him, writing London Fields and trying to get a character to move in a direction that he later abandoned. He's a big believer in the physicality of writing; more than once he's said that if you feel stuck, just get away from the work and do something else, and your body and brain will fix it up without your conscious intervention. He talked a little about satire; writing as exaggeration, mockery through ridicule - and claimed that people feel mockery as much as they do pain, that this is present in all great tragedy - the hero's exposure to the ridicule of the crowd, or the other.
We talked about the 'units' of writing - the phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter - which echoed a similar discussion we'd had our tutor the previous day. Amis spoke about the importance of having as 'aesthetic sense of the paragraph' and emphasised that the writer has to show that s/he is in control of the text at all times. He spoke for a while about our set text for the week - Bradbury's The History Man, which I found very funny, but which other people didn't like at all. I'm not sure Amis himself liked it; he seemed to assign it merely so he could use it to exemplify a selection of practices that he thought writers would be better off avoiding - following a dialogue scene with another dialogue scene, and using long, dense, dialogue-filled paragraphs.
Then he told us all how he dislikes drama and doesn't rate it as an art-form; poetry is highest, on his scale, followed by prose, and the poor old theatre barely gets a look-in, with the exception of Shakespeare, whom he categorises as a poet rather than a dramatist, anyway. He called drama, 'collaboration through dialogue', referred to Moliere and his contemporaries as '19th century wasters', and said that setting drama up against prose was the equivalent to letting Scunthorpe play Manchester United. We all must have looked a little agape, because our tutor was quick to leap in with the qualification that this was 'a view that not everybody shares.' But he does like a controversy, does our Prof. Amis, and this is the week that he had a rant in the media against Katie Price. So there you go.
I'm tardy and idiotic
Okay, I owe you a post about Mr. Amis. It's not written yet, but in my head, it's massively entertaining. Sorry. You'll have it by the weekend, I swear.
In surpising other news (I really have very little other news; between this course and my job, I'm forgetting what it is other people do between periods of sleep), a story of mine is going to be in the next Every Day Fiction Anthology. The story's called 'A House, A Home', and you should be able to click on it over there in the sidebar. So that's excellent; I haven't really had much luck with print before, and I'll even get paid a dollar!
Plus, because the MA-related exhaustion has warped my brain and caused me to act in ridiculous ways, I've signed up for this year's NaNoWriMo (say that ten times while drunk). This may well be one of the more idiotic things I've ever done while sober, but perhaps it'll be productive and exhilarating. Wait and see. If I stop updating here, you can assume it's been the death of me. I'll get that Amis post up on Saturday, before the madness kicks in.
In surpising other news (I really have very little other news; between this course and my job, I'm forgetting what it is other people do between periods of sleep), a story of mine is going to be in the next Every Day Fiction Anthology. The story's called 'A House, A Home', and you should be able to click on it over there in the sidebar. So that's excellent; I haven't really had much luck with print before, and I'll even get paid a dollar!
Plus, because the MA-related exhaustion has warped my brain and caused me to act in ridiculous ways, I've signed up for this year's NaNoWriMo (say that ten times while drunk). This may well be one of the more idiotic things I've ever done while sober, but perhaps it'll be productive and exhilarating. Wait and see. If I stop updating here, you can assume it's been the death of me. I'll get that Amis post up on Saturday, before the madness kicks in.
MA Week Five
Week Five? It seems like many more weeks than five have passed; what kind of strange time-warpy university is this? Unfortunately, though, I still seem to be aging at the same pace, and I can't manage to reach the giddy heights of beer-consumption that I recall scaling last time I had a student card with my leering mug on it. Bah. So, Week Five it is; and next week is Reading Week, which actually translates as Reading 'Day', seeing as Monday will be the only one affected by the glorious lack of classes. So, next Monday, I'll read Dubliners and Labyrinths and The End Of The Affair and then I'll have lunch and consult the list to see what's up for afternoon consumption. Wonderful.
This Monday, though, we discussed Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. I'd read plenty of Woolf as an undergraduate, so this was one of the more straightforward seminars - I felt extraordinarily well-prepared, dragging half-remembered theories and interpretations out of the depths of my knackered brain. We talked about structure, shifting points of view, the interplay of past and present in the narrative, repeated motifs (clocks, birds, flowers), external events (like the chiming of Big Ben) as stabilising devices linking the different characters, internal and external time, mortality, and memory. We looked at the novel as an example of modernist literature; the way Woolf uses different narrative perspectives to illustrate a character or event, much in the same was the Cubist painters, like Picasso, sought to portray multiple angles simultaneously, to give a truer version of reality than the standard classic form of realism. Contradiction is the more accurate approach, in this methodology, than affirmation or agreement. We discussed the notion of 'stream of consciousness': whether Woolf's fairly consistent narrative voice truly presents that stream; if the third person narration presents an unavoidable mediation, an organising, external intelligence that prevents us from accessing the characters minds; whether pure stream of consciousness is ever possible, or whether the sheer act of narration always draws our attention to the construct of the prose.
Then, later - drum-roll! - I had my workshop. Despite a blistering attack of last minute nerves, it turned out fine. I reread my piece, a chapter of a projected novel, on Sunday night and identified a whole load of flaws. It had been a week since I'd gone near the text and that slight distance helped me to isolate a bunch of structural issues. By and large, these were exactly what the workshop group and the tutor picked up on - things to do with pacing and exposition that illustrated my background as a short story writer and the difficulties I was having in adjusting to a longer narrative form. So I can see with more clarity now where I ought to space things out, add detail, give the story a greater sense of time and place - all in all, a very positive experience. My next workshop submission and my first essay have to be submitted within three days of each other, so lord knows what I'll have fixed up or ironed out by that point, but we'll see.
Tomorrow I'll tell you all about Amis Seminar number two; are you fraying round the edges in anticipation? You should be.
This Monday, though, we discussed Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. I'd read plenty of Woolf as an undergraduate, so this was one of the more straightforward seminars - I felt extraordinarily well-prepared, dragging half-remembered theories and interpretations out of the depths of my knackered brain. We talked about structure, shifting points of view, the interplay of past and present in the narrative, repeated motifs (clocks, birds, flowers), external events (like the chiming of Big Ben) as stabilising devices linking the different characters, internal and external time, mortality, and memory. We looked at the novel as an example of modernist literature; the way Woolf uses different narrative perspectives to illustrate a character or event, much in the same was the Cubist painters, like Picasso, sought to portray multiple angles simultaneously, to give a truer version of reality than the standard classic form of realism. Contradiction is the more accurate approach, in this methodology, than affirmation or agreement. We discussed the notion of 'stream of consciousness': whether Woolf's fairly consistent narrative voice truly presents that stream; if the third person narration presents an unavoidable mediation, an organising, external intelligence that prevents us from accessing the characters minds; whether pure stream of consciousness is ever possible, or whether the sheer act of narration always draws our attention to the construct of the prose.
Then, later - drum-roll! - I had my workshop. Despite a blistering attack of last minute nerves, it turned out fine. I reread my piece, a chapter of a projected novel, on Sunday night and identified a whole load of flaws. It had been a week since I'd gone near the text and that slight distance helped me to isolate a bunch of structural issues. By and large, these were exactly what the workshop group and the tutor picked up on - things to do with pacing and exposition that illustrated my background as a short story writer and the difficulties I was having in adjusting to a longer narrative form. So I can see with more clarity now where I ought to space things out, add detail, give the story a greater sense of time and place - all in all, a very positive experience. My next workshop submission and my first essay have to be submitted within three days of each other, so lord knows what I'll have fixed up or ironed out by that point, but we'll see.
Tomorrow I'll tell you all about Amis Seminar number two; are you fraying round the edges in anticipation? You should be.
Spooky Soup and Science Fiction
I went back to Preston on Tuesday, to the Halloween edition of Word Soup - Spooky Soup! Terrifying tales were told; spines were shivered. Jenn Ashworth read from her as-yet-unpublished new novel, Cold Light, and you can read a different extract here, in the current volume of the Manchester Review. Can't wait to get my paws on the real thing when it comes out. (Actually, now that I think of it, she should have finished the novel by yesterday, right Jenn?? ) Amongst other wonders, a local singer/songwriter performed several gory numbers, Richard Hirst gave us a multi-media history of zombies and their liberal-arts tendencies, and Rob Shearman read a story from his new collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical. Rob's the writer behind the 'Dalek' episode of Doctor Who, a fact which got me and my boyfriend very excited altogether, and I got to bond with him in the pub afterwards by moaning about lots of different things - a fine way to get to know people, I reckon. We got back to Manchester at about half one on the morning, just to make sure I was nicely brain-fried and hungover for some intense Woolf-reading in the university library all Wednesday. Fun.
Today, Saturday, I went to another Manchester Literature Festival event, When It Changed, which was the launch of a new science-fiction anthology by Comma Press. The book, also called When It Changed, is a selection of sceince-fiction stories written by a selection of writers working in collaboration with scientists. In the anthology, each story has an afterword by the scientist who informed or guided the writer's work or inspiration. The panel consisted of Geoff Ryman, who'll be one of my MA tutors after Christmas, Patricia Duncker, Adam Marek, who I saw reading at Tales of the Decongested in London last summer (I bought his book from him in the pub and drunkenly demanded he sign it; he was lovely), and two scientists, Dr. Tim O'Brien, an astrophysicist, and Professor Steve Furber, a computer scientist who's designed loads of fancy microprocessors. Anyway, these two spoke about their research and their interest in science fiction, and the writers read from their anthologised stories. It was very entertaining stuff; I bought the anthology afterwards and accosted Geoff Ryman to say hello, and then I met some fellow twitterers, Andrea and James, and I think I perhaps saw Elizabeth Baines in the crowd, though it could have been a looky-likey, and there's only so many internet/book people I can accost unexpectedly in one week without giving the world a hernia.
Then I thought that was enough high-fallutin' gallivanting for a while, so we went to Asda, where I ate (possibly) more than my fair share of free sample tubs of Cheerios. And now I'm watching the Phantom Menace and thinking that it's still bloody awful, when I should be back to reading Woolf. Procrastination is a fine thing.
Workshop in less than two days. Gulp.
Today, Saturday, I went to another Manchester Literature Festival event, When It Changed, which was the launch of a new science-fiction anthology by Comma Press. The book, also called When It Changed, is a selection of sceince-fiction stories written by a selection of writers working in collaboration with scientists. In the anthology, each story has an afterword by the scientist who informed or guided the writer's work or inspiration. The panel consisted of Geoff Ryman, who'll be one of my MA tutors after Christmas, Patricia Duncker, Adam Marek, who I saw reading at Tales of the Decongested in London last summer (I bought his book from him in the pub and drunkenly demanded he sign it; he was lovely), and two scientists, Dr. Tim O'Brien, an astrophysicist, and Professor Steve Furber, a computer scientist who's designed loads of fancy microprocessors. Anyway, these two spoke about their research and their interest in science fiction, and the writers read from their anthologised stories. It was very entertaining stuff; I bought the anthology afterwards and accosted Geoff Ryman to say hello, and then I met some fellow twitterers, Andrea and James, and I think I perhaps saw Elizabeth Baines in the crowd, though it could have been a looky-likey, and there's only so many internet/book people I can accost unexpectedly in one week without giving the world a hernia.
Then I thought that was enough high-fallutin' gallivanting for a while, so we went to Asda, where I ate (possibly) more than my fair share of free sample tubs of Cheerios. And now I'm watching the Phantom Menace and thinking that it's still bloody awful, when I should be back to reading Woolf. Procrastination is a fine thing.
Workshop in less than two days. Gulp.
MA Week Four - poetry reading and workshop
I bet you're getting sick of me this week, right? A post a day! Well, rest assured it's not likely to happen again - it's all on account of letting crap accumulate until I had to blurt it all out in one messy, info-dump of a week.
So - on Monday evening, after our fiction workshop session, we had tickets to the first of the University's Literature Live events of the 2009/10 season - a poetry reading by Tom French and Michael Longley. I have to hold up my hand at this point and confess that, though I'd happily read from dawn to dusk with ne'er a break for meals or washing, and though my flat is one big chaotic pile of books (with some help from him indoors who's got a set of teetering piles of his own, all art theory and philosophy, over in the intellectual end of the living room), my poetry knowledge is abominable. I mean, seriously pathetic. I've got a BA in English, three million tonnes of reading material, and barely a stanza in sight. So of course I'd never heard of these guys, and I was a bit wary of sitting (in the front row, and that'll teach me for being tardy) for two hours in front of two people reading material I knew nothing about, surrounded by ardent fans. (Plus I always worry I'll fall asleep at readings, plays, talks, lectures - anything public. Church services is a big one, it's just not the done thing to start snoring at a funeral.) I'd normally resort to the internet to do some quite fact-checking, but the time ran away with me and it never happened; I walked in cold, a total impostor.
But of course, it was riveting. It turns out Michael Longely is ridiculously famous; he's won everything, is mates with Seamus Heaney (I have heard of him - I once went to a classics lecture he gave, when I was an undergraduate, didn't understand a word, but felt very smart all the same) - and French is very well-known and respected. He's just got a new collection out. They each read for about half an hour, chatted a little between poems, gave us the backstories and the contexts. I didn't nod off at all. At the end there were a few questions from the audience, and one stood out (there's always one, and never for a good reason). A lady wanted to know (serious question as far as I could tell) whether they thought they had an unfair advantage, as poets, what with their lovely Irish accents. (Longley's from Belfast, French from Meath, I think - very dissimilar accents!) They both looked a little nonplussed; Longley talked about voices and words, and French shrugged and said that if he did have an unfair advantage, he was happy to have it, and wouldn't we all? Damn straight. Maybe I should turn to poetry; make use of the accidents of birth and pronunciation.
The following morning, Tuesday morning, I didn't have a scheduled class, but Longley was gong to be doing a poetry workshop with the poetry strand of my M.A., and our course coordinator had said that if any of the rest of us would like to attend, we were more than welcome. I wasn't going to turn down the offer of free learning,, so I joined them. I keep ending up at seminars where I'm not officially on the list, and then when they do a run-around introduction thing, I have to preface with, 'well, I really shouldn't be here, but...' Longley did ask everybody who their favourite poets were, and I floundered, going in the end with Allen Ginsberg, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, and thankfully he didn't ask me to elaborate. Win!
The first half of the session was Tom French reading Michael Longely's work with us, talking about Longley's move towards single sentence and then single line poems, the integrity of the stanza, the power of a couplet, his fondness for elegies, and found poems. He passed out a handout so at least I had a vague idea what we were talking about. (Ha! I say 'we' - I didn't say a word.) Somebody (a poetry PhD student) asked about the anxiety of influence that must affect Irish writers - the weight of history, the particular responsibility that nationality much bring. Now, that got my goat, to use a rather unpoetical phrase. I'm very edgy about essentialism, the bracketing of people according to birthplace, skin-colour, language - the idea that this ought to be your main concern as a writer. I'm not going into a rant about it here, but surely, if you want to talk about the weight of history, there isn't a single writer or artist from any place on Earth who can say that they're free of that? And surely we're all free to ignore it or concentrate on it, or write about whatever the hell we chose? Even us Irish writers? Tom French was very polite; I might have been a little more scathing.
After a break, we switched rooms and Longley himself took over; he chatted for an hour or so about his work, his grandchildren, his influences, his own thoughts on the issues that had been raised earlier. He talked about compression and precision, saying that the importance of a poem doesn't depend upon its length. He dislikes garrulity or long-windedness in poetry, and said the line ought to be an 'intricate machine', referring especially to Whitman as an example of that admirable intricacy, long though he may be. He did a really good impression of Wallace Stevens doing a reading that had us all in stitches, like the nerds that we are. And he finished by talking about the 'railroad excitement' of breaking the rules, of establishing an expectation and then thwarting it - but warned that you really need to know the rules first. He insisted that every poet needs to spend special time on syntax and grammar, on the mechanics of sentences. Every fiction writer too, I think.
There was another reading this week - M.J. Hyland and Nick Laird on Thursday, preceded by a fiction workshop from Nick Laird, but I couldn't attend either as I had to work. Well, you can't win 'em all.
My workshop's Monday. This is a scheduled post; I may have died from worry by now, so keep an eye on the news.
So - on Monday evening, after our fiction workshop session, we had tickets to the first of the University's Literature Live events of the 2009/10 season - a poetry reading by Tom French and Michael Longley. I have to hold up my hand at this point and confess that, though I'd happily read from dawn to dusk with ne'er a break for meals or washing, and though my flat is one big chaotic pile of books (with some help from him indoors who's got a set of teetering piles of his own, all art theory and philosophy, over in the intellectual end of the living room), my poetry knowledge is abominable. I mean, seriously pathetic. I've got a BA in English, three million tonnes of reading material, and barely a stanza in sight. So of course I'd never heard of these guys, and I was a bit wary of sitting (in the front row, and that'll teach me for being tardy) for two hours in front of two people reading material I knew nothing about, surrounded by ardent fans. (Plus I always worry I'll fall asleep at readings, plays, talks, lectures - anything public. Church services is a big one, it's just not the done thing to start snoring at a funeral.) I'd normally resort to the internet to do some quite fact-checking, but the time ran away with me and it never happened; I walked in cold, a total impostor.
But of course, it was riveting. It turns out Michael Longely is ridiculously famous; he's won everything, is mates with Seamus Heaney (I have heard of him - I once went to a classics lecture he gave, when I was an undergraduate, didn't understand a word, but felt very smart all the same) - and French is very well-known and respected. He's just got a new collection out. They each read for about half an hour, chatted a little between poems, gave us the backstories and the contexts. I didn't nod off at all. At the end there were a few questions from the audience, and one stood out (there's always one, and never for a good reason). A lady wanted to know (serious question as far as I could tell) whether they thought they had an unfair advantage, as poets, what with their lovely Irish accents. (Longley's from Belfast, French from Meath, I think - very dissimilar accents!) They both looked a little nonplussed; Longley talked about voices and words, and French shrugged and said that if he did have an unfair advantage, he was happy to have it, and wouldn't we all? Damn straight. Maybe I should turn to poetry; make use of the accidents of birth and pronunciation.
The following morning, Tuesday morning, I didn't have a scheduled class, but Longley was gong to be doing a poetry workshop with the poetry strand of my M.A., and our course coordinator had said that if any of the rest of us would like to attend, we were more than welcome. I wasn't going to turn down the offer of free learning,, so I joined them. I keep ending up at seminars where I'm not officially on the list, and then when they do a run-around introduction thing, I have to preface with, 'well, I really shouldn't be here, but...' Longley did ask everybody who their favourite poets were, and I floundered, going in the end with Allen Ginsberg, W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, and thankfully he didn't ask me to elaborate. Win!
The first half of the session was Tom French reading Michael Longely's work with us, talking about Longley's move towards single sentence and then single line poems, the integrity of the stanza, the power of a couplet, his fondness for elegies, and found poems. He passed out a handout so at least I had a vague idea what we were talking about. (Ha! I say 'we' - I didn't say a word.) Somebody (a poetry PhD student) asked about the anxiety of influence that must affect Irish writers - the weight of history, the particular responsibility that nationality much bring. Now, that got my goat, to use a rather unpoetical phrase. I'm very edgy about essentialism, the bracketing of people according to birthplace, skin-colour, language - the idea that this ought to be your main concern as a writer. I'm not going into a rant about it here, but surely, if you want to talk about the weight of history, there isn't a single writer or artist from any place on Earth who can say that they're free of that? And surely we're all free to ignore it or concentrate on it, or write about whatever the hell we chose? Even us Irish writers? Tom French was very polite; I might have been a little more scathing.
After a break, we switched rooms and Longley himself took over; he chatted for an hour or so about his work, his grandchildren, his influences, his own thoughts on the issues that had been raised earlier. He talked about compression and precision, saying that the importance of a poem doesn't depend upon its length. He dislikes garrulity or long-windedness in poetry, and said the line ought to be an 'intricate machine', referring especially to Whitman as an example of that admirable intricacy, long though he may be. He did a really good impression of Wallace Stevens doing a reading that had us all in stitches, like the nerds that we are. And he finished by talking about the 'railroad excitement' of breaking the rules, of establishing an expectation and then thwarting it - but warned that you really need to know the rules first. He insisted that every poet needs to spend special time on syntax and grammar, on the mechanics of sentences. Every fiction writer too, I think.
There was another reading this week - M.J. Hyland and Nick Laird on Thursday, preceded by a fiction workshop from Nick Laird, but I couldn't attend either as I had to work. Well, you can't win 'em all.
My workshop's Monday. This is a scheduled post; I may have died from worry by now, so keep an eye on the news.
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