Creative Writing or Creative Accounting?

by Fred Johnston Thu Dec 17, 2009 17:55

It's sometimes hard to avoid the feeling that literary competitions are a sign of desperation, a way of enticing people to like the organisation by having an apple held out in front of them. A cult of winning competitions has sprung up; but there are so many compettions that their worth, surely, is highly devalued by now. Workshops that do not criticise and criticise fairly but without restraint are few and far between, chiefly because they too can become a love-in of sorts,.

by Wally B Tue Nov 24, 2009 23:41

The poet Brendan Kennelly has given poetry reading and writing classes to prisoners in Mountjoy jail. For institutionalised people poetry can be a welcome therapy that enables them to deal with traumatic aspects of their lives and to discover hidden potential. Painting classes for convalescents in hospitals has had similar happy results, even if the technical standards never come to the level of a Manet or a Picasso. Some years back somebody (Kennelly maybe?) edited and published a collection of prisoners' poetry, the profits being donated to a charitable cause. Whether such poetry shows literary promise or not it enhances the lives of those concerned and builds bridges between prisoners and the general public unaware of what the daily banality of prison life tends to be.

The Faber enterprise is, as stated, a commercial and not necessarily literary promotion and pales in comparison with the sincerity of the Mountjoy project. We are not all poets just waiting to have our poetic floodgates opened by workshop tutors or literary competition. Many of us, however, have the capability to receive help from dedicated tutors to read and appreciate the musical notes and images and distilled life insights and experiences contained in many well-honed poems.

And what is good poetry? It's a matter of personal taste acquired over years of sensitive and directed reading. Many noted living poets would acknowledge that poetry which lasts the test of time consists of ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. This simply means that when you have got that first exciting first draft scribbled down on sheets of lined paper you must come back to it in succeeding days and redraft, redraft and redraft. And redraft again until you think the final version leaps up at your from the pages.

by Fred Johnston Tue Nov 24, 2009 17:54

I read Faber's notice of this some weeks ago and it struck me as just the sort of thing that will suck in people bedazzled by the false claim that anyone can be a poet. Faber are simply throwing high-profile names into the advertising mix. This course is not only costly, but claims in its title that at the end participants will have poems worth publishing in a collection. That's one hell of a claim to make - so let's hope no disappointed participant comes back at Faber when their poems are rejected by a publisher. This isn't the Faber of T.S.Eliot, of course, merely a haggard ghost from better days. They're trading on their name, naturally; but they are not who they once were. No writers' course can produce a poet, no matter who organises it. But not only Faber and Faber, who at least should know better, have presented that notion as valid.