Thursday 21 January 2010

Poetic People (30): Sir Andrew Motion's Line, Part ii

'Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.'
Anton Chekhov


My thanks, thus far, to Mand (of the Travel Hopefully blog) and to Aidan Baker (Librarian at the Haddon Library, Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) and for their comments on my previous post (here) on the subject of Sir Andrew Motion's views on the teaching of Creative Writing in universities.

Thank you, too, to those who have voted in my poll.

Aidan Baker refers us on to another article, this time by Louis Menand in the New Yorker (June 2009). The link to this article is here.

If you have not voted in my poll yet (top right of my blog), you might like to read Menand's piece first - but please remember to vote!
Postscript: On the subject of 'new writing' (well, what was once a new way of presenting writing, in this case), do read the marvellous quotation in paragraph 3 (beginning 'an essentially superficial process...') in Professor Henry Farrell's review in the current edition of the THES of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution by Dennis Baron (OUP, £13.99, ISBN 9780195388442). Henry Farrell is associate professor of political science and international affairs, George Washington University.

1 comment:

mand said...

Talking of Andrew Motion, i've just come across Tellus magazine http://bit.ly/4ze60j which is 'a shared space for new poems which engage contemporary minds by engaging with ancient civilisations, be that with their mythical imagination, political propaganda, cosmology, architecture, social stereotypes, literary works, cultural obsessions or jokes'.

And now i'm off to read that New Yorker article. Before reading it, i definitely feel the craft of writing is teachable, just as grammar can be formulated, though i suspect the art or talent involved is innate.

Now to see if my view changes.