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TEXT Review
Against the domestication of the mind |
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review by Jennifer Webb |
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Explorations in Creative Writing
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Kevin Brophy writes on page 1 that this is a book that is about 'how writing gets done'. Here are some rules of writing that can be extracted from its pages:
Pretty good advice. But this isn't a book about rules; it's a book that seeks 'the intensification of the world', a 'tentative and uncertain thing' that suggests ways of doing without attempting to convince, or prove. Which means it's a bit circumlocutory, it's a book you can pick up and put down, one you can read from beginning to end like a novel, or dip into like a collection of poems. It is also often deeply personal. 'I am still not sure if I have said too much or too little in what follows', he says on page 8. Too much, I'd say, when it comes to the narratives that circulate around his children. If he were my dad, I'd be seriously peeved. The stories are touching, and instructive; but because they're about real-life young people, people I've met, there's just too much information. He says perhaps too little when it comes to writing other than the narrative, the free verse poem, the metaphorically grounded; when it comes to approaches that are not built upon the twinning we find in medieval thinking. Language poetry, cyberwriting, graphic novels: do the issues he discusses so lyrically resonate in these forms? He says perhaps too little about Bakhtin's notion of the novelisation of poems: that 'tendency to drag all other genres into a zone of contact with contemporary reality' (42). I wonder about how valid Bakhtin's ideas may be now, half a century later. I wonder whether it couldn't be argued that epics had begun to disappear before the novel took the throne of writing. I wish that, having raised it, he'd got into it a bit more vigorously. And I wish he'd given sources for his quotes. Harvard style: author/year/page. Other than those quibbles, this book is like Baby Bear: neither too much nor too little, but just right. He is a sentence-thinker, Kevin, one who knows the morphology of a sentence, can identify its spine, its breath, the way ripples move through it, how 'it wriggles out into its life' (30). He knows the relation between word and thing, word and meaning, word and sentence. Knows that a writer is a word-chooser (65), picking through the selection on offer in the dictionary, dropping one word after another into the sentence, and listening like a piano-tuner for the resulting tone. He's generous: he lays down anecdotes like gifts. Think of these: people purring; the meekness of elephants; chimpanzees climbing a hill to watch the sunset; couches that stay with you all your life. These are things to write about. It may indeed be a book that is 'suspended upon ambiguities' (86) and often contradictory, but is good to think with, is sensually crafted, is prepared to go with the realm of affect, not simply logic. It is written in the voice of a poet who lingers over the texture of each word and phrase, the shape of each sentence. It is pleasurable to read. Read it. And having read it, go back to your writing.
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Jen Webb
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TEXT Vol 8 No 2 October 2004 http://www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/ Editors: Nigel Krauth & Tess Brady Text@griffith.edu.au |