Teaching Creative Writing

It was nearly fifty years ago that I began teaching. So when I write about my teaching experience it is about another era – a time when the very idea of policemen on campus would have seemed preposterous. An experience I really enjoyed was getting teenagers to write creatively. How did they portray the world?

What I found was that letting young people unlock experience through language not only improved their language competence but also often their social behaviour. Time after time I was amazed at how a student who had not shown much proficiency would suddenly come up with words and images that left me humbled at my temerity in making judgements about them. The system I was working in imposed a structure that was all too often not conducive to learning and creativity. By its very attempt to systematise learning education in inclined to create a lockstep programme that tends to stifle creativity. Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, D H Lawrence, Denis Glover, all rail against the schoolroom. Ironically, it is teachers who have helped preserve their fame.

There were challenges in getting teenagers writing. The first was to persuade them it was useful, as well as pleasurable. The second was to get beyond cultural second-hand and cliche from film or print. There are areas of integrity where the teacher has to walk carefully. Some images and ideas appear archetypal, others false. Tigers and crocodiles seem right, murder and mayhem in the style of the latest Hollywood blockbuster did not. Further, fashions change in images and ideas - Star Trek comes in, Robin Hood goes out.

As students grew, the more self-conscious they became. Third formers would write comfortably in free verse about the wind in their hair as they galloped their horse or rode their bikes over the squashed hedgehog on the road. Senior students all too often had learnt that poetry was stern stuff. Once persuaded that its creation did not involve stuffing it full of hidden meanings for some planned treasure hunt, and that the flow of associations was what was desired, they would happily write for hours.

Older adolescents tended to sum up - language gives control of the universe. Acceptance of the idea that metaphor has little closed meaning is one of the most empowering things they could learn. Sometimes as I watched them writing, I had a sense of having missed that bus myself. If only they had been exposed to this excitement earlier, what poems and prose they might have written. Elwyn Richardson's fine book In The Early World impressed me with the possibilities inherent in much younger children.

A Song of Spring

Colin came for dinner last night. He said I was very cheerful. I'd felt bright and alert all day. I realise it was because Anne was home and around. Indeed I wrote a poem, the first for ages. Here it is

A Song of Spring
(for Anne)

In the bouncing kowhai
tui court, the snowball
tree sprouts green shoots
daphne scents the section
cat spends more time
outside, tulips sway in
their pots.
A hurtle of wings
ignoring the gale, tui cavort
past, it is the season
for swings and flings,
a ballerina dancing
to applause as off stage
an old troubadour expires

Talleyrand

“How many times have I stopped short when exploring Talleyrand’s epic struggle against Napoleon’s imperial overreach and thought, aha! Yes, if only our world’s lone superpower at this outset of the 21st century were to lend him an ear. He identified for all ages the ultimate foible of empire. The alert he sounded two hundred years ago to a military genius who bestrode a vast empire of his own making rings all the bells: ‘I attest that any system which aims at taking freedom by open force to other peoples will only make that freedom hated and prevent its triumph.’”

This passage from Lawday’s introductory chapter to his life of Talleyrand illustrates his admiration for the French statesman. In it he claims his hero laid the basis for the ending of the ancient enmity between England and France and their subsequent alliance from then till now.

Talleyrand was born to an impoverished noble family. He had a club foot and therefore could not follow the family tradition of service in the military. He was by-passed by his younger brother and against his wishes destined for the church. Ordained he rose quickly through the ranks to become a bishop. That did not prevent him hopping into the beds of several aristocratic ladies – indeed it probably helped through their support.

As the sweep of events led towards the French Revolution Talleyrand rode the tide, leading the charge he hoped towards a constitutional monarchy. Seen as a traitor by most of the clergy he proposed that the vast properties of the Church be transferred to the state in exchange for salaries paid by the state. For his acceptance of the civil constitution of the church and the consecration of new bishops for that church he was excommunicated by the Pope. He was lucky, just before the worse part of the terror he was appointed ambassador to England. He rode out that storm in exile.

That is as far as I have read at present.

Strangely Parted

STRANGELY PARTED

To my children
I’ve always been old.
A tree never the sapling.

A sunset
without the sunrise.
As far as they’re concerned

my life began mid-stream
– a ford for them to cross
over in safety.

Like photos I’ve seen
of my own mother
taken before I was born,

when she was twenty-one
and a stranger wearing shoes
and a coat I’d never seen

before, her hair young,
springy, strangely parted
to the side. Girlish,

she’s as thin as a parcel
still wrapped-up, smiling
an oddly unencumbered smile.

Kay McKenzie Cooke

Seeing I'm on a camera/poetry jag here's another one. Cooke’s approach is familiar territory, the poet as participant. Photos freeze a moment of time. There was time before it was taken. And time after. The mother’s unencumbered smile and her own experience as a daughter and then as a mother is a reminder of the passage of the generations.

Limelight & Things

House-sitter Jo and I watched the Charlie Chaplin film Limelight on DVD last evening. I recall as a teenager weeping buckets of tears at the movie’s end, Chaplin as the old vaudeville trouper dying in the wings while Claire Bloom as the ballerina danced on stage. I now know the dancer was a double. But Claire Bloom’s beauty made that young man swoon. It was good to see it again. The comic scene with Buster Keaton is great. Chaplin was a master of the movie camera.

Reading my blog about brawn my sister-in-law Margaret sent through Mum’s recipe for passion fruit flummery. Take six passion fruit, beat half a bottle of cream stiff and add sugar to taste, beat whites of two eggs very stiff and add dessertspoon of sugar, and fold in to the cream the beaten egg whites and passion fruit and a good tsp of gelatine mixed in a little cold water.

I am reading David Lawday’s Napoleon’s Master, a Life of Prince Talleyrand. Talleyrand has always fascinated me. I have Duff Cooper’s life bought when I was studying the French Revolution. The wily old fox survived the revolution and then became a major architect of the 1815 post Napoleonic settlement.

I read recently a review of Lawday’s latest biography of Danton. Apparently he is very laudatory of Danton. Despite being one of the initiators of the Reign of Terror and the constant use of the guillotine he seems to attract a favourable reaction. Hillary Mantel’s great novel A Place of Greater Safety also makes him a warm figure

Shoot

In my last two blogs I wrote of the impact of the camera upon literature and entertainment. This poem by young poet Mark Pirie illustrates the impact of the movie camera.

SHOOT

1 Tilt

you tilt upwards
& begin

to notice her eyes
the way

they alter
as the first kiss stirs

2 Roll

you roll back
& see

the light
across her hips

your face
covering her shadow

3 Crane

you slip
down a bank

& fall
towards the river

your limbs
shaving the trees

4 Zoom

you kick the door
open and tumble

from a moving car –
the camera

catching your legs
in mid-air

Mark Pirie

The Reader

Anne’s in Auckland. Her son, Jonathan, returns to China next week to do a second stint at teaching English as a second language. The visit also gives her an opportunity to see her sister and family as well as other friends. Jo is house-sitting and looking after me. Last evening she got out the DVD of the movie The Reader.

I have read the novel by Bernhard Schlink and found it very moving and thought-provoking. It provided the basis for a very good film which is all the better for following the text fairly closely. Sadly, the two producers both died before it was released. Kate Winslet as Hannah the illiterate exSS guard was superb, it is no surprise she won the Academy Award for best actress for her performance. Her aging was very credible.

David Kross as the young Michael plays the part of the young adolescent and later bewildered law student very well. The erotic relationship with Hannah after she seduces him leaves him unhappy and morose for the rest of his life. Ralph Fiennes is also excellent as the perpetually perplexed adult Michael, unable to establish good relations with women. The scene where he finally comes face to face with Hannah for the last time is painfully powerful.

In yesterday’s blog I wrote about the camera. It’s a winner in this film. The seediness of the working class suburb contrasts with the beauty of the German countryside. The nude scenes were not voyeuristic. Apparently they were shot last, after Kross turned 18. Court scenes are usually dramatic – this one was. It’s a film I would recommend.