#WriteCBC: Writing tip and task from Anthony Anaxagorou
BY Katie Smart
6th Oct 2022
Welcome back to #WriteCBC. I hope you’re ready to be inspired by this month’s writing challenge! If you haven’t entered a #WriteCBC competition before, we’re excited to welcome you to our writing community – and you can quickly get up to speed by reading this blog with information about how to play. It’s a lot of fun, and you might just win a free place on one of our six-week online writing courses.
October’s special guest is award-winning poet and spoken word performer Anthony Anaxagorou. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His second collection After the Formalities, published with Penned in the Margins, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize. His latest poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics will be published by Granta on 6 Nov 2022. Anthony is also the leader of our six-week online Writing Poetry course.
Anthony’s writing tip:
- A poem needs to do more than just offload chunks of information; it needs to stretch itself beyond explanatory language into a space where it’s able to pull ideas together that wouldn’t necessarily be associated.
Poetry allows us to express thoughts, feeling and ideas with ingenuity and intensity. Poems can be complex and adhere to as many imposed ‘rules’ as you’d like them to – they can also be simple and stripped back with a straightforward structure. A poem is playful – this means there is no definitive ‘correct’ way to write one. It's a form that naturally lends itself to experimenting with language. The best poetry surprises us with new combinations of word and phrases that nevertheless construct vivid imagery, striking the reader with a sense of recognition.
Anthony’s writing task:
- Pick an object you use every day to write a tweet-length poem about. Don’t use the name of the object in your poem. Explore beyond your initial associations with it. Let your subconscious play and open new avenues of inquiry.
When you’re selecting your object don’t worry about choosing something inherently interesting or unusual – we want you to elevate the mundane through your use of unexpected language and poetic techniques.
Here are a few tips to help you write your tweet-length poem:
- Experiment with interesting line breaks and punctuation. Unexpected use of enjambment (running a sentence or phrase across more than one line of poetry) can help change or add to your meaning.
- To rhyme, or not to rhyme. Think about how using a structured rhyme scheme might enhance your poem. If you don’t want to rhyme, that’s okay just make sure you don’t forget to think about the rhythm of your poem – are you using a set metre, alliteration, repetition or internal rhymes? Do you have multiple stanzas – and how many lines make up each of them?
- Metaphors and similes help you create striking images and build a bridge between ideas – try to steer clear of clichés or subvert overused conceits and concepts by flipping them on their head.
- Less can be more. You don’t have to use every poetic device in your tool belt. Make sure you strip back the words on the page so that every single one of them is helping you create a striking image or your desired emotional response.
The winner is... Sally Skinner @salskins:
- Feathers, saliva, a pressing of dreams.
You plump up down
and slip,
silksunk,
dreamdrunk,
the taut-flipped
cold side.
The snowbank shifts
to cradle your head,
warming to you now,
until you wake again,
rise and sign
your name with a single
hair
We really enjoyed Sally's use of language in her poem from the perspective of a pillow, she uses common words associated with sleep to alert the reader to the object of her poem but is playful with them. Her alliterative, rhyming pair of portmanteaus 'silksunk' and 'dreamdrunk' are particularly evocative of sliding into sleep. We also found the ending of the poem to be a clever use of word play that transforms the common phrase 'rise and shine' into an ending for the night and the pillow instead of a beginning to the day for the person.
Congratulations! Sally has won a free place on the six-week creative-writing course of their choice.
Well done to our runners-up!
@writerCPDawson, @linzlowe, @suezhaopoet and @DavidSGeey you have each won a £50 discount to be used on the six-week creative writing course of their choice.
Please email help@curtisbrowncreative.co.uk to claim your prize!
Pre-order Anthony’s poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics here.
If you want to investigate and play with poetry further, join our Writing Poetry with exclusive teaching videos, notes and tasks from Anthony. Plus, you can use code OCT30 at checkout to get £30 off the final Writing Potery course of 2022 – and reduce the course fee to just £190. Offer not to be used in conjunction with any other offer. Available for a limited time only, code expires 31 Oct 2022.