DRAFT OF COMPLETE PROSE POEM
Continue working on your complete prose poem. We I’d like to take them all in next week
(or please email, them to me, those of you who are sick). Think of the following points which you
need to consider for ALL your writing in whatever form. It’s always a good idea to try out
different approaches. See how they
sound.
· Are there
any words I can cut out?
· Would it be
better from a different point of view?
That is, for example, saying ‘I’ instead of ‘he/she’.
· Would it be
better in a different tense? Telling it
as if it’s all now, in the present tense, for example.
· Cut the
clichés! I hardly need to mention that.
· Would it be
better in a different tone of voice, for example more casual, slangy, conversational, speaking to a ‘you’? Or sarcastic?
· Do you need
to make the sounds of the words imitate the meanings? Change, ‘I walked across the lawn’ to ‘I squelched across the lawn’
· The ‘twist’
at the end can happen in many ways.
Think about what you’ve got the reader to assume in the main part of the piece and then in the last line or
so show that really things were quite different.
Below I’ve printed my first draft which I read out to you last week, and
then my first rewriting of it. It's about a former schoolmate who died last month. The
basic problems it deals with are
Liked the guy and yet hated the world we lived in (those private boarding schools)
Haven’t seen him for sixty odd years and didn’t want to
YET remember him so well, especially a moment of joy
A moment of joy, not sorrow, fills my mind at the thought of his death.
What can that mean? I’ll leave it
to the reader to decide.
.
RJH
Hadn’t seen
you for sixty odd years. And didn’t
want to, wanting to forget those awful schools,
even though we’d been friends of a kind at both of them, you sliding
your semolina over to me next to you at that long dining table, talking about
how you’d once sat on Prince Regent, wanting to share a study, being captain and me vice-captain of the house cricket team
together, practising together. But you
didn’t really matter. You were still
part of all that.
Except
hearing of your death, now, I keep
seeing you, about twelve, that time when
you scored a hundred for the school, that moment on 99, when you pushed a full toss towards midwicket
calling “Yes!” for that 1 more run, with almost singing joy
i. m. RJH (revision 1)
We’re sitting
together at that long dining table, and you’re sliding your semolina to me You’re telling that once you’d sat on Prince
Regent. We shared a study. Your
girlfriend was called Ivy. You looked at
me and said, you know what you’ve got the measles. You captain and me vice-captain of the house cricket team. Practising together.
Prepschool,
public school: eight years of everyday chapel and lessons and prep. Your blond confidence. My half admiration
half envy. There. Them. When I dropped out I never wrote. You were part of those places. You didn’t matter now. And yet. . .
H, hearing
you’re dead, a rich CEO, now, sixty years of silence later, I keep seeing you, at
prepschool, that time, that moment, when you scored the one run you needed for
your hundred. You’re pushing a full toss
towards midwicket and calling “Yes!” with an almost singing joy.
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