The Poet's Portable Workshop

Yesterday I was looking for a book in the university library and I found a section of books about creativity - in particular writing poetry. I ended up going home without the book that I had originally been looking for but with a stack of other books instead, the idea being that they might help jump start my creativity and help with my writing practice.

I started reading the first of these books last night. It is really interesting, it is called In the Palm of Your Hand - The Poet's Portable Workshop and it is by Steve Kowit, who is an author I have never heard of. Some of what I have read so far is fairly basic stuff - stuff about point of view, showing not telling etc. But I think it is good to be reminded of these things from time to time and have examples where what he is talking about is working well. later on in the book there are writing exercises as well and I am looking forward to doing those. One of the things that our lecturer this term has done is given us the occasional writing exercise to kick start our brains and I love them. I nearly always get some kind of usable idea out of writing exercises. One of the poems that I am working on at the moment is a poem called Swimming Lesson and it came out of a writing exercise I did with the Access to Writing group at City College.