Why write? Is writing making?

What is telling? What is showing?

What are clichés in writing, and how do I subvert them?

Are artists' writings taken seriously?

How do I know when to stop writing?

How do I start writing?


Making the Written Word will investigate and encourage the use of writing as a relevant outlet of expression at all stages of artists’ and designers’ studio practice. Each of the four sessions will aim to answer specific questions through readings, writing exercises, and discussion. This blog is a forum for the discussion generated and a place to leave references for each other.




Wednesday, February 2, 2011

A Sylvia Plath poem..

Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Grey as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among the horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights.


I'm always interested in how writers and artists reference one another - what they choose to take from other works.
Gleam like small change.

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