My Writer's Eye

On Sunday I snuck away from the house for a few precious hours to work on project 4- entitled writing as seeing and is all about developing my writer's eye. I think mine must be a bit short- sighted because I really struggled with these exercises. The point of them is to get me to 'see things with a fresh, imaginative slant.' and to be able to write about the most mundane object as if I am seeing it for the first time. As I worked through the exercises I felt my descriptive powers gradually increased and soon my words were flowing out freely as I recorded things that I was seeing. These took me a couple of hours, but when I reached the end the notes said that it was recommended to spend at least 4 hours for all four exercises. Woops. So then I decided to spend some time doing each exercise again, but picking different objects/scenes. This seemed to work ok initially, but towards the end of exercise 4 I think my mind was shouting "No More!" as my words suddenly dried up. As a result, on a read through I am pleased with my notes at the beginning, but towards the end the images and language seems more contrived and not as fresh. Over the past couple of days I've been working on redrafting my notes for all the exercises into the beginnings of poems, some of which I feel are quite successful, some parts not quite so. I'm not sure if I have been jumping ahead of myself a bit as they already seem poem-like in style, rather than just being like lists of descriptions which is what was specified in the course directions, but it felt like the right progression as I was working on the drafts, so I just went with it. Anyway, here is a taster of my favourite produced as a result of this work:

Plastic container of free liquid,
Transparent smoothness of the light
Reflected, refracted though and round
Encircling the lipped rim
And moving down inside
These belted bands of light
Meet the clear still water
Filled to the halfway, marked
Only by a single line
And shallow ripples touching
The surface, the reaction to
An outside world, the
Movement and vibrations
From all around.
Translucent printed words
Maroon, they shine through the sides
Suspended in the water,
Twisting bending upside down
in crystal liquid.
The beautiful teardrops left behind
Cling near the inner rim,
frozen there for now, untouched.




The citrus orb upon the table top
Sits shining bright,
Acidic colour pops
A flaming fire-ember glow.
Its waxy rind of
Close up pimpled imperfection
In porous skin
Gaping open wide
A minutely cratered hind
Is met by starfish tag
The secret sealed tight inside
Unpeeled, unbroken.


Can you guess what describing here?!