from Guardian UK

Sean O’Brien’s workshop

Sean O’Brien
Monday March 10, 2008
guardian.co.uk

A central figure in the world of contemporary poetry, Sean O’Brien is famous for balancing the demands of tradition and poetic structure with a flair for contemporary themes and local colour. He has won most of the major poetry prizes for his five collections, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the EM Forster Award and the Cholmondeley Award. He is also active as a literary critic and is Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield University.

 

Sean’s suggestions for adding drama to poetry

A fundamental skill is the ability to dramatize a poem, to give it the sense of three-dimensional life, rather than simply let it comment on its subject. Few of us are sufficiently remarkable to have interesting general opinions about life, but if we renew proverbial truths in fresh contexts we may be on to something.

Factors to consider in order to achieve this include:

1. The use of narrative rather than commentary.

2. The use of image rather than commentary.

3. The method described by the playwright David Mamet in his famous dictum “Arrive late and leave early.”

4. A sense of audience, which may for example require you to consider the function of the “lead” pronoun of the poem, e.g. “I”, “you”, “we”, “they”.

5. The presence of more than one speaking voice; or the sense that the speaker of the poem is addressing a particular person – which puts the reader in that intimate role. Alternatively, the reader may be an eavesdropper on the events of the poem.

6. The sense of the poem as an event that offers the reader an experience. In this context give careful thought to sentence construction. Formal? Conversational? Mixed?

Examples Robert Browning: My Last Duchess, TS Eliot: Portrait of a Lady, WH Auden: The Fall of Rome, Sylvia Plath: Sheep in Fog, Paul Muldoon: Cuba, Jo Shapcott: Motherland, David Harsent: Marriage xviii: A still life is how I see it – a cool approach.

Activity Write a short dramatic poem (30 lines maximum). Here are some possible openings which may be helpful.

1. When you come around here Waving flowers and a writ You’ll find me standing on the stairs.

3. “It will never be said in my country I have killed a naked man.” – “Matty Groves”, traditional

4. Give me a pear from the blue bowl, Jane. Give me five a day, for old time’s sake. Peel me a grape, disembowel a fig. Let fruit be waiting when I wake.

5. You were saying, dear uncle, When the doorbell rang?

Email your entries, with “Poetry workshop” in the title field, to books.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk, by March 31.