Posts By: Chrissy Williams
‘What are we supposed to use, harsh language?’
Chrissy Williams on using the movie ALIENS to create her one-day poetry workshop, Short Controlled Bursts. When poets, myself included, turn to cinema for inspiration, it’s often to complex films with a philosophical bent which are crafted with deliberately poetic tools; not machine guns, armored cars, and aliens who burst through the chests of their…
Chrissy Williams
Writing After David Lynch – Students’ Poem
The Writing After David Lynch ten-week course took us all on a thrilling and mysterious journey across David Lynch’s films. As part of the penultimate session, on Mulholland Drive, I invited the students to respond to Naomi Watts’ staggering audition scene with a single four-line stanza, that I would then order and curate into a group poem. I took inspiration…
Chrissy Williams
The Fish in the Percolator – on Twin Peaks and Poetry
Twin Peaks may not have introduced me to the concept of mystery, but it did reinforce in me the value of mystery without easy resolution, and the power of the imagination. I’ve been thinking about how that echoes through poetry, and what we can learn from it. I watched Twin Peaks unfold for the first…
Chrissy Williams
What Is a Poem?
Does a poem have to rhyme in order to be a poem? Does it have to have line breaks? Does it have to be about metaphysics or can it be about tin openers – can it be about both? Is a poem still a poem when it is ‘deliberately opaque’? What about if it’s been…
Chrissy WilliamsPoetry and Comics
Poetry and Comics don’t need each other to communicate, and yet Poetry Comics have been around for a while. The New York School Poets, Joe Brainard in particular, created comics which used poetic text, and the idea seems to have grown from there. In the eighties an American writer and educator called Dave Morice published…
Chrissy Williams