Cirrus@Austlit

As teachers of creative writing, we strive to 'open up the field' for our students, to 'broaden their horizons', to show them that poetry doesn't need to be a narrow thing. As many students, especially in introductory courses, come to class assuming that poems must rhyme, that stories must be told chronologically, that all diction must be well-mannered, one of our jobs as educators is to show them other possibilities. In poetry writing, models and exercises can be particularly helpful, especially in dealing with preconceived notions of form and language. But we must also encourage students to move beyond exercise and towards a legitimate creative product. Ekphrastic writing can be particularly useful here. Rather than focusing on technique or surface issues, as exercises frequently do, ekphrasis is essentially a mode of content - relating a poem (or other piece of writing) to a painting (or other artwork), often beginning through the act of description. Source: http://www.textjournal.com.au/april09/kaplan.htm