Writing
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Slow progress and wide heart lead
Seven items from the imaginary news desk at Kenny Towers. A nice, not to mention speedy, review of TRUTHS A Telltale Press Anthology in London Grip. If you’d like to buy a copy, simply get in touch with me through this site. In other poetry news, I have a poem called Commuted on the Amaryllis site, and…
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Is John Keats a natural poet?
‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.’ John Keats, Hampstead Feb 27th 1818, Letter to John Taylor. Keats wrote this ‘axiom’ in a letter to his friend John Taylor when he was 22. Are we to read this as a notion of genius — that great…
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A mixed bag
I have been working hard on my children’s story The Second Kind of Darkness in the last two months. The end is in sight. Putting the story aside for a few years has really helped. Time is a great editor. I’ve also been filling in gaps in my reading of good children’s books, including Noughts & Crosses…
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Omega day
Long ago I decided that the last day of the year should be treated with the sort of extreme caution owed to a snake in a sack. And at this time of year I often think about The Omega Man (1971) a film starring Charlton Heston and based on the enjoyable novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson…
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On floweriness
My wife pointed me to a piece in The Guardian about the UK’s National Curriculum and the tendency for primary school teachers to steer children’s creative writing towards “too elaborate, flowery and over-complex” language to meet assessment criteria. An issue raised by a large group of children’s book writers including at least two Carnegie Medal winners. I…
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Visiting the Brontës
The importance of the author’s intentions in reading a novel or poem has been a hotly-argued subject. What became known as ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (after a essay by Monroe Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt) suggested that the author’s thinking about their own work was irrelevant. Instead a novel, for example, should stand on its own two feet…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 