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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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April 03, 2008

Found Poetry

One thing I like to do is write found poems. A writer friend got me into this, though this same writer got me hooked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too. Not sure either is the most salutary disposal of my time, but never mind. I do think it’s important to be writing all the time, no matter the genre. It’s good to push words around and to enjoy yourself doing it. I always tell my students to write lyrics, poems, letters, journals, anything to keep the muscle—yeah, yeah, the part of your brain that writes is a muscle—active. Finding a poem isn’t quite writing, but it is about organizing words on the page. And it can teach you a lot about how to generate possibilities with language by forcing you to think outside your comfort zone. Sometimes I look at an incredible sentence by, say, Cormac McCarthy, and try to imagine a state of mind from which I might have written such a sentence. On what planet do I need to be for those words to have arranged themselves thus in my head? Probably I can’t get to his planet, but I can get off my own. So I’m always messing around with language to see where it gets me. Recently, I had cause to visit Amazing Goop’s website, specifically, the testimonials about how amazing Amazing Goop really is. I found the letters so entertaining, I made some poems.  Here is one of them:

Men in full-service apparel have
clientele in Tasmania.
I figure the perfect love regards glue
As competition.

Incidentally, I gave a reading the other night at Happy Ending in NYC. Part of the deal is that after you read, you have to perform a “risk.” I decided to give people a choice: either I read a song I wrote about VD or I produce in under three minutes a found poem from some random page in my novel. One person voted for the poem. We’re all going to shit.

Posted by Fiona Maazel at 12:17 PM in Guest Bloggers |

Comments

Kelli Matthews

Hi Fiona,

Thanks for the very cool poem about Amazing Goop. I'd love to repost your poetry on our new blog! If you'd like, you can send them to kelli.matthews@gmail.com.

Kelli

Posted by: Kelli Matthews | April 03, 2008 at 05:51 PM

Fiona

what is your blog?

Posted by: Fiona | April 03, 2008 at 05:57 PM

Kelli Matthews

It's the Eclectic Products (maker of Amazing GOOP) blog: http://eclecticproducts.wordpress.com.

Thanks!

Kelli

Posted by: Kelli Matthews | April 04, 2008 at 07:01 PM

Fiona

OH MY GOD. The Amazing Goop people saw my post? I can't tell you how excited I am. I will send you the other poems pronto. Amazing Goop!

Posted by: Fiona | April 04, 2008 at 07:56 PM

fabian

you are a stupid bitch writing this junk.I hope you die fag.

Posted by: fabian | September 15, 2008 at 05:04 PM

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