How I love guest sessions! Yesterday’s workshop on nonsense verse with Anushka Ravishankar was a treat. It’s delightful how serious nonsense verse is! Full of contradictions, full of rules (of what nonsense verse is not), and full of surprises, we learned so much and wrote nonsense poems of our own too.
Essentially, nonsense writing is a serious kind of writing which makes no sense. Does this seem contradictory? That’s where the humour of nonsense lies. While gibberish is not nonsense, we learned how we could use made-up words as part of a larger text, like in the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll. I agree with Anushka when she says that it’s a shame that so many of Carroll’s words are now in the dictionary. They were never supposed to make sense!
We had a FULL batch yesterday, and the participants had dozens of questions, ideas, and poems to share. From Sukumar Ray to Shel Silverstein, we explored a range of writers, listening to all kinds of nonsense poetry.
For me, the best part was the very clear and organised set of techniques Anushka shared with us. How do we actually go about writing nonsense verse? When is it nonsense verse and when is it gibberish or fantasy? How can we straddle sense and nonsense so that our poems almost make sense?
Anushka ended the session with an exercise on nonsense verse, which was especially lovely, for it revealed how well the participants caught on to the sense of nonsense!
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