Ms Tedeschi’s Year 11 students have currently been focussing on creative writing exercises in Literature, centred around the Gothic genre, specifically. Students were each given a page from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and were encouraged to eliminate words for the purpose of creating a poem. This practice is known as Blackout Poetry and the exercise was completed with considerable success. Take a look!

Toils

With an anxiety.

Instruments of life

I might infuse

myself of rest and health.

An ardour that far exceeded the beauty of the dream.

Wildest bloom enveloped.

Night

amounted to agony

collected around me.

One in the morning the rain battered dismally

And I saw the eye of the creature.

My emotions wretch such infinite pains,

His features beautiful

But these luxuriances formed horrid contrast.

I had deprived myself health

I had desired and beauty and disgust filled my heart.

I was

Miserable

It was

a spark.

How can I describe the features that filled my heart?

His eyes were fixed on me.

I remained, listening attentively.

Gazed on him.

It was on a dreary night of November that I

Infuse a spark of my candle

And a Great God

With eyes that seemed almost of the same colour

As the dun-white sockets and

Straight black lips,

Vanished, and

I rushed out of the room.

The accomplishment, a spark.

Glimmer of the half-extinguished light.

My emotions

selected muscles and arteries beneath.

Accidents of life.

I had deprived myself of beauty.

Elizabeth, the bloom of health.

The first kiss, my teeth chattered

His jaws opened.

A mummy again.

He was ugly then.

I described my emotions as beautiful

but these only contrast with watery eyes.

I had deprived myself of rest and health.

Horror filled my heart.

Unable to compose my mind to sleep

I was disturbed by wildest dreams.

They became livid

And

Every limb became convulsed.

I

fear

life.

I collected the instruments of life,

Beauty,

horror and disgust.

I was disturbed by the wildest dreams

Listening attentively, catching and fearing.

A dreary night

Infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet

By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light,

Describe my emotions at this catastrophe,

Features as beautiful. Beautiful!

Breathless horror and disgust filled my heart,

Endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness

Wildest dreams

Embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips

They became livid with

Miserably given life.

I collected the instruments of life around me

And I endeavoured.

I had worked hard

for the sole purpose of infusing life into

Myself.

I had filled my heart.

I had created

the wildest dreams.

The dim and yellow light of the moon,

I had created and

I escaped and took refuge in

Life.

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