Reading Response Prompt 2

In Chapter one Davidson and Fraser discuss defamiliarization, concrete versus abstract images, showing versus telling, improving, and keeping a journal. How has your journal already affected your writing or your perspective of writing (I find myself writing often and paying attention to the language I hear on the streets, in films, etc). In the past have you written each day or in small bursts? What does this say about your process or how you work? Do you thrive with the blank page or with a nudge? If you need a nudge, how do you think you could approach their concept of “improv”ing? Do you need prompts? (If you do, don’t worry; that’s temporary). Have you noticed trends or focuses in your writing (mine didn’t leave my childhood house for about a year). Why do you think poetry thrives on concrete language?

In Chapter two Davidson and Fraser detail form and formlessness, question and answer techniques, and expansion and contraction methods. Do you work better with the challenge of forms or the flexibility of formlessness? What do you prefer to read? Are you skilled with expansion or contraction? What do you need help with? Why is one or the other difficult for you? (I am much better at contracting than expanding. I prefer tight language and adding more is difficult). Have you tried the Q&A exercise? (I did, with Nick McRae in my 2060 class.) How might it help or hurt you? What other exercises could you use to spark your writing?

Freewrite Prompt 2

Improv-ing: The best way to learn to write poetry is to study a poet you love and the ones you don’t. My favorite poet is Gabrielle Calvocoressi. She has a skilled mastery of the grotesque, class and gender studies, and history. She has many qualities I admire and when I began writing poetry, I would work with her poems often. (Now I have changed styles and built upon those foundations). But, I still use this technique with my newfound poets. Improv-ing takes many forms. We’ll review all of them later. For now, the most basic—stealing. Find that line you love (or hate). Steal is outright, use the opposite, change it slightly. Pick a single line from a poem you love and use it to write your own. When you’re finished, it shouldn’t matter that you stole that line. You can remove it later. Just use it to copy a style or image that you can use and your poet didn’t.

Although, as mentioned, you can steal a favorite line from a great poem, I stole and inverted a line from a poem I don’t enjoy: Elizabeth Bishops’s “One Art”:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I took the line “The art of losing isn't hard to master” and flipped it. Then I began writing. At the time, my family was tiling the kitchen floor. My draft:

Tile

The art of losing is hard to master

and sounds like creaking knees

as I bend to tile a floor.

Drips of water saws drown the whir of blades

ripping squares of kitchen tiles.

Swipes of dulled blades to mortar

and plastic pegs to separate

my work from yours.

I ease my way out of the back corner

one edged tile at a time, and

remind myself of the games we’d

invented. Dinosaurs and astronauts soon

paled to the magic of angolo and

counter rails, majolica and formella. Yet no

running bond could keep us together—

you, with your no-childhood face

glaring at me as we swipe yet again.

A lifetime apprenticeship for you, my son,

the only token I had. Not enough for your

mother, not for you, and your eyes

smoke of her. Your hair shrouds the gray of

that eye, and I wish again I’d had a girl.

A girl to sweep and butter after

your mother left to open a

no star restaurant with linoleum floors

and empty walls where our picture should

fall. A girl to remind me of her, to

fashion and crackle better than you

ever would. My son, with your feminine

hands, keep your chin to mortar and

mastic, and smile a tune to me.

The line is slightly different. Yet, the piece varies incredibly from Bishop’s. So much that I didn’t need to remove it. It was no longer similar enough. Yet this line provided a poem I wouldn’t have written otherwise.

Note: Remember how to begin analyzing a poem? This title sucks. It’s not one that furthers the piece (we know it’s about tile). Rather it’s one for me to quickly reference. Also note how Bishop’s poem signals differently than mine. Hers follows a form, rhymes, and heavily depends on abstract concepts. Mine, however, doesn’t. Which method suits you better?

Classmate Prompt 2

How to review a poem: These are a few of the many things to consider when reviewing a poem. To begin, I use the example from Melissa Stein’s collection Rough Honey, “Olives, Bread, Honey, and Salt”:

Olives, Bread, Honey, and Salt
The lanes are littered with the bodies of bees.
A torrent took them, swarming in branches
just as the white buds loosened their hearts
of pale yellow powder. Each body is a lover:
the one with skin blank as pages; the one
so moved by the pulse ticking in your throat;
the one who took your lips in his teeth
and wouldn’t let go; the one who turned
from you and lay there like a carcass. If we were
made to be whole, we wouldn’t be so lost
to each offering of tenderness and a story.
Therefore our greatest longing is our home.
There is always the one bee that circles and circles,
twitching its sodden wings.

1.      What does the poem mean? (Basic level). Here, there was some sort of flood during springtime. The water ruined a hive and killed most of the bees.

2.      Are there interesting connections? What is a larger meaning? Stein writes about relationships (“Each body is a lover”). With this line, the broken bees become couples. With the last, lonely bee who “circles and circles,” we are reminded of mourning.

3.      What are the components?

a.      How does the title work? Is it expected? Is it the first line of the poem? Does it add to the poem, or is it a quick naming that we’ll find later in a line? What would work best for this poem? In this poem, it’s not the first line, but we won’t find it in the piece either. It seems to suggest some of the basic components of life (food), and this will add to the system of relationships and life revealed later.

b.     What about the line length and form? Following a structure reads differently and into a tradition of poetry. Breaking that tradition also sends signals or critical “signs.” Short lines are read differently than long lines. Punctuation can slow or speed a poem. Read the poem out loud. Is each piece of punctuation necessary?  Do the enjambments (line breaks) add to or hinder the piece? This poem is not in form, though Stein often uses form. Here, she uses no rigid structures, no rhyme schemes, no self-imposed rules. Her form is open, allowing her more liberty in leaps and words. The poem is slow. There are medium-size lines with long-pause punctuation (lots of periods, colons, semi-colons, etc). This adds to the gravity, forcing us to become that last bee.

4.      What is good about the piece? The title, the images, the line breaks, something disturbing or sweet? For me, it’s the following lines: “Each body is a lover: / the one with skin blank as pages” and “the one who turned / from you and lay there like a carcass” (as if, for humans, the death of lovers are metaphorical and voluntary).

5.      What needs work? Although I love this draft, there are parts I would change. I don’t care for the buds’ powder referred to as “hearts” loosening—it’s a bit too sentimental, especially with the line about the lovers. Also, I would remove “Therefore,” because I think it fragments and jars the piece (not that we need it; after all, our lover just died). Finally, there is something missing before the last sentence. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a void that tells me this draft was hurried or left incomplete (otherwise abandoned).

6.      What is something you can learn from the piece? Here, I like that she reviewed abstract concepts and life lessons by observing a specific and corporeal incident. With the sodden death of bees, we investigate relationships, loneliness, and mourning. But first, she began with a specific image (seemingly unrelated, and therefore more interesting; we all feel that jump from dead bees to lovers) and moved outward.

Freewrite Prompt 1

Generating material to write about can be one of the most difficult aspects of writing. When you’re stuck or have a block, try one of two things:

1. List fifteen unusual nouns or verbs

2. Find a random word generator online or a dictionary. Pick your favorite fifteen words

From your list, select a promising word or two. Flesh it out (i.e. write about it). Begin with that image, but feel free to move away from it, too. Try not to write thirty lines about the same word. Use it as a springboard. Does the word remind you of a texture, taste, memory, animal, place? For instance, here’s one of mine from this exercise:

But to begin a story with the end
wouldn’t be right. Sure, it would smell
of tangerines, and you could imagine
your own fingertips circling those peels,
your tiny tips dipping to dents. But no
manner of strength of knuckles during
ripping could satiate that frenzied bloodlust
as you pop that first peel between teeth,
your tongue bobbing it to mouth-roof.
Your family physician warns of pesticides
and congeniality, but nothing quite says
Blow me like licking fruit tendons off
the underbelly of your wrist, trails of that
sickening yellow-orange rivering your cheek.

Okay, so clearly my favorite word was tangerine. I didn’t move away from it too much, but here I became more interested in the sounds of the piece (“tiny tips denting to dents”). I could have easily bounced away:

Sure, it would smell of tangerines,

and you could imagine your own

fingertips circling those peels easier

than runes or collarbones, each layer

felling the chalk of sediment and fortunes,

of . . .

No, I don’t know what that means, but I was interested in things my fingers can encircle. I like creepy imagery, so bones popped into my head (runes, collarbones). I don’t care much about meaning yet. We want words on the page. Editing comes later.

Classmate Response Prompt 1

Find a line in your classmate’s poem or junkyard quote that strikes you. Steal it, reverse it or change it, make it strange or quirky, suggest it back to them. Resist the impulse to be logical. This can generate new language in unexpected avenues. For instance, a segment from my peer, Randie Mayo’s draft, “Walking With Marzanna”:

Strange, now, how I could never

face the wind’s bite when Slovakia always ran

through my blood. I had never been to Slovakia,

its language lost to me, much like the language

of birds who stuff their faces beneath their wings

to hide from winter.

Randie’s language here is concise and interesting, moving through images of American-Slovakian traditions and heritages, the power of language and nature, and never gets “stuck” or fixed on a particular image. Yet, let’s change it a bit.

                              Strange how that Slovakian

bite runs through my blood like language,

never lost, never birded—fanning the snow

to patterns of [insert images]

Or…

How strange the hidings of a grouse—

its Slovak blood winging snow like language,

with a bite like loss or home.

Of course, we could generate many more examples. These two renditions reflect the same language, but emphasize different qualities. Do you (or Randie) as a poet wish to emphasize the snow, the language, the birds, Slovakia, etc? When your classmate is stuck, help them revise to generate more images.