"Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions." (293) Write a poem about a word and all of its tastes? It's trailing cloud of meanings?
Start Creative Writing class with: what's your favoritie word. Mine: theo, theory, oracle, conjury, bouillabaise, . also discuss writing as play, diversion. What is the kind of writing which is wholly out of the box? Diverted from whatever authoritative track?
"Out of three or four in a room/One is always standing by the window"
1) Sit before a window.
2) Look carefully at everything in view.
3)
Write a poem about what you see.
My Love is Like a Doornail
Make a list of worn-out, cliche comparisons: "my love is like a rose," "dead as a doornail," "white as snow," "cold as ice," "the sands of time," "happy as a lark," "old as the hills," etc. Include at least fifteen. You might begin your list at the beginning of the semester, and add to it whenever you hear such cliches in your daily life.
After
you've made your list, write a short prose piece in which you regroup the
items of comparison: "happy as ice," "cold as a rose," "blue as time."
Jumble the worn-out expressions, feeling free to sometimes make little
sense. Write simply for the pleasure of making the comparisons fresh.
Eating Poetry
Considering
Kinnel's "Blackberry Eating," write a paragraph
or poem about some single, rich physical experience, using language to strongly
suggest the actions and sensations of that experience. Or, after looking
at Roethke's "Root Celler," try your hand
instead at a "cold," "hot," "scratchy," "wet,' or "smooth" poems. Choose
one sensation and make your language mimic it through sound.
buh-DUM, buh-DUM buh-DUM buh-DUM buh-DUM
Write a full page of lines, double-spaced, in iambic pentameter. These lines do not necessarily need to connect in meaning to one another, nor do they necessarily need to make sense in and of themselves. Simply practice the iambic pattern (five iambs per line).
When you're done, try writing a real poem in iambic pentameter.
(Ok--
you wonder how you ought to start?
Just
think in terms of lines that sound like this.)
Lound and Sanguage
Write
a paragraph or poem full of nonesense words or portmanteau words, as in
"Jabberwocky" or "A Nosty Fright." Experiment with the sheer sound
of words, feeling free to be playful, extravagant, illogical. Consider
transposing letters in word groups, combining words to form new ones, or
distorting words slightly to form interesting, intentional malapropisms.
Oral Fixation
One
way to sharpen your attention to detail, sound, and pattern in a poem is
to memorize it. As with the "Tracks" idea above, you can't really
know the benefit of this exercise without just doing it. For notebook
credit then, select a poem at least fifteen lines long from our text, memorize
it, and then recite it aloud to the class. (Reciting aloud also has
its benefits.)
The Line Breaks in Each of the Following Free Verse Poems Have Been Removed
The line breaks in each of the following free verse poems have been removed, and each poem written out as a prose paragraph. Without changing any of the poems' wording or punctuation, reinsert the line breaks yourself, experimenting with different arrangements. Try each one first with all short lines, then with all long lines, for instance. Try end-stopped as well as enjambed lines, or try breaking the lines in places where, in reading the poem aloud, you would naturally stop to take a breath. Provide breaks which help reinforce or mirror the meaning of the lines themselves, or which otherwise contribute to the poem's feeling or sense. See if you can adhere consistently, within each poem, to a single principle of lineation, whether rhythmic, syntactic, syllabic, visual, or otherwise--though you might even try breaking the lines completely at random, just to see what the result will be.
Check
with me in class for copies of the original poems--to see how the authors
themselves broke their lines.
Poet #1:
Love Poem
There is always something to be made of pain. Your mother knits. She turns out scarves in every shade of red. They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm while she married over and over, taking you along. How could it work, when all those years she stored her widowed heart as though the dead come back. Now wonder you are the way you are, afraid of blood, your women like one brick wall after another.
The Mirror
Watching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautiful and why you do not love but cut yourself, shaving like a blind man. I think you let me stare so you can turn against yourself with greater violence, needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away scornfully and without hesitation until I see you correctly, as a man bleeding, not the reflection I desire.
Across Kansas
My
family slept those level miles but like a bell rung deep till dawn I drove
down an aisle of sound, nothing real but in the bell, past the town where
I born. Once you cross a land like that you own your face more:
what the light struck told a self; every rock denied all the rest of the
world. We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate--My state still dark,
my dream too long to tell.
Answerers
There are songs too wide for sound. There are quiet places where something stopped a long time ago and the days began to open their mouths toward nothing but the sky. We live in place of the many who stir only if we listen, only because the living live and call out. I am ready as all of us are who wake at night: we become rooms for whatever almost is. It speaks in us, trying. And even if only by a note like this, we answer.
Jazzing Up the Jejune
Choose
one of your already "completed" poems and, knowing that it will still be
there when you've finished this exercise, plough under the language and
fill the lines back in with whatever odd, zaney, surprising, arbitrary
diction that comes to mind. With the help of a thesaurus, revise
the diction (any or all of the main nouns, verbs and adjectives) to make
it new and more vivid or imaginative. You might arbitrarily choose
a single page from a thesaurus, and force yourself to use words only from
that page, even if they make little, at times, logical sense. Alternately,
you might fill in the poem with diction which is new but not entirely random:
in place of words denoting or connoting happiness, pleasure or peace, for
instance, you might fill in words having to do consistently with depression,
pain, or violence. You don't necessarily have to keep this revised
version of the poem.
This and That
Write
a poem about how your mother and father met.
This and That (II)
Write
a poem about chlorophyll.
This and That (III)
Write
a poem about the North Dakota sky.
This and That (IV)
Write
a poem about the Eleusinian Mysteries.