a: What a Baby You Are; or The Medium of Time Travel; or The Poetry of Casey Kasem
This idea comes from Karen Head, author of Shadow Boxes (All Nations Press, 2003), though I don’t know if this idea appears in her book, but . . .
This is what Karen did, if I have it correct, or some part of it. She went back to the year of her birth & used songs from that year as starting points for poems. For instance, she has a poem titled “Light My Fire,” in which she weaves in certain events from the time period of her birth & the song. She then talks to those events & to the song & wraps them all together in a poem that talks back to her existence & to the reader.
So we are going to try something similar. You will use song titles from songs that were on the top 40 chart during the week of your birth (well, for those of you born in 1970 or after). Or you can use titles of songs that came out in the year of your birth, or the titles of albums, or the titles of books, or whatever else you can think of.
The point is to discover the immediate effects of your surroundings when you were born, by using the title of something as the lense through which you will perceive those surroundings.
I’d been interested in hearing from someone born in 1973 & who has used Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light” as their song title. Man, I want to know how that got woven into your life.
b: Conceptual Music; or How the Solipsist Applied Loop Quantum Gravity to His Existence
Ok. We will be doing a similar thing in this assignment, but now we will do it using the time period of when you were conceived.
If you don’t understand the second title to this assignment, it will be explained, in part, in an upcoming poetry assignment, “Break on Through to the Other Side; or T+3, T+2, T+1, T=0, T-1, T-2, T-3, T-2006 AD; or The Big Crunch as Big Bang in Reverse; or Neo Takes the Red Pill of Negative Eternity.” Look for it soon. [See Science, the Universe, Time, & Other Evolutions.]
Happy New Year! A Time to Reflect. A Prose Assignment!
This was inspired by Christopher Howell, who at the end of one of his semester-long creative writing classes would have students write a paper on what they have achieved with their poetry in the semester. This assignment will be similar.
You are to respond to the following questions. The response can be in journal entry form, essay, or however you want. The questions are:
What are you doing with your poetry?
In what ways has the poetry you have written this year been successful/unsuccessful?
Where would you like to go with your poetry? or what would you like to see/hear happen to your poetry?
Optional:
What’s going on in contemporary poetry?
What do you like &/or dislike about the current happenings in poetry?
What would you like to see happen to contemporary poetry?
The New American Poetry
It is the poetry of the privileged class.
It inherits portfolios.
It was born in the Ivy League, & inbred there.
Its parents filled its homes with bubbling Bach,
silver & crystal brightnesses
for its surfaces.
It does not hear the cheap & natural music of the cow.
Its vases hold gold-stemmed roses, not ponds with logs
from which turtles descend at our approach,
neckfold leeches shining like black droplets of blood.
It swallows Paris & Athens, tracks its genes to the Armory Show.
It waits by parlor coffins, applies rouge to Poe & Beau Brummell.
Its father is Gertrude Stein, not Whitman, who despises it,
though it will not admit it.
Old women with children do live in it.
It does not harvest thought, or associate with farmers.
It does not serve in the army, or follow a story.
Inviolate, buttressed by its own skyhook aesthetics,
it revels in skewed cubes,
elliptical appositions.
Ultramarine critics praise it, wash their hands of subject matter.
It is tar-baby minus the baby, minus the tar.
Its city is not the city of pavement or taxis, business or bums.
It dwells on absence & illusion, mirrors refulgent flames.
Deer that browse beneath its branches starve.
Its emotions do not arise from sensible objects.
It passes rocks as though they were clouds.
It does not flood out is muskrats.
It sustains itself on paperweight petals.
It does not define, catalog, testify, or witness.
It holds models before the young of skillful evasion,
withering heartlessness.
It lifts only its own weight for exercise, does not body-block,
or break up double plays,
or countenance scar tissue.
It flails in the foam, but has no body & cannot drown, or swim.
In his afterlife, Rimbaud smuggles it along infected rivers.
(1984)
“The New American Poetry” from The Confessions of Doc Williams & Other Poems.
Used by permission of Etruscan Press.
a: Won’t You Give Me Three Steps / Gimme Three Steps, Mister, / Gimme Three Steps Towards My Core? / Gimme Three Steps / Gimme Three Steps, Mister, / So My Poems Won’t be a Bore
With the end of the year near,
it’s time to reflect on your poetry, dear.
So here are some questions you can ask
yourself about your poetic tasks.
What are the three most important things
you do to make your poems sing.
Bustin’ the rhyme here. Reflect on what are the three most important aspects of your poetry right now?
For instance, for me:
Clarity. Trying to create poems with visual, syntactic, & thinking clarity.
Music. Well, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Doo wop doo wop doo waa.
Gleaming the other. Creating the poem that extends beyond itself. (For instance, in a poem about a compass that is about how the compass works & how it gets me home, is it also on another level about, for example, love, politics, justice, or is it an ars poetica. Can the poem convert lead to gold, etc? And why or why not?)
b: Three is a Gesture, Ten is Gaining Depth; or Three . . . That Ain’t No List, Now, Ten, Well, There’s a List for You; or Rounding Out the Top Ten – the Next Seven
What will complete the top ten list of what you are doing with your poems? And why? What will you try to improve or make more significant?
You will probably have to meditate on these aspects, & you will probably have to explain to yourself & your poems why.
For example, waiting to make my list:
Imagination – or longer starings.
Pivots – unique turns or shifts, wonderful seamless leaps.
Tone – to see how tone affects meaning.
Voice – to see if it is necessary for voice to match content.
Image – is this connecting? Is there a better way to present it?
Square look on page – to see how shape & poem interact.
Ambiguity – as an experiment to encourage gleaming.
The David Lehman Experiment; or The Best Poetry According to You
That’s right. Each year you will compile your own anthology of the best poems you read that year, but the poems could have first appeared in a year other than the one you are reading. So for instance, if you happen to read Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder’s poem “Whoso List to Hunt” (ca. 1526) and you think it is one of the best poems you read during the year, then include it in your anthology.
This activity is continual. But you will start a new anthology at the beginning of each year.
The Ed Hirsch Experiment; or Keeping Track So You Don’t Forget; or The Reading Journal
Ed Hirsch has a fine new book out: Poet’s Choice (Harcourt, 2006). This book, basically, is filled with two- or three-page essays about a poet and the poet’s poetry. The first part is about individual non-American poets (and it’s quite impressive the number of poets he mentions that I’ve never heard of, but after reading Hirsch’s essay, they become poets I want to read – there are, of course, poets I have heard of and read). And the second part is about American poets.
Each essay talks about something wonderful the poet did or how wonderful a poet is/was. Each essay is filled with enthusiasm and love and a deep understanding of the poet and the poet’s poetry. Hirsch has been able to turn his head enough to find something in each of the poets he writes about.
So this is what we are going to do. We are going to keep a reading journal. We are going to write about every book of poetry we read. We are going to put into written words why we like, or dislike, a certain book, or poet. You will be able to record your early responses to each book. Later, you can add to the responses. Or later, way later, you can see where you were at this point in your poetry life. I think, in part, it will help us understand how a book of poems works, or will help us understand a particular poet with more depth and clarity – and probably our own poetry.
You can also couple this poetry assignment with the previous assignment. You can write about each poem in your anthology.
Yeah, we are going to learn why we really like something. And through the writing of it, we will aid our memory about a poet. You can even rewrite poems in your journal. That’s always a good idea.
The next assignment or two will get us back to writing poetry, but in the meantime, it’s good to reflect through prose.
Go forth!
Making Closure; or Getting to Know You / Getting to Know Every Word About You [use a high, squeaky, out-of-key voice to sing that]; or Damn, Is My Vocabulary that Small? And After All of that Highfalutin Schoolin’, too, Sheesh; or I’m Gonna Make You Smoke All Them Ceegars Until You Learn to Hate Them; or The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Remedies; or How to Avoid the T. S. Eliot (Old Possum) Syndrome; or Shaking Off the Funk; or Getting Rid of Your Wouby (Mr. Mom anyone?); or Keeping it Fresh; or How Boring Am I?; or Mama Needs a New Pair of Words (and how to avoid making your point)
You are gonna need all of your poems for this one. Go through all of your poems and find the most frequent word(s), image(s), idea(s) that appear in your poems. Well, maybe not all of your poems, but over the last year or two or three.
Now use those words, images, ideas, in at least every other line of the next poem you write. And then do it again with the next poem. And the next. Keep doing it until those words, images, and ideas are out of your system. Or until you at least understand how to use them with significance, and not as an easy fall back.
For instance, my common words and images are: shadows, the moon, and mountains. And I need to purify myself of them so I can grow and move on. Right now they are so easy to use. I know they are inexhaustible material, but, dude, I need to break free for awhile, ya know? I need to learn how to use them with power, again, as I did when I first discovered/used them. Maybe this doesn’t happen to you, but if it does, you will find out and cure yourself.
Go refresh!
[11-11-16 Note: To make this easy, copy and paste your poems into a Word Cloud generator.]
Self Parody; or She Who Laughs Bests, Laughs at Herself; or Popping the Ego; or How to Make Nelson Muntz “Ha Ha” at You
Now that you’ve been examining your poetry, it’s time to make fun of it. Hyperbolize yourself. Generalize yourself. Write a self parody of your poems’ tendencies. Shake it up.
Ask yourself, “Am I still being original? Am I still being fresh? Am I making it new?”
You should do this assignment every couple of years. Starting now. Then every two or three or five years (five might be too long), consider where you’re. If, for example, your voice tends to be the same, make fun of it, so you can explore other voices. If it’s your tone that tends to be the same, bust it up. Check your syntax: are you following the same techniques because they create a cool effect? If so, make it laugh for you, and then go explore other syntactical arrangements.
Stay fresh my friends. Make it New!
I tend to say “Go forth!” at this point, as if you are a noble knight on a gallant steed, and you are about to go on an exciting journey or heading for battle. But this time I will put on a fool’s cap with a little bell dangling from the top, spin once, twice, thrice, and with a giggling cackle, a “Ha Ha,” and a jocoserious tone announce to you, . . . “Go Jest!”
Stupid Money, Dumb Politicians, & Celebrating America
Money Sucks; Money is Oppressive
Somewhere along the way money was thrust upon us. We are now forced to use money against our will. Some of us are no good with money, & yet we are forced to deal with it. And the lazy wealthy – who are talentless, make money off the poor working people – they break our backs. But what if the currency was different? . . .
I think humans are creative people. I think money stifles creativity, except for the creative scammers – the lazy wealthy, the usurers. But what if the currency of the world was Art?
That’s your assignment. Explore a world in which Art is currency. The Art currency of your world can be whatever you want – paintings, music, poems, sculptures, etc., or a combination.
In my imagination, the currency is paintings. So the painters are the wealthy, & the art critics are the bankers & the stock brokers, who invest in trends – Dada is down 20 points today, Cubism is up 5 1/8, Dogs Playing Poker remains unchanged, etc.
As Mike Dockins said when I explained this idea to him, “I wrote a poem today. I’m rich.”
Go forth. Make art. Have a wealthy life!
(9-2-06 addendum): Definitions for paragraphs one & two of poetry assignment: The Rich – Work for a living. The Wealthy – Pay the Rich their salaries. In paragraph three, the wealthy are beautiful, but the bankers and stock brokers – the usurers – are still evil and vile.
If you want to write a poem of/on politics, try the following method: Use meter &, perhaps, rhyme. Create the appearance of stability. Lay on top of that the language of ambiguity & uncertain clarity. Use a twisted syntax with its own logic – flowing & contradictory. Make sure there is a lot of change happening in your narrative, or lyric. And end as you have begun (but try to cover a time frame equal to a generation or two or five.) – for nothing really changes – hence the stability of meter & rhyme to carry the chaos of content.
But this will only work, I think & maybe wrongly, if you are writing a political poem of direct confrontation. It may or may not work if you are just brushing up against something political as your poem naturally moves on its own way.
Ok. Now go get Poetilitical. If you want, start your poem “With Usura” as Pound begins Canto XLV of The Cantos & as Parks begins Medici Money.
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Quarter Tales; or Two Bits is Worth One Poem, or a Shave & a Haircut
The U.S. Mint is pressing out the new quarters with state themes. Each state quarter has a few images on the tail’s side that are associated with the state’s culture, personality, history, geography, myths, etc. For instance, California’s quarter “depicts naturalist and conservationist John Muir admiring Yosemite Valley’s monolithic granite headwall known as ‘Half Dome’ and also contains a soaring California condor” (U. S. Mint).
Your assignment is to create a narrative from the images that appear on a state’s quarter. Each image must appear in the poem, & hopefully each image will appear twice to make the narrative cyclical, like the quarter. (You do not necessarily have to write about the state the images are representing.)
It’s advised to actually hold & stare at the actual quarter you are writing about. The quarter may affect you in ways a picture of it cannot. Its texture might effect your perceptions, or it may even talk to you. Who knows? But the physical connection with the quarter will only be beneficial.
If you are lucky & determined enough, you could have a whole book of 50 poems, which, of course, will be titled Quarter Tales, &, of course, people will only be able to purchase the book with quarters. And if you are doubly lucky, you might even get it published by 2008 – the year of the last five state quarters: Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, & Hawaii.
Miscellany; or Trying to Relate the Unrelated; or These Gotta Go Some Place . . . So Here
Bridge Building, or Setting up House
I’m sure all of us have many strong, individual poems. And I’m sure many of these poems have relationships with each other, and I imagine many have no relation one another. And I imagine these unrelated poems would like to be collected & find a home in a book or a chapbook, but their inability to relate with each other keeps them in their own little poetic studio apartments.
Ok. Here’s the assignment: Get those poems out of their apartments. Gather those unrelated poems & make bridges between the poems by writing poems that can find/make relationships. Do this for as many of the poems as you can. Let your poems make friends with each other. Let them share their talents & let them split the mortgage.
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The Overlooked
I guess this would be considered a personae piece.
You will take on the voice of a character in a story who is one of the following: someone we are told is there but not talked about (a scenery character), someone who is mentioned in passing, or someone who is known to be there but not mentioned. Then give that person a voice. For instance, I did the voice of one of the crew members that was sailing with Odysseus when they encountered the Sirens. There are plenty of others. For instance, one of the spear-carrying warriors fighting with Lucifer in Paradise Lost.
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Dream Poems
[This assignment arose from a Michelle Bonczek idea, and is used with permission.]
Write a poem about a dream a famous person (real or fictional) may have had.
It can even be done without allusions!
a: First Things First . . . Second, Third, Fourth, . . .; Indices Are So Useful; or Amateurs Borrow. The Great Ones Steal, Part Two
This idea came from reading the index of first lines in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry and realizing the string of first lines sounded like a long poem.
Then, when I was at AWP, I stopped at the Nightboat Books table, & picked up one of their recent releases The Truant Lover, which is a fine book by the way – it has an Emersonian structure about it.
Within The Truant Lover there is the poetry assignment that I am assigning, but that Juliet Patterson got to first. Here’s the poem, which is used with Nightboat Books’ permission:
Index of First Lines
A slash of blue
Asphalt/colorless
Again the cry that
But she is/a stranger yet
By the time you read this
Coming late, as always
Darling,
Dear
Dear/I could/send you
Dear/I would/have liked
Dear friend/I regret to inform you
For love we all go
I’ll send my/own two answers
Many times loneliness
No words/ripple like
Oh,
The things of which we want
The proof of those we knew before
There is another loneliness
We meet no stranger, but our self
We had not expected it
When I hoped/I feared/When I feared/I dared –
where we/owe but/a little
You must let me/go first
(What’s good about Patterson’s poem is that it actually works within the context of the book, as you will discover when you read it.)
Here’s the assignment: go find a poetry book with an index of first lines, like a Norton Anthology, or the new Migration by Merwin, or The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats (Volume 1), or whatever. Then string together the first lines to make a poem. Or, as it seems Patterson did, use the second line to push the poem forward a bit. You can even make a series of poems. And remember, you can also just use this as a “trigger” to begin a poem. When you’re done with the first lines, you can stare & revise until something else arises.
b: Making New Use of Your Bookcase
Your bookcases are lined with books, & for the most part, the spines of the books face out so you can read the titles.
Here’s the assignment. Use the title of the books, as you did with the index of first lines, to string together a poem.
Ok, go forth line by line, or title by title.
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Eavesdropping
[This assignment arose from a Michelle Bonczek idea, and is used with permission.]
You need to be in a coffee shop or bar or diner or restaurant & be writing a poem. The moment you get stuck or pause in your writing is the moment you listen in on a conversation. The first phrase you hear will then have to be worked into the poem within a few lines.
Should you get stuck or pause again, repeat the process.
A variant of this can be done at home & with no one around. Instead of listening when you pause, you can flip through a dictionary, randomly stop on a word, & then bring that word into the poem within a few lines.
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The Boring & the Mundane
This is your assignment: watch a pot of water boil, or coffee brew, or a bathtub fill with water. Look at a crack in the sidewalk. Put your ear on your front lawn & listen. Put your ear to a tree. Put your nose over a clean drinking glass & smell. Lick the back of a book you hate or your favorite book. Touch an iron rail.
Observe something ordinary – but observe. Later, reflect.
Maybe even watch your computer reboot.
That is all. Except maybe do it when you are completely bored out of your skull, or when you have far too much energy.
Go forth!
a: For the Slackers; or Pound, Merwin, Hemingway, & You; or the Art of Discipline
Some of you are already performing this assignment, & you are therefore excused from it. The rest of you, including myself, must do this. It is imperative to get yourself writing consistently.
In the recent issue of Poets & Writers [I think it’s the July/August 2005 issue] there is an article about & an interview with W.S. Merwin. We learn that Merwin once visited Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. One piece of advice Pound gave to Merwin: write seventy-five lines of poetry every day. That’s your assignment – write seventy-five lines per day for at least one month.
If that seems too many lines per day, or not enough, then adjust to your personality. (I will be writing one page per day – approximately forty lines per day). But you must write enough to form a sustained amount of time for mediation.
b: No Cop Outs
Already some of you are finding excuses out of this assignment. “Oh, I’m going away this weekend. I won’t have time to write.” In that case, I refer you to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, as I have read, wrote 250 words per day. If he was to go fishing on Saturday, he wouldn’t wimp out on writing. On Friday, he’d write 500 words to compensate for his lost day of writing – thus keeping up his 250-words-per-day average. So, if you are going away for the weekend, on Friday write 225 lines – seventy-five for Friday, seventy-five for Saturday, & seventy-five for Sunday.
c: The Cop Out to the Cop Out
Someone, probably me, is already planning this one: “Oh, I managed to write one hundred lines of poetry yesterday, so I only have to write fifty lines today, & then my average will still be seventy-five lines per day.” No. No back-ended compensation. Future compensation is ok because you are planning & anticipating. You are making up for a period of time when you know you cannot write. With backwards compensation, you are just slacking. There will be no slacking. If you have time to write, write your seventy-five lines.
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OK Pardner
This one came from Renée Roehl’s kid, Dario, & his writing class.
Start a poem with “Ok Pardner, this is it.” Partner can be used in place of pardner should you choose. This seems to provide for a strong, exciting opening.
One might also want to refer themselves to Ed Dorn’s book-long poem Gunslinger. One might also want to refer themselves to Chris Howell’s poem “The Holdup” as it first appeared in Third Coast Spring 2003 (quoted in full below).
The Holdup
Give me your money, he said.
We don’t have money, they replied,
we have eggs.
Oh, very well, he sighed, give me your eggs.
We don’t have complete eggs, they said, only
the shells.
Well, then, give me your shells, quickly
before I become tense.
The shells we have are broken, they said,
we will give you the pieces.
(“The Holdup” is used with the permission of Christopher Howell and Third Coast.)
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Overcoming Scriptophobia
This one comes to us by way of Aimee Nezhukumatathil. As I understand it, she looks up information about a phobia, & then she takes on the voice of the phobia or the voice of someone with the phobia & writes a poem with that voice. The poem she read at AWP 2004 was about the fear of poetry (metrophobia). The poem appears in her book Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press, 2003). But make sure to not make of the fun of the person with the phobia and try to create a three-dimensional character, a character who has the phobia but is not defined by or limited to just the phobia. You can be playful and have fun, just don’t make fun of the character, because there is at least one person out there suffering with the phobia you choose.
Compose a poem with the phrase “choking on a rainbow.” This is a phrase that comes from a satire article in The Onion about a young poet. Variants can include “eating a rainbow” or “cooking a rainbow” or whatever. You know?!
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The Reader’s Digest Experiment
Write a poem titled “An Abridged Version for the Modern Reader.” I found this sentence on the title page of a Stendhal book published by Reader’s Digest that I found in an antique mall in the-middle-of-nowhere, Washington.
Can we do this in poetry? Consider the following Natasha Sajé poem from her book Bend (Tupelo P, 2004):
I See
the cats playing with a rose fallen
from a wreath: a stiff silvery stem
topped by a dark pink ball.
How curiously they bat the rose,
sniffing it with glee, and that’s what
makes me bend, and see that it’s really
the long dried tail and entrails of a rat.
I laugh: If rose & rat are not so far
apart, then what can’t be mistaken
for something that it’s not?
The turn’s a way of telling me
to make each breath a self-revision.
“I see” from Bend by Natasha Sajé, published by Tupelo Press. Copyright 2004 by Natasha Saje. All rights
reserved. Reproduced by permission of Tupelo Press.
The assignment then: Bend as many perspectives as you can into a poem – a poem to not exceed one page in length (consider it your canvas). And please, don’t rely too heavily on line breaks.
Helpful hints to achieve this assignment: pretend you are inside Picasso’s mind or Einstein’s mind.
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GemALEgedicht – The Pintist School of Poetry
Let me tell you a story of the forgotten school of poetry that Ralph Black & I (Tom Holmes) have recently discovered. This school arrived in the late nineteenth century & early twentieth century in a few dank, town pubs in Northern England, Scotland, & on the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland. This poetic movement wasn’t a response to anything, it grew organically from the hops & yeast in Pints of Ale.
The Pintists, as they were called, believed in writing poetry whilst drinking pints of ale. Though they preferred to call their composing of poetry in this manner as Pinting. This school of poetry held firm in their beliefs of Pinting: everything could be explained by using only objects in the bar as a metaphor for the human condition; they believed the bartender was a high priest, or priestess; and their muse, their god, was represented in the below picture painted by Brian Warner.
The painting “One More Time” by Brain Warner is from the collection of Tim and Trinity Barnosky and is used with their permission.
Yes, the Pintists held strong til they read these lines from The Waste Land:
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
These lines shook many Pintists to the core. They believed they had been stagnating by drinking only one ale. The Pintists slowly fractured. First came the experimentalist who started binging on the German Ales. Then some of them even split into a smaller group of fringe avant gardists who downed Indian Pale Ales whilst writing their poems (& they were sure to use “whilst” as often as possible in their poems because they believed “whilst” had etymological connections to “whistle”, which they thought keen because they were always wetting their whistle, which later became their underground, hip word for pencil, because the pencil, they believed, couldn’t create unless it was wet with ale. (Some deep-hearted, avant garde, IPA Pintists actually took this literally, & dipped their pencils into their pints of IPA, like a fountain pen into an inkwell, as a ritual before they wrote. A few years later, these poor soles, these writers in the primes of their youths & artistic expressions, died from lead poisoning. This sorrowed all Pintists, & they slowly vanished like the sputtering of an empty keg.)).
At the same time everyone was reading the lines “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME”, & whilst the avant garde IPA Pintists were slowly killing themselves, feminists got involved in the movement. They believed, & rightly so, that they too could drink as much & write as well as any of the male Pintists. This group of women would become known as the Ale-Wives. And whilst they believed in the Pintist school of poetry, they also believed the words “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” was a good suggestion to all that it is time to go home. The Ale-Wives stressed the importance that there are certainly a few things outside of the pub that are important to consider. They also stressed the cyclic nature of life – all good things must come to an end, but tomorrow is just the beginning of more good things.
Around the time of the rise of the Ale-Wives, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, & Gertrude Stein were in Dublin, Ireland, trying to raise rent money for James Joyce. They met Joyce in a bar in Dublin to give him rent money so he wouldn’t be evicted & so he could concentrate on his writing. Joyce was so touched by the love & concern that he started buying drinks to celebrate this act of love. Eventually, when the rent money was almost all gone, Joyce started buying drams of ale instead of pints. He was trying to conserve what little money he had left. At which point, Ezra asked Joyce if he had heard or read anything of the Pintists. Joyce responded, “Yes, they are so dramatic & grandiose in their expositions. What they need to do is start drinking these drams, like us!” Soon the minimalist school of Pintists was born, & they called themselves the Pintalists. The Pintalists lasted the night, & the school was never heard from again. Though one poem was recently discovered by a Pintologist from Brockport, NY. This Pintologist was in SUNY Buffalo’s library of archives doing research on Ezra Pound. Whilst going through Pound’s journals, he found a cocktail napkin with a poem on it. He believes the poem was written during the night of the Pintalists. The poem reads:
In a Tavern in Dublin, Ireland
The apparition of these faces –
bubbles on a dram of ale.
Ok. Your assignment is to revive the school of Pintists. You will find a bar & compose poems whilst drinking pints of ale, um, I mean, you will involve yourself in Pinting.
Go forth.
Oh, one last thing, all Pintists believed in good tipping practices. They believed it healed the soul. They believed the better they tipped their high priests & priestesses, the less hungover they would be in the morning.
Ok. Now, go forth.
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Katzenjammer Poesie, Jeg har tommermenn Poesi, Katza Poezja, Mamurluk Poezija, or Hangover Poetry
One of the things The Wrath of Grapes notes is that there is very little written about the hangover, creatively or medically. But it does note that Peter Fallow, the anti-hero from The Bonfire of the Vanities, is “the first official Hangover Hero in American literature.”
Your assignment is not to get drunk & hungover, but to be on the forefront of a new genre: Hangover Poetry. This will be a poetry that deals with the hangover on some level: as a starting point for a metaphor, a place to turn a metaphor towards, a launching point for something else – but it must include the hangover. We need to see what we can learn from the hangover? how can it inform us? etc. . . .
A sub-genre would be poems that were written while hungover, but this is not advised.
Here’s an excerpt from an early part of The Wrath of Grapes that suggests something you should not do when hungover:
Don’t study the physical habits of your pets, especially the dog. Cats are mercifully enigmatic and won’t evoke too much paranoid response from you, although their piercing stare could unnerve you if you observe too long. Dogs, however, especially their incredibly quick eyebrow movements, should be avoided. Their eyebrow activity may pull you into the emotions that they seem to be expressing and will exhaust your mind by trying to follow their quickly changing feelings from sadness-to-happiness-to-fear-to-illness-to-daffiness, and so on ad infinitum. This is called “dog’s eyes syndrome.” It’s the old problem of what poets call the “pathetic fallacy”; that is, projecting human emotions into simple animal actions that mean nothing – which is really pathetic. Their eyebrows are probably adjusting to light refraction since most dogs are half blind anyway and they’re simply trying to see you. But don’t think about that too much, either.
(Patrick Meanor quote from The Wrath of Grapes is used with permission of XOXOX Press. Please visit their website at www.xoxoxpress.com.)
Here’s how it works: The first letter of each should read A-Z down the left side, & then the last letter of each line should read Z-A down the right side.
Or, in the case of “Dead Critics Society” by Mike Dockins, Z-A down the left side, & A-Z down the right.
The additional challenge is to make it look like a box, i.e. to aim for similar line-lengths.
Also, it will probably be important to pick a subject matter that calls for such a form. In this case, you could say it’s a poem of arts & letters. . . . Because a poet would have to ask herself, “Why use this form? For what purpose?”
Mike says: “This poem was a sarcastic reaction to the notion that all poems are about death, or, worse yet, must be about death. F*** that. Note: the word ‘Zooks!’ is from a poem by Robert Browning. Enjoy!”
Dead Critics Society
Zooks! What have I done with my anthologies? I’ll need a
year of sleep after writing my millionth review (with aplomb).
XX bottles of moonshine litter my bedside table like arsenic.
Why no lilting iambics in contemporary poetry? Only dead,
vermin-ridden prose riddled with autobiographical treacle.
Under my bed, the skeleton of Browning. I use his broken-off
tibias as walking sticks. For hundreds of scenic miles I drag
sensitivity, & marvel. Content must be pounded into a rich
risotto of form – evident rhyme scheme & equal stanzas. I
quote Keats: “Gasp! I am dying!” Were he as prosperous as J.
P. Morgan, he may not have suffered so. These days, a black-
out of good taste, a dimming of metrical etiquette, a dismal
nerve of postmodern surrealism, whatever that means. I’m
mad! I raise one of Browning’s femurs in revolt! I’ve a notion,
ladies & gentlemen, that our language has crumbled into
kindling – a few tiny sparks, maybe, but no thick log to keep
joy in prosody truly alive. Meantime, I’m just about up to Q
in my encyclopedia of verse: Quixote, etc., but still I gather
hives hunting hopelessly for my beloved poetry anthologies.
God knows Browning would have understood – what a saint.
Five finger bones claw the floor under my bed, searching. You
entertain such a relic, you pay the price – each knuckle a shiv
digging for inspiration in the floorboards, scraping shallow
crosses into my skin as I slumber. I should lock him in a box!
But then nothing would remind me of my own bones – O my
awaiting death – the only theme suitable for a poetry buzz.
Look for other ones by Mike Dockins. “The Fun Uncle” in the Indiana Review (Winter 2004), “Zarathustra Paints Town” in jubilat (nine), & “Timbuktu” in New Zoo Poetry Review (January 2007).
The clerihew was invented in 1890 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who was a schoolboy of sixteen at St. Paul’s in London when the divine numen of Orpheus struck him. His best one seems to me:
The digestion of Milton
Was unequal to Stilton
He was only feeling so-so
When he wrote Il Penseroso.
Later Williams’ continues:
Frances Stillman’s The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary (1965) says this: “The clerihew is a humorous pseudo-biographical quatrain, rhymed as two couplets, with lines of uneven length, & often contains or implies a moral reflection of some kind. The name of the individual who is the subject of the quatrain usually supplies the first line.”
This sonnet has fourteen lines. It has the same construct as a sonnet with the meter & the rhymes & the volta & all. But this sonnet has dimeter lines. The lines tend to be iambic, but the base minimum is to have two stresses per line. After the first sonnet is made, a second sonnet is made in response. Hence, “Double Sonnet.” See Below:
The spiral shell
apes creamhorns of smog.
Dalmation, quenelle
or frosted hedgehog,
yet is obsessed
by a single thought
that its inner guest
is strictly taught.
When the self that grew
to follow its rule
is gone, and it’s through,
vacant, fanciful,
its thought will find
Fibonacci’s mind.
Let’s say we have stanzas with six lines each. The first line ends with a word. The second line ends with the same word but with one letter changed. The third line’s end word has another letter changed. Etc. See Below from the second stanza of John Hollander’s poem “Getting from Here to There” in Figurehead: And Other Poems (Knopf, 2000):
Now I imagine one could add a letter, as the title of the assignment suggests, and I don’t believe all stanzas need be six lines either.
Hollander’s poem has six six-line stanzas, a seven-line stanza, an eight-line stanza, a twelve-line stanza, & a thirteen-line stanza.
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Chain Link Poems
This will involve a series of poems, & the first one you use in the series may already have been written.
The last line of the first poem will become the first line of the second poem. The last line of the second poem will become the first line of the third poem, etc…. until you are done. I imagine the linking will create a continuity & forward momentum. A subtle tension might be created between the poems, as well.
For a real Joycean challenge, make the last line of the last poem be the first line of the first poem; thus creating a cyclical movement.
The Glosa is comprised of four ten-line stanzas & begins with a four-line epigraph. The first line of the epigraph becomes the last line of the first stanza, the second line of the epigraph becomes the last line of the second stanza, the third line of the epigraph becomes the last line of the third stanza, & the fourth & last line of the epigraph becomes the last line of the fourth stanza, thus the poem. Also lines three, seven, & ten of each stanza are to rhyme. (Some say lines six, nine, & ten of each stanza are to rhyme. I say rhyming is not necessary, but to try anyway.)
Wilner, however, did it her own thing to the form. (Hmm . . . see poetry assignment “Make It New,” below). As she says in her endnote, “Since I can’t write if I know how something ends, I opened each stanza with the quoted lines, and reversed the form.” That is, the first line of the line epigraph became the first line of stanza one, the second line of the epigraph became the first line of stanza two, the third line of the epigraph became the first line of stanza three, & the fourth line of the epigraph became the first line of stanza four.
“Poems in this form consist of sixty syllables in rhyming couplets with a syllabic line count of 8,4,4,4– 8,4,4,4– 8,4,4,4,” as explained by the description for Cathy Smith Bowers’ A Book of Minutes (Iris Press, 2004).
More: “A Book of Minutes is structured like a Book of Hours, the medieval prayer book that was its age’s own version of today’s literary best-seller. The Book of Hours was arranged in sections corresponding to with the eight canonical hours of the day, beginning with Matins, moving all the way through to Vespers, and ending with Compline. A Book of Minutes retains the same eight sections, and is illustrated to suggest illumination.”
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The Gerald Stern Experiment
On February 10, 2005, Gerald Stern was in Spokane, WA, visiting Eastern Washington University’s Creative Writing Program. At the Q&A, he shared with us poems from one of his recently released, but not well-known, books: Not God After All (Autumn House Press, 2004).
Each poem is what Stern called a “petite narrative” or an “aphorism,” & he explained that each aphorism is composed of two lines of seven syllables each. I did not hear a connection between the poems, but I suspect they are connected in his mind associatively. In that regard, to me, from what I heard from what he read, they resemble the Sutras one uses to help remember The Upanishads.
Here a couple examples of Stern’s petite narratives.
It’s not God after all,
It’s the Chase Manhattan Bank.
A fire I understand,
but how do you make a flood?
Don’t make God come too fast,
be a bastard a while longer.
(The Gerald Stern poems are from Not God After All copyright 2004 by Gerald Stern.
Reprinted by permission of the author and Autumn House Press.)
As part of the assignment, I am suggesting you just sit & write a bunch of these without being consciously involved except for the counting. Write & count. Write & count. Write & give me twenty!
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Addonizio & the Sonnenizio; or Love is Hell for Fucci
In Kim Addonizio’s latest collection of poems What Is this Thing Called Love (Norton, 2004) (which is a solid book, by the way), there is a form poem I have never come across called a sonnenizio, & I would like to share Addonizio’s discovery with everyone as the next poetry assignment.
Addonizio has a footnote explaining the form:
note: The Sonnenizio was invented in Florence in the thirteenth century by Vanni Fucci as an irreverent form whose subject was usually the impossibility of everlasting love. Dante retaliated by putting Fucci into the seventh chasm of the Inferno as a thief. Originally composed of hendecasyllabics, the sonnenizio gradually moved away from metrical constraints and began to tackle a wider variety of subject matter. The sonnenizio is fourteen lines long. It opens with a line from someone else’s sonnet, repeats a word from that line in each succeeding line of the poem, and closes with a rhymed couplet.
It seems this form has the feel, or sensibilities, of a sonnet meets a sestina. And it seems like some cadence or rhythm will or can be built upon this repeated word, too. Also, it seems a slight variation on the word is a good idea so that the reader’s ears aren’t then just wafting to hear the repeated word. Make surprises as Addonizio & her poem do in:
At Helen Humphreys’ reading on October 5th, 2005, at The Writers Forum at SUNY Brockport, Humphreys read a Sylvia Plath poem. She then read one of her poems, but this poem used all the words in the Plath poem she had just read – she just rearranged the order of the words to make a new poem. Humphreys said she does this because in her own poems she finds she often uses the same words in her poems. This experiment then allows her to break free of her word-choice confines.
The name of the poem she read I can’t recall, but it appears in Anthem (Brick Books, 1999).
Ok. Go & play in this new form; or, go in new & form this play.
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Erasure Poems
Mary Ruefle has come up with a new way to compose poems & to make a new art form, or at least new to me. In her newest book, A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006), there are a collection of poems arrived at from a larger book with the same name. What Ruefle has done is to use a page of text from the larger book & then white out/paint out words to leave only a few words to make a poem.
What is interesting to me about these poems is that they involve active reading. Your eyes have to move around the page, which creates for extended line breaks, & it affects the breath. Not to mention the spaces between words that are on the same line – it’s a type of projective verse. Plus, if you get the book, you will also see textures from the white out/paint, not to mention how the aged, faded brown pages play with the lively, contemporary bright white paint. Here are two examples that are used with permission from Wave Books.
Mary Ruefle “the dead” (page 9).
Mary Ruefle “a heart” (page 28).
I’m not sure of the process behind this, but I imagine it is more than just saving words. I imagine you have to consider how it will look when complete, how to breathe & read your way through the final piece, & what the poem will actually be. [Ten years later, I realize/learn the erasure poem needs to have a conversation with the original text. But you can’t just use any text, as some poets do. No, you need a significant text, and then by erasing words, you find something like a secret meaning to the poem or text your are erasing from or “discover something like poetry hidden within [a] book.” John Cage did this with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but he added a twist. With the unerased words, he made an anagram: ALLEN GINSBERG. (See Perloff’s essay for the example.) Also see more here: https://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/on-marjorie-perloffs-reinventing-the-lyric/]
Your assignment is to do this. Your assignment is to go to a used bookstore, buy a book, & try this out. I suggest first starting with Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man or H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. Until then you can visit this page & practice online: http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/
(The Mary Ruefle poems “the dead” and “a heart” as they appear in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006. Copyright 2006 by Mary Ruefle.) are used with permission of Wave Books. Please visit their website at: www.wavepoetry.com.)
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Make It New
I got this idea from Swinburne & Pound & James Wright. Sappho wrote her poems in a quantitative metric now called Sapphics. With ‘-’ representing a long syllable & ‘u’ a short syllable, it went like this:
-u- -- uu- u --
-u- -- uu- u --
-u- -- uu- u --
-u u--
Or, three hendecasyllabic lines & one adonic line. There also tends to be a caesura after the fifth syllable, and the fourth syllable in lines 1-3 is often free.
Swinburne then came around & realized quantity doesn’t work as good in English as it does in Greek, so in his poem “Sapphics,” he wrote in a qualitative meter, but with the same pattern as Sappho – but using a stressed syllable in place of a long syllable and an unstressed syllable in place of a short syllable.
Pound then came along & dabbled in Sapphics in “Apparuit,” where he tends to use both qualitative & quantitative meters simultaneously. But in the poem “The Return,” the meter is strictly quantitative, however! he hides the form by varying the line & stanza lengths. The meter is there, it is just camouflaged & jumbled.
James Wright then came along & said enough. He Americanized it in “Erinna to Sappho.” He used a qualitative meter more fitting to American rhythms, while keeping the spirit of Sappho’s meter.
Wright’s form is three lines of iambic tetrameter & one line of iambic dimeter. To scan it with “/” as stress & “u” as unstressed:
u/u/u/u/
u/u/u/u/
u/u/u/u/
u/u/
Ok. Make sense? Now go find a form & contemporize it!
//
Make it New (Number Two); or Make it American; or Repackaging – Making the Same Product Seem New & Improved
This is a variation of “Poetry Assignment: Make it New.” It arose from the following rapid-fire correspondence between Rob Carney & me, using three different email addresses. Here’s how much of the correspondence went:
Tom (from email address #1) [responding to a particular haiku in a series of Haiku and Tanka Rob sent him]: [. . .] “coming” in “coming in the wind” seems the wrong word to me. It sounds way too sexual, for some reason, and it just seems the wrong verb with the movement of snow. [. . .]
Rob (to Tom’s email address #2): yeah, I want a different verb for the snow in the soon-arriving future but arriving has 3! syllables! – fucking Japanese forms . . . the Japanese have one-syllable words for words like cascading or disappear or animal, they gotta, or how can they fit stuff into these shot-glasses?
Tom (from email address #2): Why not put a James Wrightian, Americana spin on the poem. 4-8-4 in iambs?
I say James Wright, not because he Americanized Haiku, but because he Americanized Sapphics. And you could do the same with Haiku.
Tom (from email address #1):
A New York State of Mind
The snow cascades
in spring amid the yawping geese –
rotate the tires.
4-8-4 in iambs (with an allusion to Whitman).
Aha! A new poetry assignment. Shit. This will be posted in 10 minutes.
Rob (to Tom’s email address #1): Dig it. Funnyclevercool.
[. . .]
Rob (later to Tom’s email address #1): Yes, of course. That’s fine. Oh, and I love that “rotate” doesn’t just command/resign to rotate/rotating the tires and also do an imagery thing BUT ALSO THIS: precedents were all iambs, then this first words actually, by going trochee on stuff, enacts the word “rotate”.
[. . .]
Rob (even later to Tom’s email address #1 and regarding the new poetry assignment): [. . .] bonus points for ironic tone rather than reverence for Nature? or bonus points for making it funny too, a beautiful joke rather than a Zen koan like so many in Japanese are, meaning humor rather than riddle. Or bonus points for making great use of enjambment or fitting use of syncopation? [. . .]
Ok. There you go. Americanize the Haiku. Four syllables / eight syllables / four syllables in iambs, plus ironic tone &/or humor &/or great enjambments &/or syncopation.
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Concrete Poetry; or Gaudier-Brzeska with the Line; or Watch Out for that Stinger
The shape of a poem on the page is indeed a worthy consideration when writing a poem. For me, for instance, I will write a poem with pencil & paper, & I will write it over & over with all the revising until I think it is done. Then I type it into Word. I then stare at it. Fix the shape better so it works better with the content. (It’s so nice to have that uniform spacing, unlike my random scrunching & expanding scribblings with my pencil.) Then when I think it is done, I print it. And then revise some, & sculpt the shape some more. Then back to the screen. Then to printed copy, etc. until I think, or the poem tells me, it is done.
The shapes of my poems, good or bad, tend to be rectangular. But there are others who have sculpted lines to represent the shape of the object of the poem. As far as I know, the first person to do this was George Herbert, with poems like “The Altar” (where the shape of the poem looks like an altar) & “Easter Wings” (where the shape of the poem, when turned ninety degrees, looks like a butterfly). The concrete poem then had a resurgence in the 1950s & 1960s. And then recently in William Heyen’s poem “Scorpions,” which appears in The Rope (MAMMOTH Books, 2003). The poem is below.
(William Heyen’s “Scorpion” is used with permission of the author and MAMMOTH Books.)
In this poem, the reading of the poem imitates the viewing of a scorpion. You look upon the scorpion’s body, then curl up his tail, then drop off the stinger, then back to his body & legs. So the poem, has the second line as the body (the first line read), the first line as the stinger (the second line read), & then the third line the feet (the third line read). And the stinger-line dangles with one word, just like the stinger dangles. The poem snaps your head around as a scorpion would snap its tail. Heyen has another concrete poem, “Wishbone Hull Requiem,” that appears in The Rope.
I think this assignment is a good investigation, or reinvestigation, into the study of the line & line breaks. I think it will make us turn our head & ears just enough to reconsider how the line can act, breathe, perform, seduce, & mimic. I think it will also make us consider & re-consider how the sculpted shape of the poem can contribute in new ways.
Ok. Go forth!
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Ghazals, Gazelles, & Jezebels; or Distracted from Distraction by Distraction
Ok, I’ve been reading a lot of Robert Bly, lately. The Night Abraham Called to the Stars & My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. He’s writing Ghazals, and I’m staring at them. I’m noticing each stanza stands on its own, yet relates to the preceding stanza & the following stanza. And I notice each poem is complete, whole, despite the discreteness (though not really discrete). I stare again differently, but away from his poems & towards my generation of poets. I think, “This is a good form for my generation of poets. We are so easily distracted yet able to keep it whole. (Keep it real.) The sum of the distracted parts is greater than the whole” (with apologies to Creeley).
So, why not make this our generation’s form of poems. Our generation being 25-40. Born in 1966 (yea, you know the associations of that year & time period) to born in 1981 (when Regan became president). Why not make stanzas that are about one thing, then make the distracted associative leaps. Then at the end of the poem pull that draw string & yoke the poem into wholeness. Let’s call it Garbage Bag Ghazals. A place where we empty our thoughts, pull the draw string to close it up & contain it, haul it over our shoulder, walk it to the dumpster, hurl it into the dumpster, watch it explode on impact, & see what results. Watch the associations scatter & combine.
Let’s connect our distractions. Let’s write Garbage Bag Ghazals.
Oh, & to make it more interesting, let’s focus some of these poems on “grief.” I add this because, Bly says we (Americans) don’t know how to deal with grief, & because I’m not sure if I even know what grief is (other than “Good Grief,” ala Charlie Brown). I know sadness. I know burden. I know heaviness. I know sorrow. But I don’t think I know grief. Do you?
And now for a wonderful response to the assignment.
Optic Nerve
So the task swivels: look with your word-eye,
keep a bright light on, see through the word eye.
On the bone planet, night time warps. Spooks morph
delusional, bobbling a tight, weird eye.
At the rim shattered, junk started, speeding
the labyrinth city – one hot-wired eye.
Air here so thin. Your chest wrenched by what
can or cannot be cranks wide the worried eye.
Heed: ropes, riddled grapes, pikes. Drag your feet
to the crossroads. Stamp out the wayward eye.
Afterburn. Blue mortar blast. Dying. Kin
in the sights. Does it heal, the skewered eye?
Guts on hold, it shrinks, gelatinous; alights
anywhere but here, that coward eye.
Ambling, misproportioned, poorly tethered
from its mate; must we love the awkward eye?
Acid wash. A flaying grief. Tears just scratch
the surface, grate salt on the raw red eye.
Hot tempered Damascus. Zealous blood gut-
ters up the hilt. Quick! Unhorse that sword eye!
They give reasons. Justify. Explain. Not
quell. Is it satisfied, our answered eye?
Though well-oiled; galvanized; springy; his stripes
soft in the breeze; resist the bedward eye.
Tabloid: Dear Abby, What have we done? What
do we do now? Yours, true, The Inward Eye.
(Used with the permission of Abby Millager.)
By Abby Millager. (5-18-06, or so)
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The Coop de Gras Experiment
[This one is brought to us by Linda Cooper! and used with her permission.]
Write six ten-line poems with no repeat nouns. Include internal rhymes within lines nine & ten. Do not think about content while writing the little vignettes. Afterward, look for a common theme & bring it to life! (Revise away the form if it doesn’t serve the poem). Go Forth!!
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The Switchback Poem
This is probably a new poem form!
While hiking in the Olympic National Park near the Heart O’ the Hills on “Switchback Trail,” which leads to the Lake Angeles Trail & the Klahhane Ridge & overlooks Port Angeles & British Columbia at the top, I noticed something on the way down. I noticed that my thoughts, when not diverted by throbbing thighs, were toward one thing – a dorsal-finned mountain, & then on the switchback, my thoughts turned toward another thing – two blackbirds flying, who at certain angles reflected white or red – & as I kept going down my thoughts went back & forth between the fin & the birds depending on the direction I was facing on “The Switchback Trail.”
The assignment is to write a poem which follows the movement of a switchback trail.
Write a poem that starts in one direction & then turns in another. That is, start off in direction A, for instance, & then change to direction B, & then to direction A & back to direction B & on & on. But only two thoughts can be had. Two thoughts that share no associations.
You could combine two unsuccessful poems for this assignment.
Here’s the form: I imagine each direction, switchback, should be a stanza long (as a line would be too abrupt). I imagine each stanza should be about the same length, but of course, variances will be had based on thoughts & because the switchback trail had switchbacks that tended to be of similar length but at times also varied in length. The length between two adjacent stanzas, however, should be of similar lengths (for instance, one stanza could be five lines & the next stanza six lines & the next five & the next four). In addition, the length of stanza one could be completely different than the last stanza if enough subtle movements are achieved. For example, stanza one could be three lines, but by the time the last stanza is reached & some clever writing is had, the last stanza could be ten lines.
Ok. I hope you get the idea.
Also, if your two thoughts come to a conclusion, if associations are finally achieved between the two disparate thoughts, then great. If not, then you had a helluva hike!
a: The Cigarette Cough of the Just Poet; or Joseph K Writes a Poem; or the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the DRAG, to the LINE (with apologies to Charles Olson); or Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em
I was thinking about Creeley (who according to Olson in the essay (“Projective Verse,” which contains “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”) said, “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT”).
As I was saying, I was thinking about Creeley. I was thinking about his poems – their pace. I was remembering that back in ’93/’94 I was reading Creeley & smoking cigarettes. I was remembering that I would take a drag of a cigarette & read a poem & then exhale. I was remembering what I was thinking while reading Creeley: “Creeley must have been a smoker. That his poems, the length of the poem, coincide with the drag of a cigarette.”
Thus, this assignment. Write a poem that lasts the length of a drag of a cigarette. A poem that commences after the inhale & ends with the exhale.
And then write a series of poems that can be read to one cigarette. I don’t even know how many drags that is. Five, ten, twelve, twenty? Wait. . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . puff . . . pufff. Ok. I get thirteen. Hm. So now you got to work the moon into the series, too. Thirteen moon phases in a year, right?
b: Unanswerable Questions; or What’s at the Edge of the Universe?; or What’s the Last Digit of Pi?; or How Does Venus de Milo Hitchhike?; or . . .
After writing that, I couldn’t help but think of a lollipop commercial from the late 70s. So, now you gotta write a poem that lasts as long as a Tootsie Pop “How many lick does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop” will be theme to that poem. Work an owl into the poem, too.
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Now that you’ve been examining your poetry, it’s time to make fun of it. Hyperbolize yourself. Generalize yourself. Write a self parody of your poems’ tendencies. Shake it up.
The Line Break 