POETRY ASSIGNMENTS
“The Cave” by Brian Warner. Used with the permission of Brain Warner.
or 100 Jackhammers for the Poet with Writer’s Block;
or 100 Ways to Jumpstart the Engine;
or 100 Pencil Exercises;
or 100 Ways to Stimulate Your Next Wine, Cheese, & Poetry Night
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Table of Contents
- Finding the First, Discovering the Middle, & Chasing the End
- Imaginary Worlds
- Science, the Universe, Time, & Other Evolutions
- Fun with Letters, Words, Language, & Languages
- Forms: Obscure, Updated, & Invented
- New School; or Double Vision; or WWI (Writing While Intoxicated) & Its Repercussions
- Miscellany; Trying to Relate the Unrelated; or These Gotta Go Some Place . . . So Here
- Stupid Money, Dumb Politicians, & Celebrating America
- Responses; or Calling All Poets (Dead & Alive); or Talking to Eternity
- It’s All About You
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Double Abecedarian
This one is kind of like an acrostic, but cooler.
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.
This first appeared in The Atlanta Review and then on Verse Daily on August 10, 2006.
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).
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The Clerihew
According to Jonathan Williams in his newest collection Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005):
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.”
Here’s a couple of Williams’:
Ezra Loomis Pound bought a lb of Idaho potatoes (the Hailey Comet always ate those). Hank D. Thoreau too seldom used eau de cologne, and always asked to live at Walden on his own Babe Ruth in all truth weren’t borned like you an’ me – he come down out of a tree. (Quoted poems by Jonathan Williams as they appear in Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon P, 2005)© are used with permission of Copper Canyon Press.)
Ok go have fun. And if you like intelligent fun poets, read Jonathan Williams.
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“Double Sonnet for the Minimalist”
I think this was first created by Mona Van Duyn. I read about it in Emily Grosholz’s “Poetry and Science in America” in The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science, ed. Kurt Brown (University of Georgia Press, 2001). (The poems first appeared in Van Duyn’s Near Changes (Knopf, 1990).)
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.
The response:
That fragile slug, bloodless, unborn, till it knows the hug of love’s tutoring form, whose life, upstart in deep, is to learn to follow the art of turn and return, when dead, for the dense casts up no clue to the infinite sequence it submitted to. May its bright ghost reach the right heart’s beach. “The Spiral Shell” and “That Fragile Slug” from Near Changes by Mona Van Duyn, copyright © 1990 by Mona Van Duyn. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Tit for Tat & All That
This makes me think of a sestina, but it is not.
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):
One hears such stories with one’s eyes unwet: She woke up one day and found that the Tet Offensive had left her widowed with a tot Who broke her heart as if it were a toy. Luck, having given her one so-so try, Wrung out her life and left her bones to dry. Lines from “Getting from Here to There” from Figurehead by John hooander, copyright © 1999 by John Hollander. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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.
I got this idea from Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s “Lucifer’s Crown” in Never be the Horse (University of Akron Press, 1999). Hers, however, is a “Crown of Sonnets:” a series of seven sonnets that follow the above rules.
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The Glosa
I got this idea from Eleanor Rand Wilner’s poem “Αντíο, Cassandra” from The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).
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.
(Quoted passage by Eleanor Rand Wilner as it appears in the “Notes” of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)© is used with permission of Copper Canyon Press.)
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Minute by Minute, Syllable by Syllable
I’m sure most of us saw this on Poetry Daily on December 11, 2004 [which is now inaccessible 😦 ].
The form is called the “minute,” & was “formulated by Verna Lee Hinegardner, former poet laureate of Arkansas.” It works like this:
“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:
Sonnenizio on a Line from Drayton Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part; or kiss anyway, let’s start with that, with the kissing part, because it’s better than the parting part, isn’t it – we’re good at kissing, we like how that part goes: we part our lips, our mouths get near and nearer, then we’re close, my breasts, your chest, our bodies partway to making love, so we might as well, part of me thinks – the wrong part, I know, the bad part, but still let’s pretend we’re at that party where we met and scandalized everyone, remember that part? Hold me like that again, unbutton my shirt, part of you wants to I can tell, I’m touching that part and it says yes, the ardent partisan, let it win you over, it’s hopeless, come, we’ll kiss and part forever. “Sonnenizio On a Line From Drayton” and the “note”, from What is This Thing Called Love: Poems by Kim Addonizio. Copyright© 2004 by Kim Addonizio. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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The Helen Humphreys’ Experiment
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!
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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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The Line Break 