Responses; or Calling All Poets (Dead & Alive); or Talking to Eternity
The Dr. Carlos Response Poem
Write a response to William Carlos Williams‘ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” There is enough information in this poem to piece together a story, i.e. the wheel barrow is glazed with rain water suggests it has recently rained. You may even want to fill in the spaces between the words or lines in the “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
(9-16-06 addendum) Notice how each stanza in the poem looks like the profile of a wheelbarrow. Thanks for sharing that observation, William Heyen.
//
The Dr. Carlos Response Poem II: The Wrath of Flossie
Pretend you are Flossie Williams (Dr. Carlos’ wife) after having read the following note on the refrigerator door:
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
a: The Dr. Carlos Response Poem III: City Talk
Yes, another response poem idea, but . . . Ok.
In Dr. Carlos’ Paterson, at times it seems the city of Paterson is trying to talk or is being talked for, though sometimes it is Dr. Paterson. So here’s the assignment: pretend you are a city writing a poem.
Other alternatives are to be a mountain or a lake, but something with a history & a story or stories to tell. I guess this means you are limited to narrative, but if you can break free of that, then most cool!
b: The Beatific Beatrice Response, or Dante? Who’s He?
From what I’ve learned, Dante & Beatrice met only four brief times, but Dante was horribly in love with Beatrice. And I think Beatrice didn’t pay him much mind after their visits.
With that in mind, we should explore how Beatrice felt after The Divine Comedy was finished & published. How would she have responded?
c: Beatrice Takes A Journey With Sappho, or Hell Hath No Fury Like a Beatrice with a Pen
Write a new Divine Comedy but from the point of view of Beatrice & using Sappho as her guide. Or maybe just write a canto for the Inferno, a canto for Purgatorio, & a canto for Paradisio.
//
Sapphic Love
As we know, we only have one complete & full poem/song of Sappho. The rest are all in fragments. Sometimes translators leave those blanks in their translation. This assignment, which I imagine has been done before, attempts to fill in those blanks – not all blanks to all her poems, but for just the blanks of one poem. For instance, consider fragment 24C:
So put words, lines, stanzas where the brackets are.
One may also just take a fragment like “I would not think to touch the sky with two arms” (fragment 52) & wrap a poem around it.
I imagine in your final draft, to tip your hat, you should italicize Sappho’s words.
Other poems with only fragments from poets like Anakeron or the iamb inventor Archilocos, etc. can be used in place of Sappho.
Good Sappho books are 7 Greeks by Guy Davenport (NY: New Directions, 1980), or If Not, Winter by Anne Carson (NY: Vintage, 2002). The former is awesome, & the latter is equally as impressive. Mary Barnard’s book, while also impressive & awesome, doesn’t leave the blanks.
//
This One’s for the Ladies; or “Oh, Please. Enough With the Worms, Already. If That’s What You Want to Call It”; or “Andy, Andy, Andy. Will It Ever End With You?”
Andrew Marvell wrote a wonderful poem, among many others. But the one we are concerned with is “To His Coy Mistress,” which is quoted below.
Alas, then. You are to be the Coy Mistress & respond to Andy’s pleas. Using meter & rhyme might be nice, or you can contemporize the whole situation if you wish. That’s it.
To His Coy Mistress
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Should’st Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster then Empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.
For Lady you deserve this State;
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I alwaies hear
Times winged Charriot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lye
Desarts of vast Eternity.
Thy Beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound
My ecchoing Song: then Worms shall try
That long preserv’d Virginity:
And your quaint Honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my Lust.
The Grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew
And while thy willing Soul transpires
At every pore with instant Fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt pow’r.
Let us roll all our Strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one Ball:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the Iron gates of Life.
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
//
Dealing with Rejection
With my 99th literary-rejection letter just received, & number one hundred at hand [as of November 7, 2016, I am at 1085 rejection letters], I was reminded of Mike Dockins’ poem “Monsoon” about his one hundredth rejection letter, which then sparked this assignment.
Your assignment is to write a poem dealing with rejection, & if it deals with rejection letters from literary journals, all the better, & perhaps even more preferred.
MONSOON
Dear 100th rejection slip, I am learning to spell
monsoon. I look forward to your square blue ocean:
starfish and whales of polite sentences wriggling
on harpoons, black tide awash with monsoon,
my lamp a fiery moon rising on krilly semi-colons,
maybe a sleek marine scribble. Soon, soon.
I see the in the Arabian Sea, approach Panaji
from the southwest. How kindergarten, how 1978,
how monsoon. I am in love with your maps
and hieroglyphs – how jejune. When you cry
à la loon from my blustery mailbox I’m going
to order a fat drink speckled with plankton,
festooned with a paper umbrella bending in
monsoon, tiny tsunamis crashing the salted rim.
I might even kiss the postal clerk, Irishman
that I am, monsoon I long to be. I’m a candle-boat
on the anniversary of something terrible
and beautiful, some atom balloon, adrift on
a waveless lagoon, wailing monsoon monsoon.
Used by permission of 5 A.M.
//
On Second Thought
This one has a long tradition, & now it’s your turn. You are to write a response poem to one of your friend’s poems. You can pick up on a theme & say “Yes, & in addition to that . . .” or “No. It’s more like this . . .” or “What about this?” Etc. (Of course, phrase those utterances with a more poetic sensibility.) Most important, it’s gotta be a response to your buddy’s poem!
//
Here, Let Me Try
This is in line with the above assignment, “On Second Thought.” This time, however, you will take one of your buddy’s poems & revise it for him/her.
Whether you keep the revisions for yourself (& be a kinda cool literary thief who won’t go to jail, but who may have to buy their buddy a bottle of wine if the poem comes out good – you know, a fine) or whether you return it (like Ez did with The Waste Land to Tom) is up to you.
//
Laundry Time
This idea comes to me from Kat Smith after she heard W.S. Merwin read a poem at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. It is also something that Lorca has done, & should provide for a good summer long exercise.
The assignment is a celebration of our clothes.
You are to write a poem about a particular piece of clothing you wear or someone else wears.
I plan on writing every time I go to the laundromat, so by the end of summer, & after all the laundry, I hope to have a series of clothing poems.
Ok. Go Sing, celebrate, & clean your clothes.
//
The Wally Stevens Anecdote
[This assignment arose from a Michelle Bonczek idea, and is used with permission.]
It is simple. Here it is.
Write a poem with the title “Anecdote of Me Reading a Wallace Stevens Poem.” You can insert your name in place of “Me.” I imagine you can do it with any poet, but I imagine it is funnier with a Wally Stevens poem.
//
Art Response Poem
Find a painting or a sculpture, one that isn’t too famous or popular, & write a poem about it, or a response to it, or let it evoke something. Perhaps even create a narrative about the scene. The Pre-Raphaelites might be most helpful for the latter.
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.
//
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.
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.
//
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.”
//
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!
//
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.
//
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.)
//
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.
//
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!
//
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)
//
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!!
//
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.
Connect the Dots; Star Gazing into Creation; or Neck Exercises
We’ve recently entered a new millennium, yet we still use our night sky’s old constellations & their stories. Your assignment is to create new images & new stories for the existing constellations, or to find your own constellations & create stories for them.
For those who choose to create more than one constellation, or for those who want this assignment to endure – create an epic story for all the constellations you have made or found. Try to weave the stories together.
Be careful not to stare too long into the night sky or else you might find yourself with a neck ache. If that happens, you will have to write a bunch of poems so your neck can bend down &, hopefully, offset the pain from bending your neck backwards.
//
Hey, Where’s Everybody Going?
Something strange is happening in my town. Perhaps it’s happening in your town, too. Quick! Look out the window. Are all the statues leaving as they are here? What do you think is going on? Where do you think they are going? Quickly, write it down. Follow them. Take notes. But don’t get caught. This could be monumental!
//
Til Death Do Us Part
This assignment is inspired by the first line in Stan Rubin’s poem “Emily Was Right,” which is in his new book Five Colors (Wordtech Communications, 2004). The first line is: “The perfect date would be with death.”
The assignment is to write about that perfect date, or just a general date with death, or even just a first date with death.
Ok. Get busy!
And if you want, you can get busy with death, too! (Read that as if Groucho Marx said it with a cigar in his mouth!)
//
The Sea of Galilee, or the Apocalypse
Apparently the water level in the Sea of Galilee keeps rising 0.5 cm per day. As of March 16th, it was 15 cm from capacity. I’m not exactly sure of the reasons for this. But, here’s the assignment: compose a poem of the flooding of the Sea of Galilee, or some ocean. A poem of the apocalypse.
Last week, August 10th, 2004, or so, my wife [at the time] & I were on the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula & we went to watch the sun set. When we arrived, the sun was blocked by clouds. The sun looked liked a full moon, & the feeling was eerie & apocalyptic.
Yesterday, August 19, 2004, in Hong Kong there was so much smog that the sun was blocked out. In the absence of sunlight, there were many boat accidents, & the government warned people with heart & respiratory conditions to stay indoors.
Here’s the poetry assignment. Write a poem about the day the sun disappeared. Or if you wish the day the moon disappeared. (In the moon poem, for a real challenge, make an allusion to the old tv show, Space 1999, if anyone remembers that!)
//
Fluorescent Lights as Thieves; or Me & My Bones; or In the Event of Light, the Only Safe Place is Under the Desk
Where I work is good place. Good, creative people making a fine product. But I noticed something most odd the other day when I was turning the corner. You see, when I turn corners, I listen to hear if anyone is coming, I try to look through the corners (which can be done if you know how) to see if anyone is coming, & I look to the floor for shadows to see if anyone is approaching, for I don’t want to have a collision at the corner. And then I realized, after never seeing a shadow approach a corner despite hearing a person & seeing a person through corner walls that people at work don’t cast shadows. It’s strange. Some of the cubicle walls cast shadows, & there is always a shadow under my desk (or is it just dark?). But people here have no shadows. To which my friend responded, “We are the shadows.” I think it’s just the fluorescent lights . . . not the people. I mean, I’ve seen their shadows on the sidewalk outside. I’ve seen the shadows get into their owner’s (or does the shadow own the person) car. But anyhow.
Here is the assignment. Imagine a world where only inanimate objects cast shadows. Imagine how your unconscious would be symbolized. Where would your psychological baggage be carried? What of dreams? . . . Jung & Freud? What of murder mysteries & horror movies? What of fear itself? What of the song “Me and My Shadow”? Oh my.
You may also imagine a world where only organic, living things cast shadows. What then of the moon & its phases? What then of sundials? What then of a mountain’s presence looming large over a small town, or are mountains organic & living? (surely living). Or imagine a place of no shadows.
Now. Go forth. Write. Imagine. Imagine your pencil not throwing a shadow on your words!
//
If Dante Were Here Today
Oh boy, he’d find a lot of sinners, & he’d probably find some sinners of new sins, too. What would he do with these sinners of the new sins? He’d have to create a new circle in hell, a new circle in the Inferno, for them. Thus, it is up to you to pretend you are Dante today & create a new circle in hell for the sinners of the new sins.
Or even, perhaps, to find a secret door in one of the circles that opens into another circle, where the sinners of the new sin are. For example, I thought today, there are a lot of people destroying the environment – performing acts contrary to nature – thus, you might want a secret passage in the contrary to nature circle (the one that has the usurers) & put those people destroying nature into that secret room.
If you can do this assignment in terza rima, then all the better.
If you can create a new Inferno filled with circles for all the new sins & sinners of the new sins, then kick ass! And if you do that, then I imagine you’d have to find a new Virgil, too!
Alright, go forth & put the sinners in their place!
(9-2-06 addendum) Here’s a new sin: advertisers who use Beatles songs. I’m thinking specifically of the Chase Credit Card (usury) company that recently used “All You Need Is Love” to advertise their damn credit card. That is contrary to nature, The Beatles, and all that is beautiful in the world. The advertisers & those at Chase Credit Card who approved the commercial should be in a new circle. Or the dog-food company that used Shakespeare to pimp its product and the myriad of other advertisers and ad approvers who belittle great art and humanity.
//
Imitations; or Because Poems Are to Speak to All Times; or Make It New (Number 3)
1) Translatio linguarum. “Translation is easy in the beginning for the scholar, and brings also much learning and great judgment to the master. It is most common, and most commendable of all other exercises for youth: most common, for all your constructions in Grammar schools be nothing else but translations [. . .] they bring forth but simple and single commodity.”
2) Paraphrasis. “Paraphrasis is to take some eloquent Oration, or some notable common place in Latin, and express it with other words. [. . .] Paraphrasis, the second point, is not only to express at large with more words, but to strive and contend (as Quintilian said) to translate the best Latin authors into other Latin words, as many or thereabouts.”
3) Metaphrasis. “Metaphrasis is to take some notable place out of a good Poet, and turn the same sense into meter, or into other words in Prose. [. . .] This kind of exercise is all one with Paraphrasis, save it is out of verse either into prose or into some other kind of meter: or else, out of prose into verse, which was Socrates’ exercise and pastime (as Plato reported) when he was in prison, to translate Æsop’s Fables into verse.”
4) Epitome. “This is a way of study belonging rather to matter, than to words: to memory, than to utterance: to those that be learned already, and has small place at all amongst young scholars in Grammar schools. [. . .] Epitome is good privately for himself that does work it.”
5) Imitatio. “Imitation is a faculty to express lively and perfectly that example: which you go about to follow. And of itself, it is large and wide: for all the works of nature in a manner be examples for art to follow. But to our purpose, all languages, both learned and mother tongues, be gotten, and gotten only by Imitation.”
6) Declamatio. [Um, he seems to have forgotten to expand on that. Um, little help please. I’m gonna fail my final. Hey, Mr. Ascham. Hey, Roger. Rog. All right then. I guess class is over.]
Then 110 years later, John Dryden comes along with three very similar terms for translation, which appear in his “Preface” to Ovid’s Epistles in 1680:
All translation I suppose may be reduced to these three heads.
First that of, metaphrase, or turning an author word for word, and line by line, from one language into another. Thus, or near this manner, was Horace’s Art of Poetry translated by Ben Jonson. The second way is that of paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered. Such is Mr. Waller’s translation of Virgil’s fourth Aeneid. The third way is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion: and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases. Such is Mr. Cowley’s practice in turning two odes of Pindar, and one of Horace into English.
Robert Lowell picks up Dryden’s third in Imitations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961). In Lowell’s introduction to this collection, he writes of his translations, imitations:
I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. Most often this has been a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment. I have tried to write alive in English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America.
So we are going to do this. We are going to take a long-ago dead poet (& they can be English speaking like Anne Bradstreet, William Blake, Alexander Pope, Shakespeare, or foreign like Dante, Sappho, or the author of Gilgamesh), & have that poet write as if he or she lived today in America. Plus, we will work on tone, a tone.
And if you want to be like Lowell, do one or a few poems from one poet, & a few more from another & another until you have a book length manuscript. Or just do one poet.
Feel free to ignore Ascham. I will, as he reminds me of a teacher from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Hey, Rog, I’m still waiting. Rog. Rog. Oi.
//
Today’s Fertilizer, or You Make the Call
Baudelaire once had a wonderful image/symbol of a rose growing from a pile of manure. And Ezra Pound once said, “Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”
Today (12-6-04) they announced the invention of a cell phone that when thrown away will grow into a sunflower.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters)—Scientists said on Monday they have come up with a cell phone cover that will grow into a sunflower when thrown away.
Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development [. . .] has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.
Your assignment: pretend you’re a French Symbolist & use the cell phone as a new symbol.
Here is Gérard de Nerval’s “Golden Verses” to help you a bit. (It is translated by C.F. MacIntyre.)
Eh, what! everything is sentient!
Pythagoras
You, free thinker, imagine only man
thinks in this world where life bursts from all things?
The powers within prescribe your freedom’s wings,
but you leave the universe your plans.
Respect the mind that stirs in every creature:
love’s mystery is known by metals too;
every flower opens its soul to Nature;
“Everything’s sentient!” and works on you.
Beware! from the blind wall one watches you:
even matter has a logos all its own . . .
do not put it to some impious use.
Often in humble life a god works, hidden;
and like a new-born eye veiled by its lids,
pure spirit grows beneath the surface of stones.
“Golden Verses” from French Symbolist Poetry.
Used with permission by University of California Press.
(9-16-06 addendum) You should also read Walt Whitman’s “This Compost.” Thanks for the tip, William Heyen.
//
Pessoa as a Time Traveler; or Variations on Rexroth as Marichiko; or Man, You Are So Far Behind the Times
What is your favorite time period of poetry that occurs before 1901? And what country provides your favorite poetry, besides America? Now with that time & place in mind, what poet should have existed that did not? That is, when you read the Romantics, for example, you may have thought, “If I were writing then, I think I would have had this voice, these ideas, these types of visions, inventions, criticisms, insights, & understandings that would epitomize, in full, Wordsworth, Coleridge, & the rest.” Or something like that.
With that in mind, you need to become an uber-Romantic poet, or an uber-poet from whatever time period & country you like best. You need to pretend you have discovered a poet from a distant time & land, but you need to write poems for that discovered poet & maybe some literary criticism, or some manifestoes, or some takes on how that poet sees poetry & its purpose.
If you wish, you can bring that poet into our times & have him/her speak to & in our times.
And while you are it . . . the next time you get a book published, use that poet to write a back cover blurb for you, or maybe even a review of your book.
My dude is: Semlohsa Moht. Poet Laureate of Gegôré. (Yeah, the country is fictional, too, which makes for more fun!!)
//
Jazzy Uncle Walt; or WW, he’s so smoooooth
This assignment was inspired by a CD review in the Feb. 17-23, 2005 edition of the Inlander (Spokane, WA).
The Fred Hersch Ensemble has set some of Walt Whitman’s poems to jazz music in the album: Leaves of Grass.
Your assignments then:
a: Pretend you are Walt Whitman living in the jazz age (for this assignment, anywhere from 1920-1965). What will Walt be doing? Will he be wearing dark sunglasses, blowing on a sax, & smoking unfiltered Camels?
b: Still in the jazz age, pretend you are Walt Whitman writing poems. Would his poems be the same or would they be more like:
Out of the cradle
endlessly bopping
Out of the Plugged Nickel’s sway
the jazzy shuffle
Out of the nine-hour jam
[. . . ]
Or would he write even more different?
c: Now pretend you are Walt Whitman & you meet Allen Ginsberg in a smoky jazz bar.
Ok, that’s it for this assignment.
By the way, the Inlander’s reviewer, Michael Bowen, gave the album five stars. But I have not heard it, so I can not offer an opinion on it.
//
This Poet’s Got Game . . . Do You?; or The World Cup of Poetry; or Fantasy Sports for Poets; or How Can I Get Season Tickets for This?
For Kat Smith, Thom Caraway, Jeff Dodd is God, Mike Dockins, & William Heyen.
This just occurred to me & keeps unfolding, so we will be discovering together.
I just now had the thought (& I’m sure this has been done before) that we need a baseball team of poets. And to create this team, you will have to find the poet who best corresponds to a specific baseball position. Who will be your pitcher (who’s got a striking fast poem, but with the ability to throw a three-foot breaking curve & hurl a knuckle-ball poem that you don’t know where it will end up), who will be the genius catcher to be able to handle all these pitches & tell the pitcher what to throw, who’s got the confidence, dexterity, & arm to play shortstop, etc. Yes, metaphorically pick a poet who possesses the talents of each position on the ball field. Oh, & we’re using American League rules – there will be a DH! (Which reminds me, you’ll need a pinch hitter, a middle reliever, & a closer.) I won’t tell you my team, but I will tell you the manager is Ezra Pound – who knows more, who can get poets to do more than they can, who could better yell at an umpire than Ol’ Ez?
Wait, there’s more.
With the World Cup going on, we now need a separate team for each of 32 different countries (or, as many countries as you can do). And still using World Cup rules, a poet can play for a country that he/she was born in, gained citizenship in, or where his/her parents were born. So, T. S. Eliot, for instance, could play for England or America. (I’ve got him playing for England, that is, if he can make the team. Maybe he will be a substitute. I’m thinking Chaucer would be manager for this team.)
More. When making this team, you must write a poem about each poet playing his/her position. Then after the team is assembled, you must imagine them actually playing a game, which is why it is good to have teams from other countries. And like baseball, there will be NO ties. Extra innings into eternity if you must.
You, of course, may use other sports. You may have basketball teams, soccer/futbol teams, football teams, hockey teams (but Bly must play goalie, ha), water polo, etc. But still, NO ties are allowed – sudden death, shootouts, if you must.
Oh, yea. Let’s not forget poet umpires, poet referees, & poet sideline judges. We need one poem where an umpire & manager (or player) stand face to face yelling at each other. (Yes, a Stevens-Frost allusion is allowed here, & maybe even required.)
Please be sure to keep track of each country’s win-loss record. Keep track of hitting trends & tendencies. Keep track of ERAs (or EMAs – Earned Metaphors Achieved). Hell, I may post results . . . if you’re game.
“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
//
Between 2002 and 2006, or so, I composed, borrowed with permission, or modified 100 poetry writing prompts. A publisher approached me to publish this collection of poetry prompts in book format. All the credits and permissions were gathered (and at times paid for) from writers, publishers, artists, and museums, but, alas, the book did not come to be. Anyway, I will reproduce the book here at the rate of one or two chapters each week, along with credits and permission statements.
//
Author’s Note
Poetry Assignments first appeared around 2002 as an email to a few friends to inspire us to write and to have something to share at our wine, cheese, & poetry nights. The first one was “The Reader’s Digest Experiment.” Eventually, the assignments went online at the Redactions: Poetry & Poetics complemental website, www.redactions.com. Each time a new assignment was posted it got a number, with the first one being #1 and the last one #100. As I posted the assignments, almost one per week, there was rarely a connection between the assignment posted, the one preceding, and the one that would follow. In this book collection, however, I have grouped the assignments by theme.
These assignments were also written in a similar manner to writing a journal. There has been little rewriting, other than correcting typos and the such. As a result, there will be inconsistent idiosyncrasies that change based on how I changed through the book’s composition. In addition, I have kept time references in their original state. I hope the reader can realize the book was new at the time of the writing and will continue to understand the nature of this journal.
I hope these assignments provide inspiration for writing and new ways of thinking about writing, especially fun ways. I hope the aesthetic responses in part two provide you with new ways to think about poetry and to help you see how other poets view poetry.
Okay. Enough said.
Go Forth!
//
With special thanks to contributors, Laura Hinschberger, and Thom Caraway.
//
Table of Contents
Introduction
Finding the First, Discovering the Middle, & Chasing the End
Finding the First, Discovering the Middle, & Chasing the End
a: First Words Are So Hard
[This assignment arose from a Michelle Bonczek idea, and is used with permission.]
Take a poem . . . any poem. Ok.
Now get rid of every word in the poem except the word that starts each line. With the word that starts the first line of the old poem, start a new first line of a new poem. With the first word in the second line of the old poem, start the new second line of the new poem, etc.
For example, take the poem by Frank O’Hara “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,” from Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964), & use only the first word of each line to start the lines of the new poem.
Quick! [insert rest of new line]
off [insert rest of new line]
Onset, [insert rest of new line]
playing [insert rest of new line]
of [insert rest of new line]
into [insert rest of new line]
junk [insert rest of new line]
I’m [insert rest of new line]
miserable [insert rest of new line]
of [insert rest of new line]
amethyst [insert rest of new line]
is [insert rest of new line]
on [insert rest of new line]
You’ll [insert rest of new line]
b: End Words Are So Difficult
With the same idea in mind . . . erase all the words in the poem except the last word of each line & then fill in the line with your new words.
For instance, take Charles Wright’s “Silence Journal” from The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991).
[insert rest of new line] vowel
[insert rest of new line] fall
[insert rest of new line] us
[insert rest of new line] moon
[insert rest of new line] snow
[insert rest of new line] holds
[insert rest of new line] text
[insert rest of new line] true
Note: this poem has no punctuation.
//
Bed Time
This poem will be about the first sleep of humans.
This idea came to me after seeing Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’ painting “Sleep” at The Met in NYC (www.metmuseum.org).
It might also be useful to recall the following lines in Virgil’s Aeneid: “It was the time of first rest for tired mortals” (ll 268-69).
Of course, you might want to sleep on this assignment first.
//
Do You Hear That?
[This assignment arose from a Michelle Bonczek idea, and is used with permission.]
You are to imagine you are the first person who discovers Niagara Falls.
You are to imagine what you were doing to lead you to the falls in the first place – the experience of approaching & seeing the falls – & maybe even to tell of the after effects of finding the falls, such as trying to tell your friends about your discovery.
Ok. Go Forth!
//
The Book of Firsts
This assignment was inspired by “a 35,000-year-old flute made from a woolly mammoth’s ivory tusk [that] has been unearthed in a German cave by archaeologists.”
Part I of this assignment: write a poem about that flute, the people who made it, & the people who played it.
Part II of this assignment: continue writing about firsts, such as the first sleep (See “Assignment: Bed Time”), the first one to discover Niagara Falls (See “Assignment: Do You Hear That”), the first one to discover fire, socks, wine, beer, pizza, or whatever. When you are done, you could have a wonderful manuscript you could call “The Book of Firsts.”
Here’s the article on the flute:
Ice Age ivory flute found in German cave
(BERLIN) – A 35,000-year-old flute made from a woolly mammoth’s ivory tusk has been unearthed in a German cave by archaeologists. The flute, one of the oldest musical instruments discovered, was pieced together from 31 fragments found in a cave in the Swabian mountains in southwestern Germany.
The mountains have yielded rich pickings in recent years, including ivory figurines, ornaments and other musical instruments. Archaeologists believe humans camped in the area in winter and spring. The University of Tübingen said it planned to put the instrument on display in a museum in Stuttgart.
Source: Reuters (10 December 2004)
//
Invention of the March Hare; or April is the Cruellest Month Marinating Hasenpfeffer; or Invention of May’s Dinner
Ralph Black came up with the idea of invention poems . . . or so he thought. Seems Cole Swenson beat him to it in Goest (Alice James Books, 2004). But alas, a poetry assignment can be had, plus options. So here we go.
When Swenson does her invention poems (with titles like “The Invention of the Weathervane” or “The Invention of the Mirror” or “The Invention of the Pencil” or “The Invention of the Night-Watch”), she seems to go at the invention in a somewhat direct manner, but imaginatively.
When Black does his invention poems (with titles like “The Invention of Cathedrals” or “The Invention of Angels”), he tries to create a scene for the need of something, or how something might have arisen. With the angels, he is writing a poem in present times, though obviously angels have already come to be. But he gives rise to their need.
As Black said in an email, “Seems to me that such poems are a big part of a current crop of ‘Myth poems’ – which has as much to do with tone as anything else (witness Merwin’s poems in The Carrier of Ladders or The Lice).”
So we will write invention poems using either, or both, strategies. The first assignment, though, will be to write about the invention of the poem – my knee jerk reaction is that you would have to incorporate both strategies into that poem. Yeah, & let’s give it a mythy tone. Oh, the possibilities are endless, & thus a book of inventions is possible.
Go Forth. Be Thomas Edison with the poem.
//
A Timely List of Firsts
Ok. So you just wrote a poem about the invention of the poem. Excellent. Now you are to pretend you are that first person writing the first poem & write the first poem that has ever been written.
Now you will pretend you are the person writing the first poem in the year 0 & write the first poem of the year 0. (Yea, I know there is no 0 year. It goes 1 BCE then 1 AD. But this will make it more fun.)
When that is done, you will do the same for the year 1000.
When done with that, you will do the same for the year 10,000.
And when you are done with that, you will imagine everything is done. Yes, you will write the first poem that is written after the universe freezes, contracts, explodes, or gets recalled for maintenance by some higher entity.
//
a: Bottoms Up
[This assignment & its sub-assignments were inspired by Melissa Rhoades’ idea, and is used with permission., and is used with permission.]
Write a poem from the last line to the first line.
b: The Greek Twist
The Greeks used to write their plays by writing the ending first & then writing from the beginning & wrote to get to the already made end (that is, as far as I have understood how they write).
Let’s try that with a poem. Write the last line first, & then start on the first line & write to the end.
c: Amateurs Borrow. The Great Ones Steal
Steal the last line from someone’s poem & then write your own poem to the stolen end.
I suspect it’s best not to use the last line from too famous a poem. I suspect you don’t want your last line to be:
And miles to go before I sleep.
But maybe:
Between a sleep and a sleep.
(from a Swinburne chorus in “Atalanta in Calydon.”)
Ok. Good Luck!
//
. . . But who will be my audience?
Imagine the world is going to end soon. Perhaps an asteroid is about to crash into the earth. Perhaps a big plague is killing everyone. Perhaps global warming has burnt the planet dry. Or perhaps it’s not the end of the world. Perhaps everyone has stopped reading & writing.
Now imagine you are writing the last ever poem. The last poem on Earth is yours to be had. What could possibly be said at that point? Of importance? Who would care? Why would you care to write the last poem? Who would publish it? Nonetheless, you are motivated to do so.
So go write the last poem on Earth. You can pretend you are the last person or creature on Earth if you wish, but it isn’t necessary.
For example, consider “Notes Toward the Last Poem on Earth” by Mike Dockins.
NOTES TOWARD THE LAST POEM ON EARTH
The air-raid sirens are silent.
No thin layer of ash covers the town.
The corners are not speckled with metal-band bullies.
The townsfolk only wish they’d glimpse
a mugging, pass a squashed frog,
catch a raccoon tumbling into a garbage can.
Gaggles of frat boys read Nietzsche,
stare reverently into abysses.
Even the coffins lack menace.
There’s nothing sinister about the idling schoolbuses,
nothing risky in the melodies seeping from Jeeps.
The last Italian sonnet, in shreds, has fallen into a trash can.
Every sock is saved from the dryer,
& car keys hang on their hooks in plain sight.
All the ferries arrive on time.
Cellular phones idle on hum,
& the whining of mosquitoes barely ripples the swamp.
The barbershop teeters between open & closed.
No one’s heart has burst on the 14th hole.
The final haiku is adrift on the Sea of Japan.
Mars is not even in its retrograde.
That Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a storm
twice the size of Earth impresses no one –
not mail carriers, cosmonauts, pool sharks,
bartenders, hippies, cheerleaders,
hockey stars, Arctic explorers, blackjack dealers . . .
not even astronomers, & certainly not the girl next door,
who can’t even complain about acne
or a strained relationship with her mother.
Every crossword box has been penciled.
No lovestruck bachelors repent
atop the dilapidated water tower.
The villanelle has failed.
The libraries, though deserted,
have been flame-proof for centuries.
Postcards fall through mail slots into neat piles.
Beehives are silent,
& crickets strum a predictable hum.
Nobody fumbles the quadratic equation,
& the Laws of Thermodynamics are intact.
The pantoums have crumbled to crumbs.
Outcrops are barren of dinosaur skeletons –
not a glimmer of quartz to inspire a geologist.
The eons have blended
into a single monotony of style.
Glacial ice recedes at a sensible rate.
No one has stamina for a sestina.
The sunset has never been so ordinary.
Same with birch trees, river ice, & the Moon
which at dusk might as well be a high cirrus wisp.
Jet contrails spell out nothing in particular,
rip across shapeless clouds – no tricycles or crocodiles.
On the evening news, no terrorizing snow drifts,
mushroom clouds, local scurvy scares,
or celebrities dead of brain cancer.
Compost heaps are heaped with ghazals.
No monsoons, patches of quicksand, vagrant icebergs, tsunamis . . . .
Storm chasers stare blankly at blank radar.
Gas stations are free of sniper fire.
Beefed-up cars glide through town, noiseless & patient.
Rubberneckers, bored, have collapsed into hibernation.
The abecedarians are a jumble of foreign alphabets.
Neon signs are dusted with a prescribed number of moths,
& the wafting of fireflies lacks a muse.
Tavern jukeboxes no longer eat quarters,
& ponytails swing perfect orbits.
The ideal lime swims in the ideal gin & tonic.
Even the hangovers are tolerable.
No more quatrains about autumn or digger wasps.
Kindergarten classrooms are hiccup-free.
Dodge balls scattered across sandlots
are properly inflated, & the open baseball mitts
catch the usual stream of neutrinos
from an uncomplicated universe.
Physicists crawl inside their telescopes,
undisturbed by the swallowing nothingness.
The sky tonight will be cometless,
not one meteor ooohed upon.
The handful of visible stars will twinkle
the same old twinkle, constellationless.
The galaxy’s spiral arms have an eerie regularity.
And even the subatomic world
makes a kind of sense: quarks reveal themselves
in cohesive narratives, all chaos washed away
in a quarky tide.
(“Notes Toward the Last Poem on Earth” first appeared in Quarterly West #58 (Summer 2004). It is used with the permission of Mike Dockins.)
//
The After Life of Objects
[This assignment arose from a Michelle Bonczek idea, and is used with permission.]
You are to write a poem with the title: “The Afterlife of _______.”
You get to fill in the blank. For instance, Michelle’s poem is “The Afterlife of Pennies,” but you can choose whatever, such as pizza boxes, socks, school notebooks, etc.
You might not like AI's poetry, but weren't we all us poets writing similarly when we started? AI poetry will only… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…1 week ago
RT @Knoxville_PD: PSA: If you receive a call from someone claiming to be a Knoxville Police Department officer stating that you have a warr… 2 weeks ago
As we know, we only have one complete & full poem/song of Sappho. The rest are all in fragments. Sometimes translators leave those blanks in their translation. This assignment, which I imagine has been done before, attempts to fill in those blanks – not all blanks to all her poems, but for just the blanks of one poem. For instance, consider fragment 24C:
The Line Break 