So recently I decided to drop my idea of becoming a teacher, for now, and focus on writing. But I wanted to talk bout how when I took my first teaching class we had to write a lesson plan and NO ONE wanted to teach poetry. I feel like oftentimes when I hear teachers or future educators talking about teaching poetry it’s with a little bit of fear and, or agitation. So I’ve thought a lot about how to teach someone to write poetry who has never written it before. I did end up writing a lesson plan introducing poetry and it began with a slam poetry video. Then I had printouts of a Tupac song and an Emily Dickinson song that both used rose imagery to point out how differently the language was and how many ways you can use any one image. My favorite part though was I was going to have the kids pick from a list of emotions, have them write an anecdote that made them feel that way in a journal, then circle all the “important words” and then copy those down onto another piece of paper. I would give them a moment to rearrange if they liked and add words they felt were necessary. So I’ve really liked this approach since. I feel like this would be a good way to introduce writing poetry to anyone who has never written poetry before. Of course this wouldn’t generate the best poetry, however it would be a good way to think about how language isolated can work without attaching it to an essay form.

Were there specific lesson that were really helpful when any of you started writing poetry? I think I mainly learned from reading poetry and learning to close-read.

Hey everybody, I thought I’d share a writing prompt for those of us that are looking for creative ways to fill up our portfolios!  I, personally, have a lot of made-up words unique to me that float around in my vocabulary and confuse friends and family members.  I thought it would be cool to write a poem that attempts to define those made-up words.  Here’s mine:

A “bubbin” is a tiny critter, soft

who scampers from shoulder to shoulder.

She is shared, co-parents for those silly feets

gnarled, delicate pink toes and scaly tail

but when she boggles, bruxes, buries herself in my shirts

buries herself in my shirts

Her name is a shortened version of the warmth

I keep secure in my chest,

“bubbin.”

I hope everyone has fun with this silly prompt, I know I did!

So, I recently had my senior reading and chose to do poetry. It was pretty cool, if I do say so myself. It got me thinking about the performative aspects of poetry. When reading poetry out loud, it can completely change the poem, something that doesn’t happen in stories or essays. Poetry being read aloud is a very different experience from being read from the page. The poet controls exactly how the reader hears the poem, which brings up the issue of authorial intent. Usually, I hold the belief that authorial intent doesn’t mean anything. If the poet/writer cannot convey what they wish, then they are failing in a sense. It’s fine for readers to get different readings than intended from poems (something I myself often do with other people’s poetry), and since the poet usually isn’t there when a reader reads the poem, they can’t explain the intent. However, in readings/performance, poets can explain what they intended, which can end up stepping on the poem’s freeness and the listener’s interpretation. But when the poet is performing their poem, they often give background information on the poem, what they mean for it to mean, etc. Performing poetry also plays with the form. Not all read-aloud poetry is slam poetry, but people may think so. And by being read aloud, sometimes the messages and emotions may be magnified.

Following is the third and final installment of my essay on film poetry.

Read the first part here: https://cpoem.sunygeneseoenglish.org/2016/04/05/film-poetry-deforming-the-surface/

And the second part here:https://cpoem.sunygeneseoenglish.org/2016/04/17/film-poetry-deforming-the-surface-pt-2/

At first this definition film poetry might seem too self-serving or too far reaching because of a narrow focus on surfaces, what about film poets that want to plumb the depths? I’ll try to create a wider definition to satisfy everyone, but first I want to address my problems with the concept of “depth” in poetry and film. Physically it’s clear enough that poems and films are media intimate with thin surfaces, namely paper and film. It’s equally problematic, though, to talk about the meaning of the final product in terms of metaphorical depth. Typically the platitude “that’s deep” stops any real engagement with the work. Just as often what is analyzed as depth, like a thorough examination of a very specific thing, is really just an exploration of a manifold surface. The idea that a poet is uncovering something that can’t be seen, rather than adding light to something that hasn’t been sufficiently illuminated, is a dangerous one that very often leads to poetry completely disconnected from the audience. I would contend that the best work a poet can hope to do is creatively interfere and obscure what is already there, i.e. the “something burning in the projector” or a certain literary tradition. While new territories are very occasionally opened up almost all poetic work is inscribing the surface one’s own little part of that territory, as John Gallaher put it to me in an interview earlier this semester. Poetry that tries to conceive of itself otherwise, as if it has a grand mission of plumbing the unexplored depths, is overheated and disconnected. Practicing film poetry, turning over and over thought of words as a surface, words as film, creatively destroys the illusion of depth.

A slight modulation of Stein’s definition might make it a more widely agreeable one. If we talk about the tension between plot and rhythm, rather than subordination, the definition works just as well for Brakhage (think surface tension of water) as it does for poets working more concretely or more closely with narrative. This tension is present in every film poem because perfect translation doesn’t exist: words and images, even if they are very explicitly trying to represent the same thing, will always be at odds with one another, and it would be boring otherwise. All of the best film poems I’ve seen take advantage of this tension, making it into something creative by throwing it into greater relief. Drew Milne speaks to this when he writes of Olson’s work as “preferring disjunctions between media over any kind of harmony.” This may seem like too simple of a point to be worth mentioning, but acknowledging this basic, immutable distance is a humbling and important practice to undertake before developing the kinship.

With my first few film poems, which I screened at the Rochester Fringe Festival in October alongside the work of fellow Geneseo film poets Evan Goldstein and Margot Hughes, I was concerned with mitigating this tension for the sake of creating a “unified whole.” I wanted to create a chimera, a new entity very much itself, but with distinct components. The concept was somewhat misguided. After the two iterations of the project it was clear the components, or fragments, can never quite occupy the same body, and even repulse each other sometimes. The first was montage visuals with the poem spoken over it, which came off too much like an overlay for me. My last ditch attempt at the chimera was to delete the audio from the video and insert the text of the poem into the video, about one line for each image, in an attempt to give the images some sort of agency or advantage over the text, which I felt at the moment was overpowering the images because I had written the poems before I had even thought about the video project. However, the text was plain yellow for the sake of readability and never left the bottom third of the screen; I never let the images guide the placement of the text. Instead of a subordination the text actually effaced the images.

The problem was working against the tension instead of working with it, in addition to getting nervous about “which came first? The film or the poem?” It would be off the mark to say that a film poet should always create the film and poem simultaneously, or even that one medium will necessarily have more sway in the final product because it was conceived first. The question is ultimately useless because the pursuit of harmony in film poetry does very little for it when almost every aspect of the process is defined by abrasion, burning, obscuring, shooting and fragmentation. Film poetry is the abrasion and manipulation of surfaces, the examination of the new spaces created as film surface and text surface deform each other.

In Gerry LaFemina’s article in the Writer’s Chronicle he writes about how writers of lyric poetry can use fragmentation to portray a feeling, often of grief. Lyric poetry he says is “noted for its brevity, its intensity ,its focus solely on a moment” and of course it is narrative. Toward the end of his article he speaks about poems that are focused on the experience and or feeling over the narrative details. He uses examples such as a Charles Wright poem, adding that Wright often “will establish narrative context in the title alone, and then let landscape and meditation do the work.” He then backs himself up with more poets who also use landscape and other actions and mediations to do the work of the poem.

Since we’ve been so focused on context this semester I was wondering how you all felt about this? I personally feel that there are poems that are exploring a feeling and that by demanding certain setting and or narrative details the reader may be focusing on not the wrong things, but could be refusing to see how the poem is doing a lot of the work already. LaFemina uses this poem by Christine Garren, “February Snow,” as an example because it uses winter snow falling, the ringing of a cell phone, and birds sleeping to drive its mood and narrative.

The roofs were snow covered, the powders blown across

the tree-limbs’ cross hatch.

In the parking lot below a person’s cell phone rings, clearly

like the bells of a church.

Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes

then ordinary again—

white dust on the tree-limbs and power lines—and on the attics.

The birds sleep.

In every room I walk the snow falls beyond the black glass—

isn’t that how it was in the beginning, throughout the rooms,

that feeling

of air in the midst of burial.

I feel that sometimes we forget that the pure emotion behind words can help drive a story and that being engaged in a poem can replace some, not all, context details. Obviously there are extremely nuanced things going on in this poem, mimicking the ideas of grief and the feeling of it. I feel that LaFemina ends his article on an excellent note with this quote by Jack Hitt;  “to every [poem] we bring unconscious scripts; as any given sentence [or line] unspools, we readjust the schema to make better sense of what we are hearing [or reading].” Thoughts?

First, apologies for the cheesy title, but it was far too tempting. Second, this semester we haven’t spoken much on ekphrastic poetry, which happens to be one of my favorites. I like the idea of linking the written and visual arts, much as I like the idea of linking forms and manifestations of writing. So here, if you’re interested, is a prompt:
I’ve provided a few of artists that I enjoy and find provoking and hopefully they will lead you down a road in your poetry that you wouldn’t otherwise have ventured! 

Paintings (in order):

Beethoven Frieze -Gustav Klimt

Houses of Parliament Ablaze -J.M.W. Turner

Dancer -Joan Miró

Japanese Scroll Paintings- Unknown

It might be a little late in the semester to be wondering about where to generate poetry from, but in a quick move to generate a few more points in the positive, I’ve been wondering about the transformation of trauma into poetry.

It is my guess that this stems from my recent experience at a Trump Rally.  While I was allotted more than double the magazine’s word limit, I still don’t feel all right.  The reader needn’t worry, though, this will not be a post about Trump.

Gregory Orr, a poet and critic who is largely influential to my understanding of poetry wrote Poetry as Survival this has interested me ever since, but has taken a backseat in composition in the frantic heat of trying to produce what I think a workshop will dig.

Maybe this is all wrong.

Orr accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident when they were boys, and uses poetry as a stay against that misery.  If that’s not ripe grounds for poetry, I don’t know what is.  The problem is, where then do I get my material when the most vaguely traumatic thing I’ve beheld is a blonde lunatic moan about Mexico?

I am not unattuned to strife in this world, but I frankly hesitate to write “worldly” poetry or something that envisions another people’s trauma.  It’s not my story to write, and if I were to write it there’s a higher chance that I’d like to gamble on that I’d be writing it from the entity causing the trauma, since historically, my demographic has seen the least and dealt the most.

It’s going to bug me, and I’m willing to wager that there will be at least one poem in my portfolio that deals with traumatic affairs, but its level of success remains to be seen.

I returned from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in LA a few weeks ago, but I haven’t had much time to set down my thoughts about it until now. I’m planning on posting my thoughts in a few parts: the first (this one) will be on a panel on poetry, the second will be on two panels on writing and place, and the third will be some brief thoughts on AWP as a whole.

AWP was held in the Los Angeles Convention Center, in Downtown LA. The Convention Center is huge, as Oliver mentioned, about the size and feel of an airport, except with more writers running between the small conference rooms, and a massive book fair in a warehouse-type room in the center of the building. In total we attended seven hour-and-fifteen-minute-long panels. During the panels, writers would sit at a table in the front of the room, present their talks on the topic at hand, and then take questions at the end. I took notes as best I could, so I could bring back this information and share it, and these blog posts are adapted from those notes.

I first attended a panel called: “Poets on Craft: The Furious Burning Duende.” The discussion surrounded the malign spirit that Spanish poet Fredrico García Lorca named the duende in his 1933 lecture “Theory and Play of the Duende.” Essentially, to Lorca, the duende is the spirit of poetry itself, a spirit that rests deep in the heart of the poet. In the lecture, he says, “…the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’”

According to panelist Mahogany Brown (a poet, musician and journalist, and a contributor to the BreakBeat Poets anthology), the duende is a spirit summoned from within by fighting death or fighting battles that can never be finished, like racism and oppression. Jaqueline Jones LaMon (a prolific poet and president of the Cave Canem foundation for black poetry), citing Lorca’s lecture, said that the duende “serenades death’s house.” She continued, citing a Luther Vandross interview where he was asked why he orchestrated his live performances in great detail, and he responded that it was preparing (paraphrasing) “for the initial moment when the arena goes black and silent…we as the audience hold our breath and gasp because our breath, our very connection to life–has been taken away.” She concluded that the duende arises from the silences between death and life, and it’s what makes us write. She then read the poem “Far Memory” from Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light, and her own poem “The Present Song of Seagulls on the San Francisco Bay” to illustrate this principle of poetry arising from the spaces and silences between life and death.

Patrick Rosal (a poet, author of My American Kundiman and many other collections) was the next panelist to speak. He opened with Robert Hayden’s poem “Frederick Douglass”, as evidence for the fact that the duende as inspiration arises from a place between life and death. He also reminded us that Lorca’s project was nationalist, and that his use of the duende was nationalistic, appropriated from gypsies. Nevertheless, he derived lessons from the idea of the duende, and showed us by reading a non-fiction piece he wrote about his uncle, who was poor and worked in a plastics factory in the Philippines, and sang beautiful sorrowful songs. The duende, to Rosal, is the location of deep sorrow within the body, a sorrow he felt in mourning death in his family as well–a sorrow he did not need nationalism to feel. The last speaker, Sandra Beasley, (a poet and a professor at the University of Tampa MFA program), read Sandra Cisneros’s “Night Madness Poem”, which she said claimed duende as a force. Beasley turned our attention to the fact that the duende can also manifest in a poet’s language, with spontaneous verb tenses or multiple expanding metaphors. She then turned our attention to spaces that can hold death, and used the example of a household with family in the military as a place that exists in the “unresolved narrative of death.”

I wanted to spend time outlining this conversation because I think the idea of the duende is something to be aware of while writing. I’ve noticed that this class writes a lot about death, so maybe we’re all already aware of this force, but I think keeping the duende in mind, either as a material product of the writer fighting for life, or as a spirit that lurks within the writer, can help inform all the creative writing you do. Recently while writing and revising I’ve been asking myself if or how my poetry confronts death or inhabits the liminal spaces between life and death, and I think it has been helping me clarify my poetry’s stakes. The idea of the duende has also prompted me to ask myself what my stakes are, where my writing comes from in the first place, and what it might be helping me to fight for. What do you think about the duende? Can you see it in your own writing?

Disclaimer: this is less a discussion about poetry and more about language. Due to a specialized and, therefore, biased past, I fail to see the displeasure and struggle that surround the works of William Shakespeare amongst students. Throughout my academic career, most students I have spoken to dread reading his plays and/or analyzing his sonnets. They argue that the language doesn’t make sense to them, that the syntax is complicated, even that the stories are irrelevant. Perhaps it is because of extensive study and involvement in productions of Shakespeare that I find the language easily comprehensible and beautiful. For example, in Act I, scene ii of The Winter’s Tale, the character Hermione says:

“You put me off with limber vows; but I,
Though you would seek to unsphere the stars with oaths,
Should yet say, Sir, no going. Verily,
You shall not go; a lady’s verily’s
As potent as a lord’s. Will you go yet?
Force me to keep you a prisoner,
Not like a guest; so you shall pay your fees
When you depart, and save your thanks. How say you?
My prisoner or my guest? by your dread verily,
One of them you shall be.”

Not only is there the obvious “unsphere the stars” that is beautiful to both the eye and the ear, but there is a repetition of sounds that makes this line a fun experience for reader and actor. Following this, the “e” in “yet” and “verily,” then in “guest” and “fees” lets that sound linger on the tongue. This is not simply a mastery of the English language, but also one in comedy. I would argue that the actor portraying Hermione enjoys this wordplay using “verily.”
I suppose the question I am posing here is whether or not you find Shakespeare an arduous experience, and whether or not you enjoy his poetics (this including both his sonnets and plays)? What is it that puts students off from reading or watching Shakespeare?

Cecily Parks’ collection stirred in me great interest in the way that poetry allows us to explore the relationship between humans and the earth. I read this poem in The Sun, a magazine of photographs, poems, and prose. “Intrigue in the Trees” shares some similarities with Cecily Parks work, as it focuses on the tension between humans and non-human nature, but Brehm seems to “side with” the earth rather than humans. He begins the poem by implying that if the earth were to extinguish humans, this act would be with good reason.  This is an interesting technique: the speaker in the poem retains a strong voice though the content suggests that his voice does not matter. The speaker assigns positive character to the trees and then admits that he cannot know what the trees are thinking, or if they’re thinking at all.

The same issue of the magazine featured an interview with Robin Wall Kimmer, a Native American botanist. Kimmer is confidant that plants have intelligence, and that if humans dismiss the notions of emotional and intellectual vitality that we see in ourselves, we can observe and learn from that intelligence. She also suggests that humans refuse to see plant intelligence because that refusal gives us ethical license to control or harm them. It seems that Brehm, a poet, is attempting to do what Kimmer, a scientist, encourages: to step outside of ideas about value or intelligence that apply only to his human form, and consider the trees as equal or superior to him.

Just last night I was walking
to my favorite cafe,
the Laughing Goat,
when I saw a flock of crows
circling raincloudy sky,
arguing, speaking strangely,
suddenly alight on
a maple tree, dozens of them
closing down their wings
like arrogant, ill-tempered
magistrates. Some kind
of consultation
was happening there,
some plan unfolding
(animals think we’re crazy
for thinking they can’t think),
and everybody was looking up,
looking up and watching.