The Contemporary Poem

Whether we know exactly what our poetic statements are right now, or we haven’t quite developed them yet, we all have things we don’t believe in as poets: things we hate, things we’ve sworn off, things we’ve told ourselves will never surface in our poetry. When you write your next poem, contradict yourself/ your ideas about what poetry is/should be, or more specifically, what your poetry is/ should be. Purposely write in something that you don’t like (whether it be a line, punctuation, formatting, an image, or even a whole poem). The catch: upon revision, don’t delete what you hate. Make it work within the poem. Surprise yourself. If the poem wants to get rid of whatever it is, transform the poem so it can stay.

Share your poem when you’re ready. Read it over and over again, even if you hate it. Read it because you hate it. Read it and revise it until you don’t hate it. Through this reading and revision, you hopefully will have spent a lot of time considering why you don’t believe in what you believe in, as well as thinking about how we can make things we hate work. Maybe we can even come to understand why several of the poets in Lyric Postmodernisms seemed to contradict themselves. Is there an underlying complexity that we can only discover through forcing ourselves to write a contradiction? Share what you find.

Many times, inspiration can be found simply by looking at other people. Sit down somewhere you can people watch. Pay close attention to other people’s outfits, particularly their shoes. What do their shoes say about them? Write a poem based on their shoes: it can be about the shoes themselves, how they are walked in, where they have walked, or many other things. Try to expand on the small details of the shoes without wearing their soles too thin (har har).

Special bonus round: write using only long lines, or at least lines long enough to mirror how far the shoes have walked.

As the posts before have said, share this poem! Staple it to the bottom of your shoes! Staple it to someone else’s shoes (with their consent, of course)! Walk 500 miles and 500 more and staple it to a telephone post – sharing it doesn’t mean you’re not the sole proprietor of your own poem anymore.

If you can’t seem to come up with something shoe related, don’t feel defeet. Try to write about another article of clothing! I am so sorry about all the puns.

Why do people get tattoos? Do they get words permanently etched into their bodies to represent their life’s experiences, or experiences they would like to have? Maybe you have one/more than one and could incorporate it/them into this prompt.

Prompt: What words would make up which body parts/organs/bones if you were made of ink? You might consider what words you would want to display proudly, and which ones you would want to cover up. Would there be any words that would demand attention over others?

So maybe you want to jot down a personal response to this writing exercise in your journal or wherever you keep your other words. Maybe you’ll then be able to go off of that response and then something so amazing will come of this prompt that it will take on a whole life its own and will be reborn an island unto itself. If you achieve that level of awesomeness, praise be and keep doing you. If you achieve another, lesser level of awesomeness that us mere mortals might possibly be able to handle, share it in a comment! 🙂

Search for the definition of the word “contradiction” on Google and it is defined as “a combination of statements, ideas, or features of a situation that are opposed to one another.” I believe that contradictions are important to poetry because contradictions can sometimes reveal something greater than the contradiction.

Here’s a prompt: Write a poem that contradicts itself. Maybe the title contradicts the poem or vice versa. Maybe each line contradicts a previous line. Maybe an idea in the poem contradicts another. Try to reveal something important with the contradictions.

Share it here, if you want. Share it with your pet giraffe. Share it with your David Lynch Film Club. Share it with fellow Pluto Supporters–it’s a planet, how dare you tell me it’s not! Or don’t share it at all–that’s cool too.

What makes a poet great?

It’s 10:30am on a Tuesday and class is about to begin. Two poets are just taking their seats while three others near the door chat about the weather. On each desk is a copy of the same three poems, scribbled on in varying hues of ink and shapes of handwriting. Workshop is open to the poets.

So we’ve all produced some amazing poetry, despite the fact that we spend what sometimes feels like forever critiquing every detail of each poem. There are some basic guidelines to poetry that we have learned to stick to in order that we might keep from writing anything less than stellar–avoid cliches, keep the adverb count down, etc.–but what’s the secret formula? It seems easy enough to point to a poem and label it, “needs work” (cough–bad–cough), but how do we distinguish the good from the great? A friend of mine recently read aloud a poem to me, and he writes poetry himself, so I had assumed this poem was his own work. When he finished, I was all ready to critique the poem and suggest some specific edits. Turns out, the poem was written by some famous Such and Such, and who was I to judge this famous Such and Such poet when I am merely a lowly college student? Certainly we could send our work to every publication out there and get a few uplifting replies, but who’s to say today’s poems we’re workshopping can’t be the next “The Road Not Taken”?

The poetry exercise this week was about putting people in conversation with one another in a poem, and I started thinking about this concept in a more literal sense. When I was involved in slam, group pieces were often the most appreciated and told the most complex stories. I have always wondered how this would transfer to the page. Do poets ever write something together and also present it together? I feel like page poetry is such an individualized craft, although one could argue that slam is as well.

I wrote one spoken word piece (kind of between slam and page poetry) with friends. We came with our own poems on the same topic and literally cut and pasted our words together. Has anyone ever tried this with page poetry? Is having a second poet involved just too much to deal with and still be able to make something both parties find authentic?

This is my favorite (youth) group slam piece:

Recently, I was inspired by a song to write a poem. This is the first and only time I’ve ever felt compelled to write a poem based on a song, not the first time I’ve been inspired by music, but the first time I’ve been inspired to occupy the space of that song and create a poem that occupies that same space. I went to speak with Professor Lytton about how to “cite” or give credit to the song in my poem without just “stealing” (the song and the poem share the same title). He told me about a poet who often based poems on other works of art. Inspired by this, I wanted to see if I could do more. So I tried to write a poem occupying the same space as one of my favorite paintings. Normally, when I sit down to write a poem, I’ll have one image or topic in mind, and from there begin hours of painstakingly uninspired lines appearing slowly on the page. But when I sat down to write these two poems, based on other works of art, the whole process just felt quicker, smoother. I wonder if this is because, rather than creating a work of art from nothing, I am actually just converting art from one form to another. This is to say, translating the atmosphere of the song to the atmosphere of a poem, or transcribing the space of the painting to written words on the page. Of course it’s a little more complicated than this because the space this song or this painting creates for me will be inherently different than the space it creates for someone else (at least in some small way). But the point, I think, might be that it creates the space for me—these works of art provide an atmosphere that only needs to be worked into words. One could say that that is the nature of any poem, that the world around us is full of little “works of art” that provide atmospheres/ spaces for us to write in (a similar sentiment to Donald Revell’s statement that imagination hinders poem writing). What do you think? Maybe I’m just imagining an ease of writing when occupying the space of another medium of artwork, or maybe there is a certain easiness to it. Let me know if you’ve had a similar experience!

In my reading of Aaron Shurin’s poetry for this week, I found myself very caught up in the fact that most of his poems seem to be prose poems. While I don’t want to detract from Sara’s presentation, I am very interested in some of the issues that his poetry brings up–particularly the idea of what prose poetry is.  We’ve talked a little about it in class, but I don’t recall us ever coming to a succinct definition as to what prose poetry is.  Building on that, where is the line between prose poetry and lyric essays? What is the difference between the two?  In my mind, a prose poem is typically rather short, while a lyric essay is longer.  However, a lyric essay seems to embody a bit more of a sense of the narrative than a prose poem does, as prose poems are a space to explore images & more abstract ideas. So what happens if (as in the Shurin) a poem is both long and abstract?  Is there a defining line between prose poetry and lyric essays? I’m not sure there is, but you all might have different/more concrete definitions. How do you all differentiate?

The blank page is the most intimidating part of writing, and most of the time I don’t know where I’m going with a poem before I start it. It’s always been difficult for me to start writing a poem. Usually, I’ll use phrases or lines I’ve magpied-together and go from there, but this proves to be difficult when writing on one subject or even person. I tend to string together these pieces and produce something much different than what I set out to do. While this still works as part of my writing process, I was wondering if anyone had any other suggestions or examples of how they begin their poems. It could be the style of how you begin your poems, such as looking at a picture or image to inspire your words, or listening to certain songs, etc.

While the exercises certainly work for me in terms of writing a poem of that style, I can never get started on my own. I sometimes look up different exercised online, but doing so makes me feel as if I’m cheating.

Post-Mortem

To me, you have bequeathed
a half-dissolved
apple, a spider,
and three crescents
of your fingernails.

A large Y of black stitches
has split your trunk into thirds—
a child’s rendition
of a bird migrating
towards your feet.

The arc of the scar
on your right calf
reminds me of a hooked trout
I once saw leaping
from the surge of a stream,

a curve of light shaped
by the moment between life
and the infinite space
just above it.

Smoke-browned fish on a white plate,
dawn-grey body on a silver table—
we do not like to linger
on how the dead may still nourish us.

Later, I will tell your family
what no one ever knew,
but you may have suspected:

you had two exquisite,
plum-colored kidneys,
lustrous and faultless
as the surface of a yolk.

Nicky Beer

 

Before I took Intro to Creative Writing my first semester here at Geneseo, I had no opinion about poetry, except that it “wasn’t for me.” All of the poems I had been introduced to until that point were so flowery, so dolled up with poet-y language that, at the time, seemed out of date and out of touch with humanity in the now. “I guess I like Robert Frost,” I’d say when asked about poets and poetry (which is still true, I really do love Frost), mostly because I didn’t know what to say, and I’d read some Frost before. I’d never read any contemporary poetry—I’d never explored a poem beyond its rhythm and rhyme, its metaphors and similes. However, when introduced to Beer’s “Post-Mortem,” along with a lot of new perspective about what poetry could be, I realized maybe poetry was “for me,” after all. Maybe poetry is for all of us. The simplicity in Beer’s language, the domesticity and everyday-ness of the images—“a child’s rendition of a bird in flight,” “a hooked trout I once saw leaping from the surge of a stream,” “the surface of a yolk,”—grounded me, and helped me understand that poetry, I think, is something that is accessible to everyone. You don’t need to be a writer, a reader, someone who can profess about the significance of Keats’ Eremite (not a jab at Frost or Keats—I love that poem and that allusion) to access and even, dare I say, understand poetry. This isn’t to say this single poem made me love poetry. I don’t wholly love poetry. Sometimes I love poetry so much that I just stare at the page and cry. Sometimes I hate it so much that it actually makes me physically ill—nausea, dizziness, the works. But for so many reasons, this poem remains one of my absolute favorites. Has anyone else experienced a poem or a moment like this? I consider myself sort of a “late bloomer” when it comes to poetry, did anyone else have a similar delayed experience? Also, what do you think of “Post-Mortem”?