Pedagogy Forum, Week 3

In an interview with poet/teachers Anna Leahy and Larissa Szporluk, “Good Counsel: A Conversation About Poetry Writing, the Imagination, and Teaching,” the (almost tired question at this point) poets discuss—Can creative writing be taught? Leahy expressed issue with the fact that even as creative writing as a course has grown significantly since the 70s people still seem to be asking that question—the old argument that genius and creativity arise out of nowhere, a vacuum, a muse of inspiration. Simply not true Leahy and Szporluck’s interview argues and certainly our class syllabus would back that statement up as well. I think the fact that is question of teaching creative writing—can it be done?—is still being asked then it is still a myth to a lot of young writers that they can only write when that lightning bolt of ideas hits. The two teachers here hold strong to the benefits of mentorship in a workshop environment and creative writing community—teachers, other poets, simple steady reading of collections, etc. Szporluck asks: “If mentorship can act as a kind of stand-in for talent, what kinds of mentorship activities are especially effective in fostering truly innovative and skillful writers?” This is a very important question for future teachers of poetry and their mentorship with their students. She answers herself in stating: imitation and encouraging imitation—“I find imitation exercises to be fantastic shortcuts to learning. I’ll ask students to imitate a Hopkins poem and suddenly they’re using alliteration and consonance and internal rhyme and performing technical feats and learning much more than they would by just listening to me discuss Hopkins.” This is exciting and encouraging for me as I hope to take on students of my own soon. I plan to teach this way, by way of imitation, as one tool to get students writing, because I have experienced it as a student myself and find it extremely helpful. Our improvs that are part of our weekly routine as a class has become the way in which I start to write. I have produced numerous poems that I am proud through this technique. One comment that Szporluck makes toward the end of the interview that really resonates with me is this: “Imitation teaches you how to be original while using conventional techniques. Invention teaches you how to combine, how to associate, so that when you encounter deep imagination, you trust what happens there. Deep imagination is where you surrender to creative energy; you follow along, and use your skills instinctively, not consciously.”

Sign Inventory, Week 3

Facing It
-Yusef Komunyakaa

*The speaker states being made of various materials: “I’m stone,” “I’m flesh,” “I’m a window.”

*The poem repeatedly notes black and white distinctions: My black face fades, black granite, the booby trap’s white flesh, a white vet’s image floats, his pale eyes, in the black mirror.

*The speaker instills in the stone wall the ability to own, he personifies the wall with the ability to possess him: “I turn this way--the wall lets me go.

*The speaker continually mentions being part of the wall or inside it: My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite, the stone lets me go, the names stay on the wall, I half-expect to find my own [name] in letters, he’s lost his left arm inside the wall, etc.

*The poem is scattered with specifics: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 58,002 names, Andrew Johnson; and more general descriptions: a plane in the sky, a woman’s blouse, the sky.

*The poems features numerous negations: “No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair,” “He’s lost his right arm,” “a woman’s trying to erase names,” “dammit,” “No tears,” “I said I wouldn’t”.

*The speaker makes sure to assign race to himself and the vet with the lost arm, even the bird is red, but the woman and Andrew Johnson remain raceless.

*Vision is opaque: my clouded reflection, white flash, a white vet’s image floats, depending on the light to make a difference, my own in letters like smoke.

*The poems has a series of short, direct, declarative sentences: I’m stone, I’m flesh, The sky, A plane in the sky--in amongst longer, more narrative sentences.

*There are numerous images of flight or things that can take flight: eyes me like a bird of prey, letters like smoke, red bird’s wings, a plane.

Improv, Week 3

*excerpt*

Camouflaging the Chimera
-Yusef Komunyakaa

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
marching in from America.


-------------------------------------------------------------
Women left grass, painted in mud,
hung in the doorways. Hummingbirds
zipped in range of the wet green

smell and licked the dirt to find
it tasted of refuge. Women tied
tigers' tails to children's wrists

for luck. The body of the tiger
was sent to America, cut and crammed
into a freezer bin then boated

across the sea. Americans salivated
for the body, the rust-color fur,
the black padded paws. The eye

for a necklace, the teeth for a pin.
Women wear coats made of tiger skin
to camouflage thier own paleness
and the river of bones they live in.

Free Entry, Week 3

Some women marry fetishes.
Martha, for instance, dallies in yellow latex
gloves and feather dusters to keep her husband
coming home. And putting them back
each morning under the kitchen sink
next to the Brillo pads and Lysol, she smiles.
Some days she can’t wait for her husband,
for his red pick-up to roll up the driveway.
Naked, she layers herself in dish rags,
each one pinned to the next and stretches the gloves
up to her elbows to stroll past all her windows
waiting for mowers to start or dogs to be walked.
Her neck cranes at each rumbling motor that sounds
down the street, eager for her husband’s pick-up.
The street lamp clicks on, lightening bugs rise
then fall across the yard. He never shows,
never calls, and Martha unpins herself.

Junkyard Quotes, Week 3

"In the twentieth century scholars have attempted to draw conclusions [...]."
--found in wikipedia entry for the Battle of Troy

"The almighty bottle has come a long way."
--Bottle Art, 8 ways to recylce a bottle

"Are morning people born or made? "
--webiste on How To Become an Early Riser

"Pea-Sized Frog Found in Borneo"
--headline on Discovery.com

"While shaving with a diamond may not sound pratical at first[...]
--article on new market items: razors coated in a film of man-made diamonds

"The man as a unit of weight is thought to be of at least Chaldean origin."
--defination of batman, a unit of mass used in the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia

Calisthenics, Week 3

When we did battle and fell down
the finish line was the old fig tree--
prayer bell and dream of days, the dress I shed.
However a poet feels about himself,
the elastic belt with its metal tongue
still rusts like unwashed dogfood cans.

They are all here, the races, the classes,
at the resturant the bus boys,
like most adults, were born during a war.
I woke up. What I saw first--the light.
It is unusal that a board game involes cards
but no job accounts for the impulse to find.
I emerged through those curtained booths
like a diver surfacing, wet gleam of polish.
Greeks gave up old dishes and slid into repose,
in this way they can also articulate two stages
of the psychoanalytic process:
the brick and mortar, foundation gives way.
After this long excursion into the more
distant regions of daydream
an anthology arises devoted to small boxes,
such as chests and caskets.


The Burns boys, like most adults,
were born into a war, devoted
to aluminun wheels, planes, caskets.
They emerged from their mother's legs,
each a year apart, surfacing divers
to break the wet gleam of polish
between worlds. When they did battle
and fell, they were buried under
the old fig. Here lies brick, mortar,
and metal, etched on the headstones.
They say the Greeks fought Troy
in two stages: daydream and repose.
The Burns boys died without anthology,
without a curtain of process to drape
their shoulders and washed in war, rust.

Response to classmate's journal, Week 2

Laura,
I love the possiblities of this draft. I particularly like the line: “At the door of the house, who will come knocking?” and “A wind from a distant autumn is trying to rise.” It may be later in Triggering Town, or perhaps another poet/critic said that if you ask a question in a poem you should never answer it (the source of this quote escapes me). I think that these are the two most vivid and detailed lines from your draft that give exact images. One suggestion that would make would be to play with the order of words in these lines to make them more active and less passive. How about instead if the lines read: Who knocks at the door? And “From a distant autumn tries to rise.” If you eliminate gerrunds it helps keep words active.

Pedagogy Forum, Week 2

One method that I recently observed in Amy Ellison’s 1101 class was how she got students to realize that they were already experienced at taking an inventory of signs. Her particular method is one I hope to use myself in future classes in not only composition classes, but I think it would especially great in the teaching and analyzing of poetry. The method goes as follows: As professor walk into class on the first day and say very little. Just tell students to get out a piece of paper and begin to answer the following questions that I would begin to write on the board. On the board I would write—You are already judging me without even realizing it. Answer the following questions honestly for I will not take this work up. The questions read—How old am I? Where do I live? What do I live it, house, apartment, condo? What is my favorite color? Am I married? Who do I live with? What are my hobbies? Do I have children? And so forth. The ultimate goal is to get the students to back up their answers with evidence they gathered by looking at the professor as a sign. Many students will be hesitant to explain their answers. Many students said that Amy liked artsy décor in her apartment and when she asked why they thought so, how they gained that information, they would answer “I don’t know, just a vibe I guess.” This I found out was at first fear of embarrassment on behalf of the students, but when probed further they could back up their statements. “Prof. Ellison is wearing all black and that is why I think she has artsy décor in her home,” was what one student said. What the class eventually goes to was that all black signifies cosmopolitan, the non-descript art student whose body is a canvas free of commercialism and logos—black signified to some students New York City (which relates to cosmopolitan) and, therefore, means rich, straight line style, beat-niks, Audrey Hepburn, sophistication. What the students slowly begin to realize is that they could already read signs and take an inventory of reasons as to how they made those assumptions and what those assumptions mean.This is basically what we did with “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” in 6385 and I am beginning to formulate ways to introduce this poem to an 1101 class. The poem provides vivid examples and an available inventory for those who are inexperienced and new to reading poetry, to looking at poetry critically.

Sign Inventory, Week 2

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop

*The speaker delineates a series of nondescript items to lose: “lose something everyday,” door keys, places, names, future travel sites, houses, cities, continents, so forth.

* The speaker mentions losing her mother’s watch--the most and only specific item listed in the poem to lose.

* The line, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” appears repeatedly (four times) in the poems to not only complete a formal technique but a personal mantra the speaker habitually states.

*The speaker states that at art of losing must be practiced and infers that the ‘art’ is not inherent.

* The poem includes two asides: “(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)” and “(Write it!)” that signal as textual reminders to the speaker to remember versus lose.

*The speaker only directly mentions once in the poem her emotions about losing remembrances/places/people: “[…] I owned, two rivers, a continent, / I miss them” and then end the poem with a nod to the visual over emotional ties: “the art of losing’s nor too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”

*The speaker’s convictions about the art of losing falter in the final stanza as she states that the art of losing is not too hard to master.

*The speaker only direct comment on emotion about losing comes after losing two rivers, a continent, and cities and not after losing her mother’s watch, a item typically regarded as sentimental, a symbol of maternal lineage, a familial marker, so forth.

*The speaker states in the first stanza that physical items inherently possess the intent to be lost, therefore, instilling inhuman items with humanistic qualities.

*The speaker appears to thinks in physical relations and localities in regards to things lost, beginning with the domestic then “farther, [and] faster,” expanding to realms, continents, and rivers.

Free Entry, Week 2

I mistook your Rome for a vase
filled with money, but it was just
myth, a balled up society of gods.
Your hands are a plaster cast,
complete with fits of breaking.
Your face winces into a corset
of lines that road from scalp to neck.
I mistook your roads to Rome
for rivers, the dirt so muddy
I thought I found rain churned waters
to drop my body in. At night
the animals come to drink its stories
of water. I am not the only one
to figure it all wrong.

I mistook you for Rome, the statue
you crafted of yourself, a slow cracking
of blisters string around your neck
tell me too much of your mortality.
I mistook your hands at night
and drank your stories of war.
The bed muddy with our bodies
and the ones that were there before.
Later, I held our sex in a vase,
our sex, some kind of myth
only gods believe in. I found
wrong in the animals the will
to drink without asking first
for permission to imbibe. I mistook
the river for our bed and slept
in dirt while animals lick my toes.

Improv, Week 2

One Art
-Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely one. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look (Write it!) like disaster.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no tongue for my bitch to master;
no mate. For a bastard can be a bastard
without a spoken word. Yet, no one accepts

my mouth in heat for anything other than a dog.
To bitch is to speak, born with intent to unsettle,
born to lose and never own a word or a letter.

To bitch a man out for losing the keys, to chew
up his ears for late hour entrances, to swear
and spit complaints only builds him as master--

because to bitch to be the dog, to understand
your own four legs, tail, the command to lay.
There is no tongue for my bitch to master.

For the bastard born owns a language despite his body,
with a tongue of contest without the gamble of his sex.
The bastard is born to a mother and has no master.

The tongue does not always reside in the mouth;
but rolls up between the thighs in wait to bark or talk.
There is no tongue for my bitch to master;
there is only the dog of her sex caged in her mouth.

Calisthenics, Week 2

Work I received from another student in class:
Eyes are troubling
mostly because they reflect the light you already see
and yet, there lies something
intangible behind them
direct contact is sometimes like
starring into the sun or the flash of a camera
instantly blinding but spot on
other times there is darkness hovering
a cumulus cloud hiding the light
how much is seen in another's eyes
when no one thinks
and sometimes a chiaroscuro mixture of others
and sometimes an undecipherable
chiaroscuro mixture steals away the soul.

Then passing through another student's hands:

Eyes trouble
the reflecting light,
lies intangible, direct
contact like starring
the sun, flash of a camera,
instantly blinding other
times darkness hovering
of others, chiaroscuro
steals the soul.

I have continued to work on this next phase of the draft:

The monuments of technology trouble the eyes.
They lie like the sun to uncover what we see
in the dark. They steal time
to remind us that history is contact
and today millions of fingers speak
without ever shaking hands.
No one touches bodies anymore.
Men gaze upon breast after breast
wanting each one while their wife
showers in the next room. Women watch
two women kiss and wonder
how her cheek would feel next to another's.
Millions of fingers hide while they stretch
to find what's beyond the hands, the arms,
the chest and grab the face that carries
the fingers. A monument to flesh builds,
eyes filter through a screen, we honor
advancement, to talk to millions
but to never touch those to whom our hands speak.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 2

"A bastard can be a bastard without a spoken word."
-Stealing the Language, Alicia Ostriker

"Over the eons, the shrinkage for the Moon was only about 200 yards, the length of two football fields [...]"

"The ridges also look freshly carved in the moonscape."
-Over a Billion Years, Scientists Find, the Moon Went Through a Shrinking Phase, New York Times

"Dusting books at the New York Public Library."
-caption under photo in The Atlantic