Pedagogy forum, Week 8

One thing that I’ve been trying to prepare for lately is teaching my own creative process of writing a poem to Amy’s Creative Process class. I have been mining my drafts trying to find the most accessible to teach ‘beginner poets.’ Also, I am trying to find the draft that may have the most drastic changes to give the most visual example to the students. Since most of my drafts begin as improvs or calisthenics it might also be useful to give the students an exercise to generate language and show them that writing poetry does not require a muse. I hope to show the students that how I typical begin a poem—through a writing exercise from other texts—is how they can all begin to write a poem. I want to perhaps talk about Hugo’s techniques about a triggering subject once they have a lengthy bit of material to work with. Or, at least cull some sort of thread that may be apparent in their exercise to begin to see some architecture. I think I want to use the exercise that we actually did in class—to bring in several texts and have the student write down a line and then pass the text and write down another line from the next text and so forth. I think that this particular exercise is a great start to show those students least familiar with the act/process of writing poetry that they can just start writing and they don’t have to be ‘inspired.’