Assignment Idea – Lit Bits

Writing a Poem by Not Writing a Poem

Today’s guest blogger is Catherine Pierce, the author of two books of poetry, Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008) and The Girls of Peculiar (forthcoming from Saturnalia in 2012), as well as of a chapbook, Animals of Habit. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2011, Slate, Ploughshares, Boston Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

In the introductory creative writing course I teach, we spend the first half of the semester reading and writing fiction, and turn to poetry for the second half. This transition often provokes some anxiety. Many of my students have never written poetry before, and some have read very little—they come to the course with the assumption that poetry is highbrow and intimidating, and are cowed by the expectation that they will soon be writing their own.

I do several things to demystify poetry—insofar as it can and should be demystified!—early on. We read lots of contemporary poems, so that students can hear voices that echo their own with regard to syntax and diction. We talk about the lessons covered in the fiction unit that carry over into poetry, and into all creative writing, things they already know to do, and do well—striving for detail, imagery, and nuance, avoiding the heavy-handed ending, establishing a compelling voice, etc. And we do daily writing exercises to keep the writing brain limber and to alleviate that initial fear that can come with staring at a blank page and knowing you’ve got to, somehow, put a poem on it. If we do small bits of writing every day, then that blank page becomes familiar—a friend, or at least an only-moderately-irritating acquaintance.

I kick off the poetry unit with one of my favorite exercises—it’s simple, but its simplicity is its key. I tell students that they’re going to be going outside for the next ten minutes. (I do this regardless of weather; some classes luck out with a 75 degree sun-filled day, but this fall found my students grumbling out into a chilly, heavy mist. I told them that great poems have been written about hardship.) While out there, they’re to do two tasks. First, I ask them to make note of three things they think no one else will notice—a line of ants streaming from a trashcan, a mismatched hubcap on a Honda in the nearby lot. And I ask them to write down the following beginnings of sentences:

The sky looks like:

The air feels like:

The day smells like:

Continue reading “Writing a Poem by Not Writing a Poem”

Bringing Keats to the Big Screen

It can be a treat when talented directors decide to bring poets and their poetry to the big screen. In the recent past, the focus has been on 20th century poets—think of Sylvia (2003) on Sylvia Plath, Il Postino (1994) on Pablo Neruda, and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) on Dorothy Parker. The imaginative 1998 Shakespeare in Love, which drew on real characters and plays, was entertaining but largely fictional.

This September, New Zealand director Jane Campion (The Piano, An Angel at My Table) brought us a biopic about John Keats (1795 – 1821), one of the most romantic of the later Romantic poets. Bright Star dramatizes the love affair between Keats and his Hampstead neighbor Fanny Brawne. Campion decided to make the movie lush in image and sound, heavy with emotion, and short on Keat’s social life. (No Charles Lamb. No Percy Bysshe Shelley. None of that set.)

This, as some reviews have said, was a smart movie. Since Keats was such a rich character, his life offers too many channels to explore in one feature-length movie. And it was clever of Campion to deliver Keats’s exquisite poems on the stream of an intoxicating love affair. General movie goers may not have known of Keats, and general students of poetry may not have known of the affair. The result: more poetry for all.

Fanny, played by the milk-skinned Abby Cornish, begins as a spirited seamstress and designer stitching fantastic stand-up collars and intricate pleated skirts. Keats, played by Ben Whishaw, is whimsical, serious, and thin, nursing his ailing brother Tom. Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), Keats’s rascally friend and quasi-benefactor, triangulates the love affair, his jealousy growing in pace with the couple’s affections.

While the movie’s lupin- and daffodil-filled fields and the blossoms of English spring are dazzling, even better is Whishaw’s reading of Keats. At the screening I attended, everyone stayed for the final credits in order to listen to the entirety of Whishaw reading “Ode to a Nightengale.” (You can hear a brief excerpt here [click “download”].)

(Caleb Crain, writing in the On Language column in the New York Times last Sunday, muses on Keats’s language and some of Campion’s language choices for Bright Star.)

The film wasn’t a total success for me since the lovesick pining followed by howling grief became hard to sit through. I also would have liked to have seen more of Keats’s life in poetry and I was dismayed that Fanny’s proud sewing was reduced to mere stitching as she became more besotten—but perhaps that’s just the reality of first love. (I’m comforted by the fact that she did not end her days traipsing the heaths of Hampstead reciting poetry, as the film says, but rather went on to marry and have a family.)

It was a pretty picture that leaned more in the direction of a love story than a cinematic-literary masterpiece.

An informal poll around the office finds opinions on poet biopics are pretty low. They suffer from “heavy-handed miserablism” or are “a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as courageous” delivered by “bloviating and gesticulating” characters. (Watch for future posts here by these two passionate writers.)

Question:

1. Do biopics help make poets and their poetry more approachable for students? Or do their efforts to appeal to the mainstream turn students off? How do you manage student responses?

2. Which biopics work best in your classroom? How do you assign them?

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Joelle Hann is a senior editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s who worked on the third edition of Helen Vendler’s Poems, Poets, Poetry, and originally created the Teaching Poetry blog in 2009.

SPAMku!

by Carolyn Lengel

Poems can be fun, and sometimes they can even be funny. For proof, look no further than the haiku collected in the SPAMku archive.

Most of the poems on the site are really senryu, which is parodic, rather than haiku, which includes a seasonal reference—both types, however, require the same five-syllable/seven-syllable/five-syllable form.

Curated by John Nagamichi Cho of MIT, the SPAMku archive grew from a collection that filled a small paperback (SPAMku: Tranquil Reflections on Luncheon Loaf, Harper Perennial, 1998) into a gelatinous, porky giant with more than twenty thousand contributions.

Although the SPAMku archive no longer accepts new verses, the poems contributed by volunteers and enthusiasts are a revelation. Everyone, it seems, loves a poetry challenge—and what could be more challenging than crafting a poetic ode to a prosaic canned meat?

spam1

Here are some favorites among the archive’s many, many delights:

Roseate pork slab,
How you quiver on my spork!
Radiant light, gelled.

—L. Sheahen

Zen Buddhist SPAM quest:
“What are the ingredients?”
What do you desire?

—Alex Dunne

Activity:

Give your students the poetry challenge they crave. After a class discussion of the appeal of combining formal Japanese poetry with a not-very-dignified pork product, ask every student to write a SPAMku. (Vegetarian/vegan students can write Tofuku if they prefer.) Who knows—perhaps you’ll end up with a SPAMku archive of your own.

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Carolyn Lengel is a senior editor for English at Bedford/St. Martin’s, where she works mainly on handbooks. She is not a poet (although she did write a YouTube sonnet about Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan for the National Day on Writing), and she generally does not eat Spam, though she admires Spam both as a word and as an aesthetic object.

The Art of Revision

By Sage Cohen

One of the trickiest—and most liberating—aspects of poetry is that there is no Gold Standard against which we measure its worth. Without this standard, it can also be difficult to evaluate when a poem is finished. Because each poem is trying to accomplish something different, it is up to us to decide when the poem has arrived. This is not easy to do, even when one has been writing for decades, but it sure is satisfying to practice!

The important thing to remember about revision is that it is a process by which we become better acquainted with the poem and push it farther toward its own potential. In the revision stage, we revisit and may reinvent the choices we’ve already made with language, image, voice, music, line, rhythm, and rhyme.

The tricky balance involves wildly experimenting with what might be possible in a poem—beyond what we first laid down on the page—without losing the integrity of idea or emotion that brought us to the poem in the first place. This is a skill that develops over time, through experience and largely by feel. If it seems like you’re groping around in the dark when revising, welcome to the club!

The process of revising poems is unique for each poet; often, each poem has its own, unprecedented trajectory. I’ve had a few “whole cloth” poems arrive nearly perfectly complete in one contiguous swoosh of pen to paper. And I have other poems that have taken me more than fifteen years to finish. More typically, I work on a poem for a few weeks or months. Sometimes, I think a poem is finished, but years later, it proves me wrong, demanding a new final verse or line structure or title.

For the purposes of establishing a revising practice, I recommend that you divide writing and editing into two completely separate acts that happen at two different sittings, preferably on different days. The goal of this checks-and-balances system is to give yourself the space to let it rip when you’re writing without fearing interference from your inner editor. Don’t worry: If it’s bad now, it will still be bad next week; you can fix it then.

Once you feel you’ve exhausted every last drop of poetic possibility in the writing of the first draft, or any time you get stuck and don’t know where to go next, put your poem aside for a while. The next time you return to it, you’ll be wearing your editor hat.

In my experience, time is the greatest of editors. The longer a poem sits untouched, the more likely you are to have a sense of how to proceed when you sit down to revise.

Activity:

Don’t know where to start with your revisions? Try asking yourself the following questions:

What is most alive in your poem? Underline the line(s), word(s), phrase(s), stanza(s) that seem to be the kindling feeding the fire of this poem so you can easily reference what’s working throughout the revision process.

Is there introductory information at the beginning or summary information at the end that could be trimmed?

Who is speaking? What would the poem be like if told from a different perspective? (For example, if a poem is about an experience shared by a mother and daughter, and told from the daughter’s point of view, try telling it from the mother’s point of view.)

Where is language weak and flabby? How can you give it more energy and muscle? Can passive verbs become active? Can modifiers be cut? Should “dropped” be changed to “plummeted”?

Verb tense: What would your poem be like in a different tense than it was written? Even if it happened in the past, try the present, and vice versa. See what gives it the most power and energy.

Does the shape of the poem (line length, stanza breaks, white space) mirror the emotion and rhythm of its content? Should it?

Are punctuation and capitalization consistent?

Is there good music of repeating sounds throughout the poem?

Does each line break create the desired interest, pause, movement, and focus on key moments or words?

Does the title serve the poem? How can the title take the poem further?

Remember that only you know the best way to craft your poem. Have fun, be willing to experiment, and you’ll learn a little more about revision each time you try.

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Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writers Digest Books, 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. An award-winning poet, she writes three monthly columns about the craft and business of writing, publishes the Writing the Life Poetic Zine and serves as Poetry Editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Sage has won first prize in the Ghost Road Press poetry contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She curates a monthly reading series at Barnes & Noble and teaches the online class Poetry for the People. To learn more, visit www.sagesaidso.com. Join the conversation about living and writing a poetic life at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com!

Wallace Stevens, Poet of the Month

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879—130 years ago—and led what seemed, on the surface, a rather ordinary life.

Educated at Harvard, he became a lawyer and spent his life practicing law, eventually becoming vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. While leading the daily life of a lawyer, Stevens produced some of the most important American poetry written in the twentieth century—composing lines in his head while walking to work in the morning and writing them down at night. Like composer Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens happily joined work and art, turning down a professorship at Harvard to remain at his firm. Widespread recognition came late, just a year before Stevens’s death in 1955, when his Collected Poems was published.

The Poetry Foundation’s biography summarizes Stevens’s talents: “an extraordinary vocabulary, a flair for memorable phrasing, an accomplished sense of imagery, and the ability to both lampoon and philosophize.” Stevens is frequently regarded as a difficult poet—his poems are opaque and philosophical, his images whimsical, his language complex—but the visceral power of his words is on display in his recordings of his poems, like this one of “To the One of Fictive Music” (with some creative animation):

(See also recordings of Stevens’s poems here and here, as well as these two clips from a documentary.)

Though appreciation of Stevens’s poetry was a long time coming, it is now near universal. Stevens’s Selected Poems, recently published by Knopf, has garnered a lot of attention and occasioned reassertions of Stevens’s place in the pantheon of modern poetry. “[W]hen we hear the sound of Stevens in poems by subsequent poets,” James Longenbach writes in The Nation, “it is most often the music of austerity, at once worldly and otherworldly, that we hear.”

Reviewing the book in the Times, Helen Vendler makes the case for Stevens as the poet of our age:

Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future. Others treated those issues, but very few of them possessed Stevens’s intuitive sense of both the intimate and the sublime, articulated in verse of unprecedented invention, phrased in a marked style we now call “Stevensian” (as we would say “Keatsian” or “Yeatsian”). In the end, he arrived at a firm sense of a universe dignified by human endeavor but surrounded always—as in the magnificent sequence “The Auroras of Autumn”—by the “innocent” creations and destructions within the universe of which he is part.

Happy 130th, Wallace Stevens!

Activity

1. As noted above, Stevens was unique in his ability write great poems while achieving success in the legal world. Why is this so rare? Are poets opposed to work? Consider some poems that deal with the mundane world of work—perhaps “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Gray or “The Unknown Citizen” by Auden—and discuss how the poets conceive of this work as related to their craft.

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Andrew Flynn is an editorial assistant at Bedford/St. Martin’s. He graduated from Columbia in 2008, with a BA in history and philosophy. Before coming to Bedford he interned at the Paris Review.

Helen Vendler: Close Reader In Action

by Andrew Flynn

Helen Vendler is famous for reading poems closely. Her skills are certainly on display in this discussion with master interviewer Christopher Lydon a couple of years ago. It appeared on his Internet radio show Open Source.

Vendler talks about her then-new book on W. B. Yeats, Our Secret Discipline, offering thought-provoking analysis of a number of poems, including the famous “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death”:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My county is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Vendler makes many illuminating observations (the discussion of the poem begins at minute 5:12)—about the poem’s history, its form, and its content—but I was particularly struck by her analysis of time and place. Vendler notes:

The thing that Yeats does that to me is astonishing in this poem is that he makes the airplane take off. When the Irish airman begins speaking, he’s on the ground, saying “I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above”—so he’s looking up to the clouds in the sky, the clouds are above. Later, he says, “A lonely impulse of delight/ Drove to this tumult in the clouds”—this tumult that he is now experiencing in the clouds, where he is surrounded by the clouds and is up in the air. And, somehow between line two and line twelve the plane has gone up into the air and he is speaking from the air, where he began speaking from the ground. And that seems to me one of the sort of amazing things Yeats could do in a poem, without telegraphing it, without saying, “First I will show him speaking on the ground, then I will show him aloft in his plane.” He doesn’t say a word. He just makes it happen. It’s all show and no tell with Yeats.

I’d read this poem a dozen or so times before, but I’d never noticed this major shift in time and place. Her analysis makes for fresh reading of this well-read poem, though I’m still trying to figure out what happens between lines two and twelve.

The quality of Vendler’s reading is that it reveals both subtleties that benefit academic debates on interpretation and also make the act of reading more pleasurable.

In her Poems, Poets, Poetry text, Vendler includes “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death” in chapter 6 on “Constructing a Self.” The chapter focuses on space and time, testimony, typicality, and motivations—considerations that help readers understand how poets create their speakers. Vendler advises:

As you read a poem, ask yourself question about the speaker constructed within the poem. Where is he or she in time and space? Over how long a period? With what motivations? How typical? Speaking in what tones of voice? Imagining life how? Resembling the author or different from the author? The more you can deduce about the speaker, the better you understand the poem. If you think about what has been happening to the speaker before the poem begins (if that is implied by the poem), you will understand the speaker better.

Helpful advice—and the entire Open Source interview with Christopher Lydon is well worth a listen.

Activity:
Take a favorite poem that you think you know well. Then consider Vendler’s advice quoted above. How do these considerations about the poem’s speaker change the way you read? How does it change your understanding of the poem’s meaning?

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Minute by Minute with #Micropoetry

by Nick Richardson

It’s easy to say that poetry is dead. So easy, in fact, that I’ve said as much before on Bedford Bits: “it’s easy […] to fall into the trap of thinking of poetry as frivolous. Or as unapproachable solipsism. Or both. Largely irrelevant, in any case.” But, like a poet, I wonder about Death (capital “D”).

Is Poetry in a coffin, unsold and unread (or worse: forcibly, joylessly read)… or has it been reconstituted, its component parts unknowingly incorporated –- immanent -– into the subconsciously literary, the reflective and minutely observant; the people with Things to Say. That is, into Poets (capital “P”), both self-identified and otherwise. Take Twitter:

A quick check of Twitter (which is considered – like poetry – to be largely irrelevant) reveals a quickening pulse within the poetic corpse. Not villanelles or catalectics, but something shorter: “twaiku” — twittered haiku — and casually shared micropoetics.

Some might say this is mostly empty verbiage. They say it’s better to leave poetry to the professionals. But again, this is where our poetic problem originated. Twaiku may not be canon –- although, I am Twitter friends with Shakespeare –- but Poetry is bubbling up, tweet by tweet, into contemporary pop-consciousness.

This minute, regardless of whether anyone thinks it’s an essentially historical or privileged art form, poetry is being created and celebrated, shared and reposted and thrown away. Yoko Ono is making international news by judging Twitter poetry competitions (the prize: free admission to poetry events!); Twitter micropoetry is being codified, at least popularly on Wikipedia, as a legitimate “genre of poetic verse”; and we may even have our first serious Twitter poetry book, Tweet, Tweet: a mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the american open road odyssey (Mark Fullmer, 2009).

This forthcoming film/poetry collection, teased in the below book trailer, documents — minute by micropoetic minute — Fullmer’s “road trip from Brea to Flagstaff to Albuquerque to Denver to Provo to Ferdley to Big Sur and back” — and definitely doesn’t look anything like your grandmother’s mouldering book of Victorian twaiku.

Tweet, Tweet, by Mark Fullmer (Trailer):

So, is Poetry dead? Of course not — that’s just something we say. Poets are, as previously discussed in Why So Serious?: Are Happy Poems Taboo, driven by mortality and marginalization.

And have we really come from The Odyssey to “The Wasteland” to this? Yes and no — like almost everything else, you can find poetry alive and thriving online, but that’s just the popular fringe. Some will take solace in this explosion of poetic creation, others can always look to the traditional sources, which chug on regardless.

Activity:

1. Take a look at Twitter searches for #micropoetry and #twaiku. What can be said about these short poems (140 characters maximum) as a whole? Do you think they work as poetry (why or why not)?

2. Given what you’ve noticed in the above exercise, try your hand at writing Twitter-style micropoetry. If you don’t have a Twitter account, just try to keep these short-bursts under 140 characters long. Of course, part of the vitality and fun of tweeted poetry is the social interaction, so — if you feel comfortable — try posting some of your micropoetry on Twitter. Be sure to end your post with a hash tag (#micropoetry or #twaiku).

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Nick Richardson is an associate editor at Bedford/St.Martin’s. He holds an MA in Literary and Cultural Theory from Boston College and has published three books (two poetry, one prose)…exhibiting what poet Andrei Codrescu has called “a fresh sort of daring in the overstrained broth of contemporary American poetry.” He is also the publisher of A Mutual Respect Books and Music, an underground chapbook press operating out of Brooklyn, NY.

Poetry Exercise: The Cut-up

This assignment was submitted by Frances Richard, a poet and art writer who teaches at Barnard College in New York.

Here’s a poetry exercise that basically guarantees a lively in-class writing session and also helps students to disrupt habitual writing patterns, get away from cliché, and expand their imaginative use of language.

You’ll need to do a bit of hunting and gathering (or have your students bring supplies for themselves). Needed are:
* A pair of scissors for each person in class
* Blank paper
* Glue sticks
* An assortment of printed matter—the weirder and more motley the better. My best score was a stack of economic-development journals being deaccessioned by the Barnard Library. The recycling bin beside a copy machine is a good source too. Continue reading “Poetry Exercise: The Cut-up”