Early on in my introductory poetry workshop, we discuss the difference between sentiment (emotion) and sentimentality (mawkishness, Hallmark cards, Lifetime holiday movies). First we talk about the ways in which sentimentality undercuts our ability to imbue our poems with real sentiment—it leads us toward cliché, it looks for the easy or more palatable way into an experience, it doesn’t require the level of intellectual and creative engagement we expect from good poems.
Then we start making fun of poets.
Okay, I say, imagine that you’re writing a parody of a poem and you want to make it wonderfully bad—full of clichés and cringe-worthy sentimentality. What are some key words you might use? “Heart,” someone always offers. We look for a little more specificity. “What should a heart not do in a poem?” I ask. “Skip a beat,” says one student. “Break,” says another. “End up in your throat,” offers someone else. Once we exhaust the heart possibilities, we move on, looking for the big offenders. What are some other words or tropes that might lead to sentimentality? I can usually get someone to come up with “soul,” which affords me an opportunity to write the word “soul” on the board, then draw a giant X through it—something I always like leaving on the board for the next class to see and fret over what sorts of things are being taught in creative writing classrooms. Usually someone mentions roses. Someone mentions the single tear. All of these go on the board (and I always offer the disclaimer that none of these rules is absolute—certainly, fantastic poems can be written using any number of potentially problematic words or images, provided the poet is savvy about how he or she uses them). Finally we move on to animals—butterflies as symbols of innocence, a bird as a vision of freedom. And, of course, there’s cuteness to be reckoned with—puppies, kittens, any three-legged quadruped. Sometimes I tell my students that they can only use a kitten in a poem if the kitten is dead. Continue reading “Kill the Kitten: Helping Students Skirt Sentimentality”
Because student writers are often suspicious of plot structure, believing it to be too mathematical or too cliché, it’s helpful to teach plotting as mechanics rather than invention, as usage rather than creation. Students should learn to exercise their “plotting muscles,” and with practice they can become confident in their abilities to build solid plot structure.
In class, I use a sequence of out-loud group storytelling exercises. By emphasizing quickness and collaboration, these exercises urge students to see plot as a skill to be practiced, rather than as a unique art object to be labored over. By working quickly, students learn that plot can be generated without unnecessary headaches. And by attending carefully to what comes before and trying to adapt to the developing plot, students work toward what Aristotle would call a “unity of action.”
Here’s how the exercises work:
STEP ONE. The class tells a story one word at a time, going around the room two or three times. This step serves largely as a warm-up, but it also demonstrates that plot balances individuality and utility — sometimes a student is lucky enough to get a noun or verb; other times, an article or preposition is required. This step can be repeated until students are comfortable. Continue reading “Group Plot Exercises”
No, I’m not talking about the calorie-burning exercises we feel we must do in the days leading up to and following Thanksgiving, a.k.a. Day of Carbs. Rather, I’m talking about a favorite, and seasonally appropriate, writing exercise.
The first story in Bill Roorbach’s Flannery O’Connor Award-winning story collection Big Bend is titled “Thanksgiving.” The story begins with a phone call. Ted’s sister-in-law, Mary, is calling to convince him to come to Thanksgiving dinner this year. And because he has vowed to “become part of the family again,” he agrees to come—but he isn’t happy about it. By the end of the story, events have caused him, in a fury, to upend the Thanksgiving Day dinner table.
Roorbach’s story gives rise to a very straightforward writing assignment:
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:
Today’s guest blogger is Ben Bunting, a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Washington State University where he teaches undergraduate courses in Composition and Literature. Bunting’s research and writing interrogates the concept of “wilderness” in 21st century America; he’s also interested in ecocriticism, game studies, and medieval literature. He plans to graduate in the spring of 2012.
After years of being one of the veritable army of literature graduate students who teach freshman composition, I was ecstatic to be given my first literature course in the spring of 2010. My excitement quickly turned to terror, though, when I realized that while I was teaching said class, I would also be preparing for my doctoral exams and beginning to draft my dissertation. I unashamedly admit that my first response to these complications was to try to design a class that minimized my day-to-day responsibilities as much as possible. However, this somewhat less-than-honorable approach actually led me to what I believe is a very effective method of teaching literature.
At the center of this approach is an assignment I call Discussion Openers, which puts small groups of students in charge of generating the class’s daily lecture and discussion content. At the beginning of the semester, I put students into groups and show them the course schedule; they then sign up for particular topics and/or readings that interest them. On a group’s assigned days, they are expected to “expand the class’s learning about an issue or issues from the readings beyond what is obvious in the text.” Rather than conceptualizing this assignment as a “presentation,” then, where the group simply shows their comprehension of the assigned readings while the rest of the class falls asleep, students are required to provide context to the readings. Some examples include:
This year, AWP (the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) is doing away with its pedagogy forums, a staple at its national conference for a number of years. An unfortunate effect of this decision is that there will be no more “pedagogy papers,” those one-page creative writing exercises written by instructors at all levels, from first-year grad students to full professors. Each year, AWP made available on its website a PDF file of thirty or so “Best of” papers, selected from all that got submitted.
No more.
If you’ve never perused these files, they’re worth a look. The papers cover all genres and are sure to spark ideas in the classroom. The good news is that the PDF files from past years are still available on AWP’s website. The bad news—actually, it’s just a bit inconvenient—is that you’ll have to hunt a little for them. On AWP’s main page, awpwriter.org, just type “pedagogy papers” (in quotes) into the search box. Each result takes you to a page where, with a little scrolling, you’ll find the PDF file labeled either “Exemplary Pedagogy Papers” or “Best of the Pedagogy Papers.” Download those files and you’ll be staring at several hundred useful, tested exercises for the creative writing classroom at all levels.
What do you think of the AWP’s cancellation of pedagogy forums?
Earlier, I wrote about the value of students tapping into their own areas of expertise as the basis for their writing. Yet I also mentioned that I often steer students away from writing slightly fictionalized accounts of their own lives. Here are two exercises, one each in poetry and fiction, that require students to look beyond their own lives and communities.
Poetry: The “Weird News” poem. There are many sources of “weird news.” Simply Google “weird news,” and marvel at the results. The assignment is to find a recent news article that A) is weird, and B) the writer feels some connection to, and then to write a poem that builds on the article in some way. The poem should tap into the article’s deeper implications, or spin off in some entirely new direction—anything, really, as long as the poem goes beyond the facts presented in the article. The “weird news” poem can also be combined with a formal assignment, so that the student would be writing a “weird news” sonnet, sestina, etc.
One student of mine wrote a terrific poem based on the story of a Japanese clothing designer who, in response to increased street violence against women in Tokyo, created a woman’s dress that allowed the woman to disguise herself as a vending machine. If she were ever in a situation where she was being followed, she could simply pull up the dress and camouflage herself amid the urban landscape. The student’s poem explored the strangeness of protecting oneself by becoming a commodity, and in one stanza addressed the clothing designer directly. It was the sort of wonderfully idiosyncratic poem that the student wouldn’t have written in the absence of an assignment that had her looking beyond her own life and community. Continue reading “The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments”
Poetry is an oral as well as written tradition, and we are only doing half the work—and having half the fun— if we silently read a poem on the page. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the chance to emphasize this enough in the classroom. As I struggle for both depth and breadth in my courses, I often run out of time before I can focus on the performance of poetry.
At least a few times during the semester, though, I create opportunities for students to engage with the performance of written texts. This might seem like an optional activity that doesn’t have the substance of a lecture or in-depth discussion, but I would disagree. In fact, in-class recitations can generate real excitement among students, in part because memorization requires a slow, attentive reading that we wish for every time we assign a new text.
With this in mind, I recommend the Shakespeare Sonnet Slam as a classroom activity. In an English literature survey we spend a couple of classes reading sonnets by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but because these sonnets represent one small unit out of many in a survey course, that’s about all the time we have for The Bard’s sequence. Even so, the memorization requires students to read their poem with a quality of attention that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Even if our activity means that we get to spend less time discussing other poets, students quickly understand the power of a poetic sequence, and how it can convey a variety of emotional and intellectual struggles in innovative ways.
Here’s how it works:
First, I ask students to memorize one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. If students are anxious about the process of memorizing a poem, I offer them several strategies: they can write the poem, longhand, several times until they get a sense of how the lines fit together; they can photocopy the poem and carry it with them, memorizing it throughout the week; or they can memorize the poem by reciting it once through, then hiding the final word of the poem and reading it through, then hiding the final two words of the poem and reading it through, and so on until they’re reciting the poem with no words exposed.
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?
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.
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
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!
