Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Pedagogy Forum, Week 2

Trista's pedagogy forum that alludes to the question as to whether creative writing can be taught--which I also believe to be a tired, but always present question--led me to think about the presumptions (i.e. poetry comes out of inspiration or thin air) of creative writing and how, as a teacher, one might try to deconstruct such presumptions in the first few creative writing classes they teach. Doing so could lay the foundation for a more integrative understanding that creative writing is, in fact, a skill not entirely developed innately, if at all. Therefore, by organizing and developing linguistic exercises through improvisation, free-writing, or other forms of writing could reveal the creative process involved in writing poetry or other forms of creative writing. As an unnamed professor told me, learning to write can be a bit like learning how to golf. Certain stances in golf create a sense of physical awkwardness that can be compared to the awkwardness of creating highly unusual utterances with language and therefore, takes much skill to teach that aspect of writing.

Response to Trista's Free Write, Week 2

I love the concept of this poem draft as it takes an unlikely domestic space and subverts it into an unlikely connotation of a rather sensual subject. The expansion of the draft could imply a more detailed understanding of the couple itself and how the fetish metaphor came to pass. The concept, it seems, remains more objective to the relationship between Martha and her husband. Also, perhaps a tighter ending to the draft could create many possibilities for the poem, perhaps by inserting rare instances of the husband’s perspective among other ideas. The images of the domestic could connote towards the ideal of the nifty fifties era and the subversive poetry coming out of that time, the most obvious being Plath and Sexton as offhand examples.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Free Write, Week 2

One afternoon the last week of April she answers the bothersome telephone. It hangs from heaven to earth and looks on the world as on another cloud. The hills like burnt pages, where does this door lead? I walked away with your face stolen from a crowded room. A person is very self conscious about his head and despair is big with friends I love. I had a vision of the moth-force a small town always has. Not my hands, but green across you now. We still love there in thundering foam and love, lying there lily still. One more day gone, found in the form of days.

Sign Inventory, Week 2

"Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa

1. The poem connotes the idea of the speaker disappearing with such phrases as “My black face fades”(1), “hiding inside”(2), “clouded reflection”(6).
2. The speaker continually asserts himself as part of the stone wall with such references as “hiding inside the black granite”(2), “I’m stone”(5), “…I’m inside/ the Vietnam Veterans Memorial”(11), “I’m a window”(27).
3. The image of the speaker’s distorted reflection appears throughout the poem, such as in the lines “My black face fades,/hiding in the black granite”(1-2), “My clouded reflection eyes me”(6).
4. The idea of erasure appears in the beginning and end of the poem, yet the speaker continually defines himself by declarations of existence: “I’m stone. I’m flesh”(5), “I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial”(11), “I’m a window”(27).
5. The only other instances that the speaker mentions color other than black occurs when viewing the reflections on the wall, such as the white flash, the red bird, and the white vet.
6. The only concrete physical image between the speaker and the wall occurs when he touches the name Andrew Jackson.
7. The lines “I’m stone. I’m flesh”(5), and “The sky. A plane in the sky” (24) distinguishes from the way the rest of the poem is written through their short declarative form.
8. The image of flight or floating appears several times through the red bird, the plane in the sky, and the white vet’s image floating next to the speaker.
9. The agency of the action in the poem seems to shift from static to active.
10. The poem seems to focus on one of many actions perceivably made to the wall through the reflections the speaker views.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Improv, Week 2

Poem: “Belle Isle, 1949” by Philip Levine

We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting
to the gray coarse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from.

Improv:

The gray river seeps its oiled hue like the residue
of an apocalyptic painting, drawn from cigarette

ash of a lover’s lips flicked across the bridge,
baptized by street lamps and the mid sunset fog

circling the city. The starlight never peeked
through the brine, the green peaks of swamp grass,

the heavy wall of steam and smoke speaking
in circles above the stove factory you could

leap to from the rocky monument of that same
river, cobble shrine of lost childhood names.

The gray shore reminisces the Toyota tire
long abandoned by the factory worker marching,

marching still in the depths of the industrial cogs,
unaware of the river’s keen eye, or dying breathe.

Calisthenics, Week 2

In class calisthenics:

Toward the end of his long discourse a panegyric…still it’s decent pay. Five soldiers fixed by Matthew Brady’s eye. Small mustachioed Turks, digging for the purple Moldovan stamps at Dallas County jail. No stronghold can protect those hours without twenty years delay, poets who fail. He was obsessed with success. Touching is like that, begin by looking for peaches. I can’t envision the howling buoy. In contrast to the triumphal procession of victors coming down the road like a piece of the road dissevered. I am in a house in a Japanese print.


I am a house in Japanese print, a road dissevered,
a triumphal procession of victors. I can’t envision
a howling buoy that no stronghold can protect,
those hours without twenty years delay. Poets
fail toward a panegyric, a long discourse
of small mustachioed Turks who begin by looking
for peaches, obsessed with success. Touching
is like that, like a house, a road, a victory.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 2

1. I have wet hair like a horror movie victim.
facebook status
2. I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.
Michael, The Big Chill
3. It's not surprising our friendship could survive that. It's only out there in the real world that it gets tough.
Nick, The Big Chill
4. The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
Ecclesiastes

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Pedagogy Forum, Week 1

The first class of the semester provided an insightful outlook on how to introduce a creative writing class by initially enacting a writing exercise to share with the entire class. I believe that by starting off with an exquisite corpse type of exercise allowed for groundwork into introducing each classmate with their initial sense of each student’s writing and editing style. By sharing the result of the linguistic wordplay and then allowing class discussion into how the exercises could be further edited seemed to create the sense of teaching creative writing as a communal act rather than just following the teacher into a particular direction. The ability to lead a class into discourse with the writing, then, becomes one of many key aspects to developing a creative writing class.

Response to Jonette's Free Write, Week 1

The act of creating a list of rhymes and forming a poem around such rhymes provides an introductory catalyst into the act of writing. Rather than writing with a clear subject in mind, this practice utilizes the language and allows for linguistic play, opening ways one could let the language lead rather than trying to formulate around the subject. Also, this seemingly simplistic practice could allow for the poet to open their ears to the sounds of language and could eventually be used in the practice of more subtle internal rhymes in future poems. Having an ear for language provides useful skills within the spectrum of creative writing as it could lead to an unexpected combination of wordplay to a degree.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Free Write, Week 1

Improv: “In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has
Been Condemned” by James Wright

Beyond the riverside against the grain of Ohio’s
border she grieves alone in the hobo light, her coat
askew with vinegar and buttons sewn without thread.

She pondered and gazed at the open doors of the maid
who drowns in the lock and key at the Hilton.
Who grasps the hand of one who was always drowning

in the Ohio’s dissidence? Or wonder still, how the brothel
women carrying trench coats in Virginia’s stale air
belittle her so, when only two shores lead the way to

salvation or to the tender smell of ripe peaches you
only find in Georgia.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Sign Inventory, Week 1

Poem: “My Shoes” by Charles Simic
pg. 432 in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

1. The poem shifts the agency of the speaker through each stanza by the use of the possessive “my” to “me” and to the “you” when conveying the purpose of the shoes.
2. The fourth stanza is the only moment that the speaker uses the first person “I” in the poem.
3. The poem bookends the image of the shoes with the first stanza describing them as “toothless mouths” and “partly decomposed animal skins/Smelling of mice nests,” while the last stanza provides more animate and personified images with the shoes being “ascetic and maternal” and more in kin “to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,/ With your mute patience, forming/ The only true likeness of myself.”
4. The third stanza is the only one to open with a question.
5. The first two stanzas evoke images of decomposition, decay, and death while the last two stanzas evoke the ideas of building, endurance, and formation.
6. The words “Gospel” and “Saints” are the only two words capitalized outside of grammatical correctness.
7. The agency shifts from “continuing” and “guiding” of the shoes in the second stanza to the speaker who would “proclaim,” “devise,” and build around the shoes in the fourth stanza.
8. The poem mentions the term “life” three times, all in different contexts.
9. The poem mentions the shoes as “toothless mouths” in the first stanza and having “mute patience” in the last stanza.
10. The first stanza creates a catalogue of specific and concrete images while the last stanza creates a catalogue of more abstract images of the shoes.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Improv, Week 1

Poem: “The Dream” by Irving Feldman

Once, years after your death, I dreamt
you were alive and that I’d found you
living once more in the old apartment.
But I had taken a woman up there
to make love to in the empty rooms.
I was angry at you who’d borne and loved me
and because of whom I believe in heaven.
I regretted your return from the dead
and said to myself almost bitterly,
“For godsakes, what was the big rush,
couldn’t she wait one more day?”

And just so, daily somewhere Messiah
is shunned like a beggar at the door because
someone has something he wants to finish
or just something better to do, something
he prefers not to put off forever
—some little pleasure so deeply wished
that Heaven’s coming has to seem bad luck
or worse, God’s intruding selfishness!

But you always turned Messiah away
with a penny and a cake for his trouble
—because wash had to be done, because
who could let dinner boil over and burn,
because everything had to be festive for
your husband, your daughters, your son.

Improv:

To shun the lamb and the beggar after you died
years ago after dreaming of your dinner boiling
over the gas stove long in need of a new burner.
You could never fit in the ideal of the nifty fifty
porch swing aprons and cleaning, cleaning, clinging
to the penniless afterthoughts of husbandry
and the doings of poker night, always a cold
Heineken, 5:30, on the dot. The rituals flung by you:
dress the kids, make the PB&J before 8am, clean,
knit, clean, iron, never a thought came across
your countenance until the death bed where the lamb
and the beggar asked one simple request, to wonder
and dream what could have been, what could have been.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Calisthenics, Week 1

Foundations: Exercises
Expansion/contraction modes

The bitter split between the crack of a rotting apple and the justice of a blinded alley in the early year does not alter your countenance, the thin break of grass under your feet. The tip of your fingers, the shotgun shells or leavings of the sea. No one could tell other than you. How does the honey bee’s steady faith beat against the stain glass window? We never knew when we passed that same abandoned church each day, always aware of the train’s throb as we walked those abandoned tracks, those same tracks leading our adolescence further apart. The bottle caps we used to flip across the interstate where you always wondered which 62 Buick had carried your father away before you were born, wondering how the dinner table was bare of silently reading the New York Times to your mother: the world of stock exchanges and the War. What clings to our cyclical breathe so sweet yet so distant as the language of ever was no time at all for us.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 1

1. And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you?
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
2. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
3. Nothing like playing the Backstreet Boys to get your testosterone pumping at the gym.
conversation, Lindy
4. I had this dream we were at this game and then there was a tornado and everyone was like ARGH and we hid in a ditch and didn't die and then we were on a cruise ship but there weren't people because almost everyone died in the tornado and then we all fought over a didgeridoo and I made out with Gerard Butler.
conversation, Lindy