So, ok.
What is this stuff?
From http://www.interviews-with-poets.com
“Poetry goes back so far into human
history that it is hard to see its clear
beginnings. Poetry is sometimes even
argued to be a fundamental aspect of
language itself….” That is, poetry came into
existence at the very instant when
language did. It is something at the very
heart of language.
—And—
“Poetry may predate literacy
itself…The oldest poem that we
know about is the ‘Epic of
Gilgamesh’ –created in Sumer in the
3rd millennium BC.”
Poetry goes back as far as
humanity itself.
At the same time…
Poetry is completely new. It is the cutting-edge
of language art, always testing what language is
and what language can do. Young poets right
now are inventing poetry—inventing how we
define and read it.
So it’s incredibly, incredibly OLD…and
absolutely NEW, ongoing, being born
right under our feet.
Theorists are always predicting that poetry and
even the written word are dying out.
But isn’t it interesting that thousands of
students flock to graduate creative writing
programs every year, that poetry journals,
conferences, and festivals are thriving, and of
course there’s the advent of the
We’ll talk more about poetry slams later.
Poetry Slam!
Poems About Poems, Poems
about Writing Poems, and
Poems about Being a Poet
What do these poems tell you about reading and writing poetry?
Introduction to Poetry
--Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
Strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
An Introduction to Some
Poems --William Stafford
As for poets
The Earth Poets
who write small poems
need help from no man.
*
The Air Poets
play out the swiftest gales
and sometimes loll in the eddies
poem after poem,
curling back on the same thrust.
*
At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
and propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn at Absolute Zero
Fossil love pumped back up.
*
The first
Water Poet
stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
left millions of tiny
different tracks
criss-crossing through the mud.
As for Poets
--Gary Snyder
*
With the Sun and the Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky -but his poems,
like wild geese,
fly off the edge.
*
A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
and it has no walls.
The poem is seen from all sides,
everywhere
at once.
Ooooooh!
Oooh! Look! A poem!
This one’s
really
teensy!
Oh ick, a
skeeter.
OMG, still ANOTHER kind!
Holy sh*t, MORE!
And yet another kind!
It’s a
Jungle
Out
There!
The categories below—the 4 types of poets—are very, very old
and are still present in our culture. They are not always mutually
exclusive (one poet may write in several modes and be both a
“moaner” and a “mad seer,” for instance), but it’s useful to break
them down this way in order to understand the many distinct
impulses which give rise to poetry.
The Moaner
The Maker
The Bard
The Mad Seer
We will spend some time
examining and even trying
our hand at some of the
different “species” of
poetry.
The Moaner
This mode of poetry goes by
different names.
… writes in the personal, first-person, expressivist mode.
The focal point is the “I” and the feelings and experiences
of the “I.”
A SUB-SET of the personal mode is the confessional mode.
The “confessional poem” was inaugurated by such poets as
Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, and Robert Lowell in the late
1950s and early 1960s. This type of poem can broach some
very private subjects and may reveal taboo secrets about
the self or society which are not normally discussed out
loud.
Young poets today who are writing in this mode are
sometimes referred to as the “post-confessional poets.”
The Mad Seer
… writes in the visionary mode.
The focal point is
perception, alternative states of consciousness, unusual
ways of seeing and knowing. This is poetry as revelation,
a kind of language which sees into the reality or truth of
time, being, and knowing—language which seeks to say
what can’t be said. May be apocalyptic in tone.
A SUB-SET of the visionary mode is the surrealist mode. The
surrealist poem came into its own in the early and mid-20th
century with “The Surrealist Manifesto” by Andre Breton and
theories of the psyche developed by Sigmund Freud. Surrealist
poets wrote to unlock or see into or create a “sur-reality”
drawing on the unconscious mind.
The Bard
… writes in the spoken-word or oral mode.
This poet is the public
wordsmith, the troubadour, the performer who takes poetry to the
streets. The spoken-word poem is meant to be heard (as opposed to
read on the page), and may sometimes include elements of theater
and/or musical performance.
The term bard is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the
early versifying minstrels or poets of other nations”, and originated
from ancient Celtic orders of poets whose duties were to think of
and perform spoken word poems (Bard n.1).
A SUB-SET of the spoken-word mode is the slam mode. The slam poem
came about in the 1980s in a coffee house in New York City, and was
meant to free poetry from the classroom and re-energize it. It tends to be
performed in rowdy contests and continues to this day at local and
national levels.
The Maker
…
writes in what might be called the formalist mode.
The word “formalist” is used in a variety of ways
when related to literature; here it describes poetry
written in prescribed forms, standardized rhyme
schemes, and traditional meters.
We will use our discussion of “the
maker” as a segue into that part of the
semester when we cover poetry and
FORM.
So.
Let’s make some poems
because that’s what we’re here to do
because creative writing workshops are about writing
Well, and
making stories
and scripts,
and plays and
creative
nonfiction and
memoirs and
anything else
you want to
do.
Sure, we’re going to read, and
blab, and do exercises, and read
some more, and go to public
readings, and perform public
readings, and of course blab and
read and blab some more. . .
but it’s all for the purpose
of
making
poems
You’re going to write at least three
poems for your Governor’s School
experience.
Here’s an exercise which may help
give you a jump-start on Poetry
Project #1.
1.
Your instructor will
give you a raisin.
Follow her
instructions.
2.
Now write a
few paragraphs
in which you
describe the
raisin and/or
your
experience of
the raisin. Be
VERY…
specific,
concrete,
sensory.
NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions
NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities
Hey Dummy! What are you doing?
I said NO abstractions or
generalities!!!!!
Look at what you’ve written. Can
you SEE, FEEL, TASTE, SMELL the
frapping raisin?????
I mean REALLY see, feel, taste and
smell it?
Is your description SPECIFIC?
Give your raisin
some LOVE, baby!
21
Ok, how do you describe a SMELL?
Really describe it?
It’s kind of hard, isn’t it?
There’s no way to avoid…
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
The smell is like…
The smell IS…
something else.
something else.
This is just a peculiar feature of language. To describe one thing you
have to compare it to another thing. But making figurative language is A
22
BLAST.
So what, again, is figurative language?
How doSome
you say theorists
that someonebelieve
is drunk? that
language
is
inherently
How many animal metaphors do we use everyday?
metaphorical. You can’t utter a
Where
did most worn-out
metaphors
come
from,
sentence
without
in some
way
and how do we keep the language alive? Look at
language.
these using
samples figurative
again from Annie
Proulx and
Lorrie More (recall that we looked at these in
our fiction unit)…
Worst High School Metaphors
1. Her face
was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides
gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking
alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from
experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a
solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it
and now goes around the country speaking at high schools
about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of
those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was
room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog
makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had
disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude
shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM
machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way
a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty
bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene
had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in
another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. Instead of
7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when
you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the
grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left
Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. Traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at
4:19 p.m. At a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences
that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds
who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the
East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one
that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are want to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike
Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not
eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck,
either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from
stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one
slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around
with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard
bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
from Annie Proulx’s,
Wyoming Stories
29
What he wanted to know now, tires spanking the tar-filled road cracks and potholes,
funeral homburg sliding on the back-seat, was if Rollo had got the girlfriend away from
the old man, thrown a saddle on her and ridden off into the sunset?...His thoughts
clogged as if a comb working through his mind had stuck against a snarl.
They climbed through the stony landscape, limestone beds eroded by wind into
fantastic furniture, stale gnawed breadcrusts, tumbled bones, stacks of dirty folded
blankets, bleached crab claws and dog teeth. […] The roots of his mind felt withered
and punky.
Looking at her, not just her face, but up and down, eyes moving over her like an iron
over a shirt and the old man in his mailman’s sweater and lopsided hat tasting his
Everclear and not noticing or not caring, getting up every now and then to lurch onto
the porch and water the weeds.
He traveled against curdled sky. In the last sixty miles the snow began again. He
climbed out of Buffalo. Pallid flakes as distant from each other as galaxies flew past,
then more and in ten minutes he was crawling at twenty miles an hour, the windshield
wipers thumping like a stick dragged down the stairs.
The light was falling out of the day when he reached the pass, the blunt mountains lost
in snow, the greasy hairpin turns ahead. He drove slowly and steadily in a low gear; he
had not forgotten how to drive a winter mountain. But the wind was up again, rocking
and slapping the car, blotting out all but whipping snow and he was sweating with the
anxiety of keeping to the road, dizzy with altitude. Twelve more miles, sliding and
buffeted, before he reached Ten Sleep where streetlights glowed in revolving circles
30
like Van Gogh's sun.
from Lorrie Moore
31
Once in a while take evening trips past the old unsold
house you grew up in, that haunted rural crossroads two
hours from where you now live. It is like Halloween: the
raked, moon-lit lawn, the mammoth, tumid trees, arms
and fingers raised into the starless wipe of sky like
burns, cracks, map rivers. . .Look up through the
windshield. In the November sky a wedge of wrens
moves south, the lines of their formation, the very sides
and vertices mysteriously choreographed, shifting,
flowing, crossing like a skater's legs... Walk through
wooded areas; there is a life there you have forgotten.
The smells and sounds seem sudden, unchanged, exact,
the paper crunch of the leaves, the mouldering sachet
of the mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence
posts splintered, trusting and precarious in their solid
grasp of arms, the asters splindly, dry, white,
havishammed (Havishammed!) by frost.
32
• "Her eyebrows will lift like theater curtains."
• "Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a
large Kleenex."
• "Work up a vibrato you could drive a truck though."
• "Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong.
It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the
refrigerator. "
• "You are a zoo of insecurities."
• "The clink of the silverware inside the drawer, piled
like bones in a mass grave."
• "You see a ghost, something like a spinning statue by
a shrub."
• "She ages, rocks in your rocker, noiseless as wind."
• "On public transportation mothers with soft, soapy,
corduroyed seraphs glance at you, their faces
dominoes of compassion.“
33
Ok. Let’s look at a few well-known and
highly regarded poets and see what
they do with SEEING.
That is, what do they do with
description and metaphor?
Links to these writers appear in our Word Press
Creative Writing page.
34
1.
Your instructor will
give you a raisin.
Follow her
instructions.
2.
Now write a
few paragraphs
in which you
describe the
raisin and/or
your
experience of
the raisin. Be
VERY…
3.
Now write a
poem about
specific,
your raisin.
concrete,
sensory.
NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions
NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities
35
Possibilities
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Include yourself in the poem.
Don’t include yourself in the poem. No “I.” Just the raisin.
Focus on just one aspect of the raisin.
Focus on the entire raisin; raisin-as-world.
Be the raisin.
Talk to the raisin.
Look at the raisin from the point of view of an extraterrestrial who has never been to earth before.
• Include your classmates and teacher in the poem as well as
the room.
• Write the poem from the point of view/in the voice of…. a
grape!
• Use interesting kinds of language.
Sometimes it helps to take a really
unusual perspective…say, that of an
animal.
Once a student wrote a piece from the
point of view of a deer. It described a
hunter’s gun as “a branch that barks.”
Look at Elizabeth Bishop’s “Giant Toad”
and “Giant Snail” poems.
Poetry Project #1
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS
2014/PoetryProject1.htm
This assignment is all about
description, concreteness,
grittiness, vividness,
thingness, and sensuality.
38
…The gooey, chewy, rich and pulpy scratchy drippy
undulating avuncular and underwearish ooh-la-la of
lavender-tinged-with-groaning-and-usually quiteembarrassing REAL LIFE.
I.e., you want to get a lot of the SPECIFIC, REAL, CONCRETE,
TOUCHABLE, STRANGE PARTICULARITY OF YOUR MOMENT-BYMOMENT
life
into your poem.
--lots of really vivid, breath-stopping
descriptive details…
Because here’s the thing.
Young writers are often very, very bad at using
detail.
I.e., they DON’T.
Use detail.
At all.
Beginning writers often rely on large, general, abstract language which attempts
to explain feeling and experience.
This almost never works. You can’t explain away your feelings and experiences.
They are too complex, too mysterious, too difficult.
You have to ENACT OR DEMONSTRATE rather than EXPLAIN your experience. You
have to SHOW rather than TELL how you feel.
You have to enter or re-enter a scene and dramatically recall or live it right there
on the page, in real-time. This is why poetry can be such a gas for the writer (as
well as for the reader): you have an experience on the page which can’t happen
any other way. It’s addictive. And fun. And scary.
So: just describe your experience—scenes from the past, the moment right in
front of you, whatever—concretely and honestly. You’d be surprised how much
feeling and complexity can be conveyed this way. Layers of feeling. Layers of
complexity.
Remembering
Remembering
Fear.
Excitement.
Parents.
Anger.
I remember my father drinking.
I felt so much sadness.
Father
Fear.
Excitement.
Kitchen.
Booze.
Mother.
Remembering My Father
My father drank heavily.
I remember his crazy antics and violence in the kitchen.
My mother disapproved, but just stood by, watching.
I felt so much fear and need.
Here are some sample poems. They all suck.
The language is boring. The language is
abstract and nonspecific. The experience
being described is generic and the people
are generic. There’s no poetry here!
Wack wack thunk thunk CRASH we are right here with the
kid, ear against his dad’s belt buckle, feeling sick, scared,
thrilled, enamored.
My Papa's Waltz
--Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
This one does
not suck.
Notice that the speaker never
explains how the child or the father or
the mother feels.
All he does is re-enact the memory in
vivid details, precisely as he recalls it.
The details say more about how
everyone feels than any explanation
could.
The details evoke a whole range of
feelings, even contradictory ones.
That’s good. That’s how human
experience and feeling really are.
More coming!