From Duluth's Poet Laureate: A Community Wide Poetry Assignment

Since becoming poet laureate of Duluth, I've been considering ways to invite the community to write poems.   Poems are marvelous little machines.   They are made of sound and image and if poems are good, they will touch you. This kind of touch is especially important during times of transition:  a loss or a death, a departure, a journey, a union like a marriage, a new job, new home, an illness, a recovery, a birth, a new beginning.   Poetry has so much to offer everybody.

So on this blog, I've decided to offer some writing prompts.  I've gathered three examples and invite you to write a poem that is structured like the example.    "Copying from the masters" is a good way to learn the craft of poetry.   But instead of recreating the master's work, make a parallel poem.  Try adapting one of the master's features to your own.  Make a poem with the same number of lines or stanzas.   Make a poem on a related topic.   Use language in a similar way.   Play with it 'fast and loose.'  In this way, you can use the master's poem as a scaffold of sorts to build your own poem.   

The following suggestions are drawn from the following poem examples.   When you begin writing, detach from the internal critic.   Avoid perfectionism.   Focus on details and the five senses.   Experiment, play, follow your instinct.   Make a first draft without much thought.  Save that for later.

Writing prompt:   Write a poem about a piece of clothing  
Writing prompt:  Write a list poem about something you've lost or found
Writing prompt:  Write about a first lesson

In this poem by Connie Wanek (from her book of poems, On Speaking Terms, Copper Canyon Press, c2010), Connie focuses on a rag, a sleeve of an old shirt, to express changes:

Rags

I dust with a sleeve I loved
to look at on my arm.
Blue is gray now, like a patch
of sky filthy with clouds.
Why is piano dust always so gray?
Something about sound waves
and day
that science could explain.

I didn't need scissors
the cotton was so rotted
by sun and sweat, the salt I made,
the sticky seawater.  I was glad
to actually wear something out,
to have seen one thing
completely through,
even though I'd miss
being the person who wore it.

Poetry has such an economy of words and yet conveys volumes.   This poem focuses on just one object, a dust rag that she'd made from a worn shirt.   The last line is so striking; one understands suddenly getting older.

In this poem, Elizabeth Bishop talks about loss.  It is from her book The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, LLC).

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next to last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This poem is a form called villanelle that features 3 line stanzas and repeated lines 1 and 3 from the first stanza.  It uses figurative language like many poems.    It starts out with simple losses but with each stanza, the loss becomes greater and deeper.   Bishop's tone is light and ironic, but she conveys the devastation.   Poems like these bring the reader gifts of solace and beauty.

Poems are gifts.  To receive a poem is an honor.   Consider writing a poem about a person, a place, or a thing in your life.   In the example by Connie Wanek, she shows us how writing about the sleeve of a shirt can reveal a life.   Wanek's poem is tightly focused.      In the example by Elizabeth Bishop, she creates a list.  Lists are very good ways to build a poem.  Bishop's losses were very important ones to her.  It is essential to write about what is important.  

This poem by Philip Booth (you can find it at www.poemhunter.com) is a memory that also becomes a blessing:

First Lesson

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

This poem concentrates on the details of learning to swim.   Booth does allow the poem to open up, past the particular day of the swimming lesson, but he remains in the metaphor of swimming.  Metaphors allow the writer/poet a longer reach.  Booth is talking about swimming, but we all know he is talking about life as well.

I invite you to try these exercises and share your work with others.

Information for Writers

Check out the National Writers Union website for information about copyright, negotiating contracts, publishing, and many other important topics.

https://nwu.org/node

How to Facilitate a Writers' Group

A writers group provides support, encouragement and critique.   It is a great way to give structure to your writing project and to get good feedback.  The group does not have to be large; 3 people is great.   Over 6 people will require more time for the meeting and to read manuscripts.   I've used the following guidelines to facilitate groups.  

Guidelines for Writing Groups
for a critique group: 3-6 people

Plan your group process with the members of the group.   

Are you a closed group or an open group? Multi-genre or single genre? How will you take in new members? When and where will you meet?   I've found that it works well to meet at a coffeehouse or restaurant, especially if you can reserve a quiet corner.   It's a neutral territory and eliminates worry about housekeeping or managing pets or displacing family members at home.   Decide the length of time that you will meet.  One hour is good for a small group. Over two hours is too long.  What is the primary goal of each person in the group? (This is important. Some people find having a deadline is what they need. Some just want to get started and don’t want a lot of critique that might be discouraging. Some have a large manuscript or past published work and want “deep critical examination.”

This is a good time to decide if you want to designate one person as a facilitator or time keeper.    This person can help manage the group process.   

Prepare for your writing group session.   

Make a clean, readable copy of your writing.   Format it in the same way that you would if you were sending it to an editor or publisher.  Bring enough Xerox copies of the work you want comments on—hand these out.

Be courteous.  If you will be late or must miss the group, notify the facilitator or other members.   Don't bring uninvited guests.  Writers are often reading works in progress and might prefer to have more private sharing.    Also, writing tends to be personal.  A new person might cause others to feel uncomfortable.
 
Learn to detach from your writing.   

Read the work aloud (or an excerpt of the work aloud) while members read along with you. Don’t apologize or dismiss your work. Reading out loud in itself will reveal some flaws or things that need to be added or omitted. If you have specific questions about the work, you can ask your reviewers to consider those.   It's a good practice for the writer to remain silent when members are giving feedback.   Resist explaining your decisions.   The readers must rely on what is written on the page and should respond only to that. 

Let your work stand on its own. Members of a group should practice ‘detachment’ from their own work when it is reviewed. Remember it is the work that is being scrutinized, not you the writer. Don’t take things personally. The feedback is an opinion and you don’t necessarily need to follow any advice or suggestions. Simply hear the feedback and then deliberate on your own. 

Don't monopolize the time.   Each member should have roughly equal time for reviews.

Give good feedback.  

Reviewers should make observations about the work. Notice what works well. Identify the strengths. In poetry, you should be attending to the sound, rhythm, pattern, imagery, metaphor, word choice. Be specific. Avoid general or vague comments like “this is good” or “I don’t like it.” Explain what exactly works for you and why. Note the shifts or confusing things. Reflect about what doesn’t seem to work. In prose, give feedback about dialogue, setting, action, point of view, and other aspects.    Note discrepancies or things that don't make sense.   Sometimes reviewers will disagree—all the better! The writer should sit back and listen to the feedback.

It is not necessary to tell the writer how to “fix” the work.  This might feel supportive, but it also might feel overbearing. Recommended solutions may not reflect the writer’s own style.   Ultimately, the writer will need to make the decisions to bring the work into line with his or her vision.  

Check in with each other regularly.

Take time to review group process. Your group will want to discuss how much time to spend on each work, and you will also benefit from talking about the individual writers process as well. Try to avoid distracting yourselves with personal information or experience. It’s easy to get sidetracked. Perhaps assign somebody to be a time keeper or to remind people to stay focused on the written work.

Set up an email list. Notify each other if you can’t attend. Respect each other’s time.

Getting Inside Poetry

Poetry may seem difficult at first.  Some readers feel frustrated or shut out by poems that seem obscure.   It takes awhile to learn its dimensions.    I think of poetry as a language within our language.   It is figurative instead of literal.   It uses metaphor and some devices in order to gain access to things that cannot be said.

I find it useful to describe poetry as "pattern language."  This phrase from architecture describes common forms: entrances, transitional spaces, roofs, particular uses for rooms, etc.    In fact, the word 'stanza' comes from the Italian and means 'room.'   Poetry is built; it does have structure.  This structure contains images, sounds, and creates meaning.    When you start to understand these elements, a gate opens and poetry becomes essential.   For me, poetry houses the spirit.    

Poetry's history is in the oral tradition.  It has been used in spiritual or religious ritual.  Prayers are memorized and spoken.   Blessings are given.   Spells are cast.   Traveling minstrels or storytellers instructed and entertained people.  Poetry's patterns allowed for easier memorization. 

"Voice" is key to understanding the poem.  Who is speaking and to whom?  Some poems are public and some very intimate.  Three basic types of poems are 1) narrative, 2) dramatic, and 3) lyric.   I consider the intention of the poet to determine the type of a poem.    The narrative is essentially a story.  A dramatic poem tends to sound like a speech delivered to many. It often engages with important figures and historical events; it might be epic.  The lyric type is similar to song.  

Some poems are 'formal,' meaning that they use a form with prescribed meter, syllables in a line, stanzas, and rhyme.  Sonnets are forms, some are Shakespearean and some Petrarchan. Other forms are the sestina, villanelle, and pantoum.   Individual poets adapt forms to suit their work.  Then there are 'free verse' poems that do not follow a formula.  These might have 'blank verse,' meaning iambic rhythm.  The author of a free verse poem usually establishes his or her own pattern.

The purpose of the poem is also an interesting consideration.   The poet Paul Valery said that prose language is meant to disappear once the meaning is conveyed, but poetry is different.  The particular arrangement of words and rhythm physically affects the reader.   It resists disappearing.  The form itself is compelling and acts as a device that continues to create meaning each time we read it.       

Helen Vendler, an astute literary critic, writes:  "Both John Stuart Mill and T.S. Eliot...thought that the reader 'overhears' the speaker of the lyric, as the audience overhears the soliloquies of Hamlet.  Others...have preferred, as I do myself, to see the reader as the true speaker of the lyric.  In this view, the lyric is a script written for performance by the reader--who, as soon as he enters the lyric, is no longer a reader but rather an utterer, saying the words of the poem in propria persona, internally and with proprietary feeling.  For poems that are overheard, I prefer to keep the name 'dramatic monologue'; in such a poem the reader is genuinely placed in the position of overhearing someone else, clearly not himself, speak aloud to yet another person. I reserve the name 'lyric' for poems that make their reader their solitary speaker."  (from the Introduction of her book, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition)

Poetry does have a strong connection to the body, and the breath of the writer affects that of the reader.    In this way, we breath in and out the images and language, the vision of the poets.

Remnants

Going through a difficult time?  Keep a journal.  A journal is a private document. It is like developing the raw material, mining the ore.  Perhaps it is a remnant. A journal will help you in many ways.  It can contain everything that you bring to it, grief, fear, anger, joy.  It will provide an opportunity to slow down and meditate.  Writing is a tool of the mind; you can sort out your thoughts on paper.   It will be a source book, a place to collect images, sounds, thoughts.  From these remnants, you will develop longer work.  

There is no correct or incorrect way to journal.  Write a lot.  Use the five senses when you write.   Julia Cameron of the The Writer's Way had good advice: 3 pages a day.  If you don't know where to begin, then start with an image or a description.  A person, a place, an object. The best thing is to is not to think too much about what to write, but just to begin.   

Allow yourself to be a beginner; use beginner's mind. Once you are writing, your subject will come to you.  When it comes, accept it. If you are one that works best with deadlines, a 10 minute timed writing is a good idea; but if you are still writing when the bell rings, then keep going.  It may become a poem or a story.   

I found these quotes (unknown author) on the website Creativity in Motion.   https://cim.ou.edu/quotes.html  (If you are interested, check out the Creativity in Motion grant application and information about previously funded projects.)     

“You cannot be a creator AND a victim.”

“You will not find what you do not live.”

“It’s not what you are that holds you back, it’s what you think you’re not.”

Writing Process
Writer's block occurs, in my experience, when you have become a perfectionist or if you trying to impose an idea or a structure too soon.   Do not try to make it perfect!  Get over the obstacle of the self.  Limit your distractions. (Internet, cell phone, family!) This is a work in progress. This is a first draft or sloppy copy. It is merely a ten minute exercise. It is like doodling or sketching.  If it has spelling errors or grammar problems, keep going.  If you find it boring, drop down a level.  Write about what is important to you.   

In this passage from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, the artist Lily Briscoe is outside with an easel:  "She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.  It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her."  


Woolf is talking about the frustration of artists and writers: what you want is not always what appears.  This is common and not of concern when you are journalling.  We create documents made by hand. Flaws can be part of the beauty.  A remnant, if we are to use Woolf's image, may be all you need. Think of women who have created beautiful quilts and garments from remnants. Once you have your raw material, then consider it without early judgment. Discover the strengths of what is on the page. Maybe it wasn't the initial vision, but something else as valuable, a deeper vision.   Revision is designed to develop the strengths.



If you need a safe place to keep a journal, use an online program.  http://www.google.com/docs or
http://www.zoho.com/writer  If you have internet access, these allow you to access your writing (and they are password protected) from any computer at any time.   They are easy to use and free.


Several studies have demonstrated the benefits of keeping a journal. If you write down your goals, you are much more likely to achieve them.  If you keep a journal during recovery from illness, your outcome will improve.  Writing is a source of strength and it help you in many ways. 

Poetry: Not Feeling But Experience

Rilke said, "For poetry isn't, as people imagine, merely feelings (these come soon enough); it is experiences.   To write one line, a man ought to see many cities, people, and things; he must learn and know animals and the way of birds in the air, and how little flowers open in the morning.  One must be able to think back the way to unknown places...and to partings long foreseen, to days of childhood...and to parents...to days on the sea...to nights of travel...and one must have memories of many nights of love, no two alike...and the screams of women in childbed...one must have sat by the dead in a room with open windows....But it is not enough to have memories.  One must be able to forget them and have vast patience until they come again...and when they become blood within us, and glances and gestures...then first it can happen that in a rare hour the first world of a verse may arise and come forth."  (Malte, pp 25-27)
 
Poetry provides an experience; it is physical.  The five senses are activated.  Sometimes people think it is about expressing feelings, but I agree with Rilke that it is about expressing experience.   In this quote, he says that one must have integrated the experience so that it has become part of yourself, in your blood, glances and gestures.   It is, in other words, experience that changes you.    (Writing assignment:  write about something that changed you).

Very good poems can change you.

Read this essay, Mark Doty writing about Rilke's poem, "Archaic Torso of Apollo."

 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19707

Alejandra Pizarnik

I love this fragment from poet Alejandra Pizarnik, from Argentina (1936-1972):

“dije you, perio me referia al alba luminosa…”

“I said I but I was referring to the luminous dawn…”

This is from her work, "Pathways of the Mirror, " from Poems for the Millenium: The Univ of California Book of Modern and Post-Modern Poetry. (1998)

Alejandra Pizarnik:  "If only I were able to live solely in ecstasy, making the body of the poem with my body, redeeming each phrase with my days and weeks, infusing the poem with my breath for each word that has been sacrificed in the ceremonies of living.

"Poetry is the place where everything happens. Similar to love, humor, suicide and every profoundly subversive act, poetry is not interested in that which is not its freedom or truth. To say freedom or truth and refer these words to the world we live in or do not live in is to tell a lie. It isn't when they are attributed to poetry: the place where all is possible."

More information about Pizarnik

This is the work that inspired my poem "I Said I" in Cloud Birds. It echoed the Finnish women poets whose metaphor was woman as landscape.

Why is Poetry Important?

Art strengthens both community and diversity.  Whatever we write about makes it stronger.  Naming is very powerful.   An investment in the arts, in your own and that of others, is an investment in the soul.  Writing and poetry help people during times of transition to see ourselves in a larger context.

Poetry is a pattern language.  It is similar to visual art because it employs image but it creates an auditory or sound environment.

Poems have taught me important things.   They are a way of knowing.   My poems tend to have a voice that is located outside in the landscape as opposed to inside a domestic space.   I draw meaning from the natural world, from rivers and migrations.  

"River begins in the other world/ without time."   (from Undertow)

"near shore another story / places that no longer know me..." (from Echo & Lightning)

My collections of poems, in chapbooks or books or in performances, are mosaics.  The individual poems are arranged in a way to create a larger story.  My stories are not escapist.  Instead of going away from reality, they go into it in ways that alter it for me.

What Do Poems Do?

It's hard to describe exactly what a great poem does. Here are some thoughts: 
  
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
--Emily Dickinson

"Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener. There has to be this transfer of energy."
—Muriel Rukeyser

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."
—Walter Benjamin

Listening to the Work: Thoughts on Writing Fiction and Poetry

Re-vision is an important part of the writing process.     I like to break the syllable to emphasize the word, vision: to see the work again, to see what it can be.   

"I try to make writers actually see what they have written, where the strength is. Usually in fiction there’s something that leaps out—an image or a moment that is strong enough to center the story. If they can see it, they can exploit it, enhance it, and build a fiction that is subtle and new. I don’t try to teach technique, because frankly most technical problems go away when a writer realizes where the life of a story lies. I don’t see any reason in fine-tuning something that’s essentially not going anywhere anyway. What they have to do first is interact in a serious way with what they’re putting on a page. When people are fully engaged with what they’re writing, a striking change occurs, a discipline of language and imagination."  Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, Gilead and Home.

This is an excerpt of an interview in The Paris Review.  This advice works well when you are writing poetry too.  Something leaps out that is strong enough to build the poem around.    This is how you "listen to the work."      It begins by building on the strengths:  enhance the image or the moment.  Create a pattern that emphasizes the strengths.   Take out anything that isn't needed.    Read it aloud.   Listen.   Read it to somebody else.  Listen.    If you have gone deep enough into the poem and become fully engaged, then you will reach the discipline of language and imagination that Robinson mentions. 

Lately, I've been meditating on the fact that poems are small, but they contain memoir, music, and sometimes myth.    Often they capture a moment, a story, a particular set of sounds, a pattern.  Sometimes the pattern is internal to the poem.....a metrical scheme, a stanzaic pattern.  Sometimes this pattern connects to another pattern, a mythic or larger cultural story.   The author Marilynne Robinson has joined the novels to archetype and sacred stories.  The poet can do this too. Poems are very small, but they contain a voice, a landscape, a world, an eternity. 

If you want to read the interview with Marilynne Robinson, go to
http://www.theparisreview.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5863