A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Eighty-Four

The workshop I lead this afternoon seemed to go quite well and I received a lot of very positive feedback from the participants.  I had a lot of fun with it, really, and found it a great way to get myself thinking about craft.  As well, having decided that I wanted the poems we looked at to be new, so that the participants would all likely be seeing them for the first time, I read through a whole bunch of recent journals, and I found a lot of great new poetry that I had not encountered before, some by poets I know well, others by new names that I was encountering for the first time.  It gave me a real chance to look closely at some of the work that is being published these days, and to consider it in deeper and more specific terms than I normally would.

The premise of the class was looking at the issue of how writer's load meaning into language.  Consider that a piece of writing is a mono-track: reader's can only perceive a word at a time.  Yet, a poet has to be creating work that is polyphonic in meaning.  In everyday language, we rely upon words to signify something specific, and we generally use language primarily on that level of literal meanings.  However, a poem cannot do just that, or it isn't really a poem.  It must use language to do more than just mean in that sense.  This is achieved, of course, by using language in a way that creates several different meanings at the same time.  Some of this is the sound, of course, music being a primary factor for a poet, but it is also to do with the way a writer can use language to point at things in the world.  In class, I used the example of the word "apple".  I asked what it brought to mind, and one person said "the Garden of Eden," so I asked if others had that association.  No one raised their hand, but when I asked if the word "garden" were used in the sentence, more did, and once the word "sin" was mentioned, everyone acknowledged that would be in their mind.  That is a fairly obvious example, of course, but that is, I think, why it exemplifies the point so well.

So, in the class, we looked at a selection of poems to explore how the writer used language to build meaning.  In some cases, it was poetry that used a specific reference.  In others it was using a kind of language that carries a context, or juxtaposing different linguistic textures.  The point was to explore how a poet points at the world around them in a poem, and uses it to imbue meaning beyond the literal into the work.  Below are the prompts that I handed out.  We only did a few of them in class, due to time, but I did give out the rest and hope that some of the people in class will find the rest useful in some way.  

1.       Write a poem that uses a well known phrase as a jumping off point.  It might be a line from a poem, song, or story, or it could be a common idiom, or even from an advertising slogan.  See how you can use the context of that piece of language as a contrast point for your poem.

2.       

     Describe a scene or activity using technical language or jargon that is not connected to the subject.   For example, describe folding laundry using the language of a recipe, or write a description of driving to work with plumbers jargon.  All of us have specific areas of interest or education that involve a certain specialized language, see what happens when you apply that language out of context.

3.       

`     Write a poem that combines disparate voices, for example altering between dialects, or mixing slang with heightened diction. 

4.       Write about an abstract concept in the form of a set of instructions, perhaps numbering them.

5.       Pick a “loaded” word and write a piece that repeats that word, perhaps providing examples or definitions for the ideas it represents.

6.       Start a poem with an emotionless description of an observable phenomenon, then describe a more resonant scene that resembles that description.

7.       Write several descriptions of the same image, each one in a specific kind of language, some of which may be entirely metaphorical.  See how these fragments play off of each other.  Order them into a poem, adding material between if you wish.

8.       Compose a poem made up entirely of lines borrowed from other writing.  Use at least three sources, alternating between sources as you wish, but never using two lines from the same source in a row.  Consider using writing that is not poetic as at least one of the sources, maybe even something like a brochure, text book, technical manual, or something equally mundane in it’s approach to language.

I did also write three new poems today, and I am pretty happy about them, I think.  I've not started the novel yet, but I plan to get on that tomorrow.