Poppa Pound says, Make it new. Poetry professors say, Steal. So how do you reconcile these? I say, Memorize poems.
Ok, I’m fully aware that folks don’t always get excited to memorize and recite poems, but stick with me on this. It’s better than the vegetable argument of, They taste bad, but they’re good for you. I think memorizing poems lets you have/steal the cake and make it new.
Because this is what I think memorization does: it encourages another writer’s voice/tone/syntax, whatever, something about their sensibility, to echo in your head, to sit back as this constantly open book. The more you memorize, obviously, the bigger the book, and the more echoes bounce around unconsciously. Chances are, after bouncing around against our own writerly sensibilities, those lines we memorize might stick and viola! the Tried and True becomes part of you.
And for the love of everything alliterated, you wouldn’t want to have echoes of poetry you hate. Read more »
You might remember this prompt. It starts with asking students to draw a map of some location. If it’s for a memoir, the location is inevitably some childhood memory place, where the student’s family held derby parties or where the bourbon distillery caught fire. The students spends several minutes drawing this map, filling in the neighborhood, the creeks and rivers, the knob where she/he played king of the hill and where later, Bigfoot was sighted by a drunk. Then the student uses the map as a writing aid and learns to fill in the setting while writing.
(For extra fun, the students may make a list of different events that happened in the same location—where they had derby parties was the same place that they broke a window with a baseball—and write two or three events that describe the same place differently, because the remembered emotion is different.)
I’ve done this prompt several times, and I’ve assigned it over and over again. Now I finally know what to do with all of these maps after the exercise has been completed. Read more »
This isn’t a review because I haven’t finished reading yet, or looking. But I figured I’d say some things about this book that is folded like an accordion into a box.
I’ve profoundly admired Canadian poet/classicist Anne Carson ever since I found her book Autobiography of Red in a stairwell in the East Village several years ago (in the same pile, in fact, as another book that thereafter became one of my favorites– Journey to the End of the Night).
Though Carson is known for keeping her personal stories private, Nox is an art book/scrapbook of sorts that pieces together bits of letters, old photos, and words relating to the disappearance of her older brother in 1978 and his eventual death in 2000. The thread holding these bits of gathered information together is a poem by the Roman poet Catallus, which Carson translates word by word in litany-like “lexical entries.” The book is essentially a high quality photocopy rendition of a notebook Carson began to staple things into after her brother’s death–collecting what she knew about him.
What happens when one’s experience of the world and her intellectual imagining of it are in vast contrast with each other? How does she reconcile what seems to be true internally with reality as it manifests itself in the outside world? In Arianne Zwartjes’ collection The Surfacing of Excess, which won the prestigious Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry in 2009, Zwartjes explores these questions through an examination of flight and the inability of humans to move beyond the ground despite our highest philosophical and scientific advancements.
Through the ideas and lives of Simone Weil, Plato, Italo Calvino, Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Rumi, and many other writers and thinkers; Zwartjes moves through the labyrinth that is human consciousness and perception dissecting the emotional life with language that is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel. In the opening poem, “Parts of the Feather,” the speaker is Weil, the early twentieth century philosopher and activist who believed reality to be unprovable and language to be “indispensible and inaccurate” (from her Lectures on Philosophy).
But still. It’s thesis time for many grad students, which means countless hours in front of a computer screen, often staring at Microsoft Word documents. Oh, the horror of spell check and grammar check.
Now that summer school at the Colorado School of Mines has started, I keep thinking about the class I taught last summer and about one student in particular.
Derk Slottow was the kind of student who would politely say, “Are you sure it’s pronounced Shtalin?” when all the other students just sat back and enjoyed watching me make a fool of myself.
He was the kind of student who, after we read twenty poems aloud, would say, “Can we read some more poems?”
He was the kind of student who always had insightful things to say about the literature we were discussing. He became one of the students I kept in mind as I planned the class and selected which information would be useful to include in lecture and which poems would be fun to analyze.
One of the first things I found out about Derk was that he loved kayaking. And then a couple weeks into the summer, he died in a kayaking accident. People say, At least he died doing something he loved and I suppose I should be happy about that.
But it makes me crazy that he was taken by the Cache La Poudre River. He was a master kayaker. He was president of the kayaking club. His friends say that if he had an hour between classes he’d spend 45 minutes kayaking Clear Creek. I’m sure he knew river currents and emergency protocols. But somehow he hit his head, rendering all of his knowledge and years of experience useless. His kayaking partner gave him CPR and then walked two miles to find a Rocky Mountain National Park Ranger. Read more »
I came across this adaptation of Camus’ The Fall earlier today. The more I watch it, the more I appreciate it. You’re gonna lose some content from muting, drawing, and casting a monologue into motion, of course, and the leaf metaphor is a little obvious, but it’s kinda cool, and having recently reread it, pretty on-point.
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