The Final Tally

Let me start by saying again how proud I am — both for the hard work you've done all quarter long, but especially for your gorgeous chapbooks.  I hope you're just as proud, and that you're enjoying a restful spring break.

You might not have believed I'd actually do this (some of you, perhaps, prayed that I wouldn't), but I just spent a few hours going through every workshop thread and every prompt thread on Blackboard to put together a final tally of everyone's participation in the workshop.  In some cases, the numbers are pretty disheartening, but I'd rather focus on the more positive ones first:

• There were six students who fully lived up to the responsibilities of the workshop and posted review comments to every single workshop thread: Patrick, Morgan, Alex, Adam B., Sammy and Amanda V.  I don't want to undercut their achievement in any way, but frankly, that number's flat-out pathetic, and ideally all eighteen of you would've done this.
• All but four of you did the required number of eight prompts, however two students (Alex and Sammy) did all ten, and another two (Anne and Amanda V.) did nine, both of which are spectacular.  Those students who slacked-off here don't bother me quite as much, as they only hurt themselves, whereas those who didn't post workshop comments let their classmates down.
• Towards that end, there were six students altogether whose skipped comments numbered in the double-digits, including two who had more than 20.  Considering that you were all forewarned that I'd be taking stock of participation, and you had extra time to remedy this, the scale here is quite disappointing.  But back to positive news . . .

As I said very early on in the quarter, a good number of you will be receiving A-level grades, and I'm happy to be able to give out so many — you gave yourselves over to the workshop experience, did a lot of hard work, and produced not only beautiful, imaginative chapbooks, but also accomplished final portfolios that demonstrated growth over the course of the term.  Even those of you who won't be getting As have developed considerably, but unfortunately a workshop is a social contract and if you haven't lived up to the deal see that reflected in your final grade.

I'll be sending each of you a brief note discussing your performance in the class, and I hope you'll keep in touch with news of your achievements through the Facebook group.  We already have one bit of good news to share: Short Vine's editors have selected two poems by Amanda V. to be included in the online winter issue (which will launch next Monday).  I encourage all of you to submit work for the spring print issue, as well the English Department's annual poetry prizes, and will post info on those when it becomes available.

Writing Prompt #10: Joe Brainard Remembers. Do You?

The late, great Joe Brainard (shown here outside of New York poets' oasis Gem Spa) was well-known as both an artist and writer, though far more prolific as the former than the latter.  While much of his literary focus was directed towards covers and illustrations for books by his New York School friends (including Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett,  Anne Waldman, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery) he did leave behind one modest yet indelible masterpiece: I Remember.  First published in three small volumes from the independent press Angel Hair — I Remember (1970), I Remember More (1972) and More I Remember More (1973) — that were brought together in its present form in 1975.  I Remember has continued to captivate audiences in the intervening decades, with Paul Auster praising it as "one of the few totally original books I have ever read," and both Georges Perec and Gilbert Adair creating book-length interpretations of their own.

The power of I Remember lies in its simplicity and imitability.  Consisting of hundreds of short prose passages, each consisting of a single memory and beginning with the words "I remember," Brainard's book calls out for us to mimic his form, documenting our own lived experiences in a similar fashion. Here are some selections from the book, cut and pasted from web sources:

I remember when, in high school, if you wore green and yellow on Thursday it meant that you were queer.

I remember when, in high school, I used to stuff a sock in my underwear.

I remember that for my fifth birthday all I wanted was an off-one-shoulder black satin evening gown. I got it. And I wore it to my birthday party.

I remember my first sexual experience in a subway. Some guy (I was afraid to look at him) got a hard-on and was rubbing it back and forth against my art. I got very excited and when my stop came I hurried out and home where I tried to do an oil painting using my dick as a brush.

I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old.

I remember the first time I got a letter that said “After Five Days Return To” on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.

I remember the kick I used to get going through my parents’ drawers looking for rubbers. (Peacock.)

I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world.

I remember pink dress shirts. And bola ties.

I remember when a kid told me that those sour clover-like leaves we used to eat (with little yellow flowers) tasted so sour because dogs peed on them. I remember that didn’t stop me from eating them.

I remember the first drawing I remember doing. It was of a bride with a very long train.

I remember my first cigarette. It was a Kent. Up on a hill. In Tulsa, Oklahoma. With Ron Padgett.

I remember my first erections. I thought I had some terrible disease or something.

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.

I remember when my father would say "Keep your hands out from under the covers" as he said goodnight. But he said it in a nice way.

I remember when I thought that if you did anything bad, policemen would put you in jail.

I remember Dorothy Collins.

I remember Dorothy Collins’ teeth.

I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.

I remember my grade school art teacher, Mrs Chick, who got so mad at a boy one day she dumped a bucket of water over his head.

I remember Moley, the local freak and notorious queer. He had a very little head that grew out of his body like a mole. No one knew him, but everyone knew who he was. He was always ‘around’.

I remember liver.

I remember when hoody boys wore their blue jeans so low that the principal had to put a limit on that too. I believe it was three inches below the navel.

I remember one football player who wore very light faded blue jeans, and the way he filled them.

I remember when my father would say ‘Keep your hands out from under the covers’ as he said good night. But he said it in a nice way.

I remember the chair I used to put my boogers behind.

I remember ‘queers can’t whistle’.

I remember how many other magazines I had to buy in order to buy one physique magazine.

I remember a girl in school one day who, just out of the blue, went into a long spiel all about how difficult it was to wash her brother’s pants because he didn’t wear underwear.

I remember a pinkish-red rubber douche that appeared in the bathroom every now and then, and not knowing what it was, but somehow knowing enough not to ask.

I remember a little boy who said it was more fun to pee together than alone, and so we did, and so it was.

I remember ‘dress up time’ (Running around pulling up girl’s dresses yelling ‘dress up time’).

I remember a fat man who sold insurance. One hot summer day we went to visit him and he was wearing shorts and when he sat down one of his balls hung out.

I remember that it was hard to look at it and hard not to look at it too.

I remember a very early memory of an older girl in a candy store. The man asked her what she wanted and she picked out several things and then he asked her for her money and she said. ‘Oh, I don’t have any money. You just asked me what I wanted, and I told you.’ This impressed me to no end.

While these excerpts aren't all contiguous (they're pasted from three different places) you can get a sense of how certain themes and ideas carry over from one remembrance to another, and also how one memory can spur another, whether directly or obliquely.  Also, while all of these memories relate to Brainard's childhood, there are great many in the book that are more contemporaneous, dating from a few weeks or a few years ago vs. a few decades ago.

So for this assignment, I'd like you to stoke the fires of your memory and see what comes out.  Don't feel any restrictions in regards to length — you can be as long or as short as you'd like.

Your Final Portfolios / Our Final Meeting

We've discussed this in class last week, but to reiterate for those of you who were absent (and there were quite a few of you), you'll be expected to hand in a final portfolio at the end of the term.  This will include the following things:

1. Revisions of 5-6 poems that you wrote this term (either poems that were workshopped formally or poems that you wrote in response to our various prompts), including both the original and revised versions along with a brief explanation (a few sentences for each) of what changes you made, how workshop comments affected your alterations, etc.
2. Two (2) copies of your finished chapbook (for me), plus a copy for everyone else in the workshop (so 19 copies altogether) — you can make it an even 20 (at the bare minimum) so you'll have a copy for yourself. * 
3. Proof of having submitted work to at least one literary journal (other than Short Vine).
4. A final evaluation of your experience in our workshop (details below).

* However,  I encourage you to make a larger set (say 40-50 copies) so you can distribute them to friends and family.  While printing/photocopying costs will increase in this case, you won't really be spending more in terms of paper, cover stock, etc. as you'll be buying a lot more than you'll use, even if you split with a few classmates.

For your final evaluation, I'd like you to answer the following questions, with your overall essay running to about 2.5-3 pages in length:

1. In what ways have your poetics — or the way in which you think about poetry, it's meaning, its usefulness, etc. — changed over the course of this workshop?  How would you describe your poetics now?
2. Have your compositional habits changed at all due to this workshop, and if so, how?  What prompt(s) did you find most useful and which one(s) could you just not get into?
3. Did this workshop live up to your expectations (or, perhaps, exceed them)?  What would you say were the most useful things that you'll take away from this experience?

Also, it goes without saying that you should be caught up with any and all workshop evaluations of your classmates, and should have posted responses to at least 8 of the 10 workshop prompts I've posted throughout the quarter.

We won't be having a final in this class, but I'd like to make use of the time that's allotted to us for a final for one last meeting as a group — especially since our last class during week 10 will be taken up mostly with workshopping our final poets.   Our final is scheduled for 1:30-3:30 on Thursday, March 17th and will take place in our usual classroom, so we'll meet then and there. Like any other final, I'd like to stress this as a mandatory meeting and therefore hope that there won't be any issues in regards to absence.  During this meeting time, everyone will distribute their chapbooks to the rest of the workshop and we'll spend a little time looking them over and talking about the process of making them.  We'll also spend some time summing up our experiences throughout the quarter, guided by your responses to the self-evaluation above.

I'm being somewhat generous in that I'd originally intended to have everyone turn in at least some of these materials — at the very least, the chapbooks — during the last week of class, and as a result you'll have an extra week to work on both.  In return for this extra time, I must insist that everyone is present for our final meeting and ready with everything that needs to be handed in (and failing to do this will have negative consequences).

We can talk about all of this briefly tomorrow before moving on to our workshop poems.

Some Useful Information For Your Chapbooks

In addition to thinking about the poems you'll select for your final portfolio and chapbook, you should already be giving some thought to the design and binding for your chapbook.  Hopefully the time we spent a few classes back going through a wide array of possible constructions, sizes, shapes and bindings was useful, and to help you as you more actively start planning, here are a few how-tos that might be of use:

• A primer on Japanese book-sewing techniques, taken from the Boy Scouts's magazine Boy's Life
• WikiBooks' tutorial on Zine Making has a tremendous amount of worthwhile information in regards to binding possibilities, layout, etc.
• Poets and Writers tutorial on how to make a saddle-stitched chapbook

Aside from the content of your book, you'll want to think about things like your cover materials, art and layout.  The easiest and cheapest option is to buy what's called cover stock (here's an example from Staples; Office Depot has some different options for colors) — it's a sturdy card stock that comes in a variety of colors, from pastels and neutrals to brights, and that will pass through either a photocopier or a printer without difficulty.  You might want to simply print in black on your covers, or use a combination of stamps, cut-outs glued to the cover, or embossing to create your design.  A variety images will print well over this sort of stock, from simpler line drawings to photographs, or you can go with a purely textual design.  An interesting compromise might be to make a design that uses only text, but manipulated in an abstract way.  Ron Silliman's latest book, The Alphabet, has a cover by Geof Huth that's constructed out of letters (see at right).  Once your card stock comes out of the printer or copier it will likely have warped a little from the heat of the condenser, so stack them (waiting until they've dried if the ink hasn't set) and then put a few heavy books over them so they'll flatten out again.  You might also wish to use endpapers — a single sheet of paper, often colored, patterned or textured — that goes between the cover and the interior pages.  Again, browsing the aisles of your local office supply warehouse will give you some ideas for possibilities: you might wish to use a complementary color (the last book I made, for example, had bright red endpapers to liven up the ash-grey covers), or you can use vellum (tracing paper), some sort of patterned writing paper, or hell, cut sheets to fit out of the newspaper.  I've always done layout for covers in PowerPoint (my favorite free and ubiquitous image compositor), which allows you to easily resize images, match them in terms of size, create and manipulate text boxes, etc.  When putting your covers together, don't forget that the front will be the righthand side, the back the left.

For interior layout, here are a few recommendations.  First, you can accomplish a lot in Microsoft Word, setting the page layout as landscape and then creating two columns.  You have built-in rulers to measure distance from edges and widths of text, which is helpful.  Be sure to leave enough breathing room around the edges of of the page, as well as on the left margin of the righthand column (for the last project I put together, I left a half-inch at both the top and the bottom, set the right margin and the space between columns at an inch each, and left a half-inch as the far-right margin).  You'll want to decide upon a standard format for your chapbook: What font will you use?  What size (I recommend using a 10 or 11 pt., no larger)?  What size will you make your titles (you can make them the same size or increase by 2pts. of the body text)?  Will you underline them?  Will you center them or make them flush left?  How many lines will you skip before your title, and how many between your title and the start of the poem?  Finally, after you've decided on your list of poems, I wholeheartedly making two different page layouts — start by posting the title page, blank pages and poems in the order you want them to appear, simply going from column to column, and getting an idea of when and where a poem will go over to a second page, if there will be issues with margins, etc.  Then save this document once under some name, and resave under a second name.  Keep both documents open at the same time, and start shifting around the material so that it'll be in the order you'll want to print in.  If all else fails and this becomes way too frustrating for you, it's fine to either construct a chapbook that doesn't require folding or to just print on one side of the page (technically, this is called the "recto," i.e. the righthand page; the lefthand page is the "verso").

Before printing sufficient numbers of covers and book guts to make your print run, I recommend printing just one copy and assembling it, so that you can troubleshoot problematic layouts, issues with fonts, margins, etc.  Once you've made any necessary changes, then go ahead and print.  When I've done these sorts of projects in the past, I've used a laserwriter printer (usually at the office I was working in) to print the covers, and have used a photocopier with duplexing capabilities to produce the necessary number of sets of book guts (note: if you opt to photocopy, never use the photo settings — I know that it seems like it will produce a higher-quality image, but it will make your text fuzzy).  One final decision you'll need to make is what paper to use.  In the past, I've used thicker, higher-quality paper with a high cotton content (what's called thesis or resume paper), and this not only gives the book more heft, but also makes your pages less transparent.  A box of this sort of paper can run you $30-40 however, so a few of you might want to chip in and split one, or just use regular copy paper.  Think of the math this way: if you're making a 16-page book, then you're going to need 4 sheets per book, and say you're making 40 books, then that's 160 pages altogether.  A ream has 500 sheets, so three of you can split a box of thesis paper, have 20 sheets leftover for screwups or damaged pages, and pay about $10 each.  Or if you're making 40 24-page books (6 sheets) two of you can split a ream for $15 each.

Also, don't forget that you can literally cut your costs in half by making smaller chapbooks (two to a sheet/set of paper) and then cutting them in half with a guillotine, however this isn't for the faint of heart, and you run the risk of ruining huge amounts of your printed components with imprecise cutting.  I don't recommend the guillotine for the faint of heart.  And though copying and/or printing costs something there are ways around it — hit up a parent or sibling who has access to a copier or laserwriter at work, or shop around to find a cheaper option.  The print shop in the basement of McMicken is relatively cheap, only a few cents a page.

In general, I recommend splitting costs if at all possible, whether that's buying a sampler of cover stock and divvying up the individual colors, splitting paper, sharing a needle and a spool of thread, or going in on a stapler together.  It's also not a terrible idea to team up in terms of production.  You might not believe it, but once all of your printing is done, you can put together 40 or 50 books in half an hour while watching television, but you can invite a few classmate over, and knock out all of your books in an hour then celebrate with the non-alcoholic beverage of your choice.

We can talk about the ins and outs of book production in our free time over the next few classes, and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you might have via e-mail or during my office hours as well.

Additionally, here are some supplies you might want to consider purchasing, depending on how you want to lay out your chapbooks:

Saddle/Booklet Staplers: I've looked around the web and haven't been able to find a small hand-held booklet stapler like the one I showed you in class, but here are a few relatively inexpensive options if you'd like to invest in one:

• Sparco Stapler (only 1 left) - $11
• Sparco Long-Reach Stapler (appears to be the same as above but $4 more) - $15
• Stanley Anti-Jam Long-Reach Stapler - $23
• Swingline Long-Reach Stapler - $29
• Stanley Anti-Jam Booklet Stapler - $36

Of course, there are a number of ways you can design/bind your chapbooks that won't require a saddle stapler (including using a size smaller than 8.5 x 6.5 [i.e. standard copy paper folded in half], stapling through the edge of the cover, sewing, using elastic thread in a loop, etc.), but if you want to minimize some other complications, you'll likely need a long-reach or saddle stapler.  You might also want to purchase some sort of bone folder or guitar slide, to help you make a hard crease easily and without the risk of papercuts.  Here are some options on Amazon:

• Bone Folders
• Guitar Slides

Writing Prompt #9: Emotional/Temporal Axes

Amanda V. requested a writing prompt inspired by Yusef Komunyakaa and I'm always up for a challenge, so here you go!  Komunyakaa is perhaps best known for his work dealing with his tour of duty in Vietnam from 1969-1970 — an experience that  would have a vivid and indelible effect upon him for decades after the fact — as well as his life after the war.  His best known poem is undoubtedly "Facing It," which deals with a visit to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., however I've chosen a different poem, one of my favorites from his collected works, to base your exercise on: "You and I Are Disappearing"

You and I Are Disappearing

The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak

she burns like a piece of paper.

She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.

We stand with our hands

hanging at our sides,
while she burns

like a sack of dry ice.

She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,

silent as quicksilver.

A tiger under a rainbow
    at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
    to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind. 

 

 

What I find most striking about this poem is the very effective tension Komunyakaa achieves between emotional depth and tempo: the poem reads like an eternal moment, drawn out painfully and ultimately never resolved, while Komunyakaa fills that everlasting interval with great psychological resonance, carried out through a number of viscerally rich images, as well as a steady litany of "She (burns)."  While it might be enough to stretch the moment out alone, or to rush through a poem built out of strong imagery, Komunyakaa weds the two techniques and the emotive power of the poem is increased exponentially — it's almost as if you could graph the poem with X and Y axes corresponding to time and emotion and come up with something like the image you see here (forgive me, more math-minded students in the workshop, there's a reason I'm an English professor).

So what I'd like you to is play around with the linked strengths of these two basic components of your poetry.  You don't have to necessarily work in the way Komunyakaa does — instead, you can work with speed instead of slowness — but try to match the tempo of your poem with an appropriate emotional or imagistic gravity.  To achieve this, you might want to play around with variations of things like line length,  sentence length (vs. line length), stanza length, rhythm and meter, alliteration (i.e. percussive consonant sounds falling in close succession or with long pauses in-between).  Breath will come into play here, as well as presentation on the page (you could work in more of an open-field mode).  Especially in an intro-level workshop like this, you might put all of your focus into getting one of these facets of your poem right, but now that we're in week eight, you've had enough experience to start thinking about doing two things simultantously.

Writing Prompt #8: (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises

Our latest prompt is a bit of a change of direction — while several of our recent exercises were intended to help you fine-tune certain rudimentary  poetic techniques, this week, we're thinking about new ways of generating language, specifically, ways that take physicality into account.

CAConrad (above), whose work some of you have already seen on our Facebook page, has been working for several years on a series of "(Soma)tic Poetry Exercises," which  engage the body and its sensations as a way of stimulating the mind to poetry.  He explains the ideas behind these exercises as follows:

Soma is an Indo-Iranian ritual drink made from pressing particular psychedelic and energizing plants together. In Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions the drink is identified with the divine. The word Soma is derived from the Sanskrit and Indo-European tongues meaning "to press and be newly born."

Somatic is derived from the Greek, meaning the body. In different medical disciplines it can mean different things, from a cell or tissue, or to the part of the nervous system that controls sensations and movements.

My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration.

He also adds the following caveat:

[The (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises] are free to everyone who wants to write some poetry, but I strongly suggest you do not write documentary poetry from them. Use the experiences as little car crashes for your life to write from — in other words my dears use these to write from, not of, thank you, you're fucking geniuses, now get writing!

From my own wonderful experience taking part in one of Conrad's (soma)tic workshops this past fall, I can report that much of the usefulness of these sorts of exercises lies in your willingness to give in to the process fully — you subject yourself to certain physical and/or mental conditions, and then stay open to the words, the ideas, the images, the free associations that are generated within that mindset.  You might not write for fifteen or twenty minutes, then write non-stop for just as long.  As many of the instructions suggest, take copious notes on your experience, that is, be sure to capture the language that's generated through these processes — it might not be a finished poem at first, but you can take that raw material and work with it and come up with something spectacular.  Just as importantly, you're very likely to feel wonderful after spending time doing one of these, because you're paying attention to your body, which is something that often gets lost in our busy lives.

You can browse through the entire list of exercises on Conrad's blog, but for this week, I've selected a few favorites to get you started:

• #45: Mugged into Poetry
• #37: Touch Yourself for Art
• #32: You in Your Soup
• #29: Shopping Mall Trees

For each exercise, be sure to read the poem that's linked on the exercise thread, if there is one, so you can see an example of how these practices yield finished products, and if there are filters, be sure to click on the link for an explanation of what that entails.

I've created a thread on Blackboard where you can post your (soma)tic poems, and if you'd like to read more work created through the process, here's a link to recordings from Conrad's chapbook (Soma)tic Midge (scroll down to the third set of poems in this session).  Here are links to the poems for Red and Green.

Workshop Schedule: Round 3

Since no one objected to me randomly choosing lead reviewers, what I've done is taken the presentation schedule from round 2 and reversed it (and if someone got themselves, I swapped them with the next person in line -- this happened with Mike and Adam B.; I also swapped Jen out as Anne's lead reviewer as lead reviewed this round, and did the same with Livia as Maggie's reviewer):

Tuesday, Feb. 22

• Nick (lead reviewer: Alex)
• Jen (lead reviewer: Nick)
• Amanda V. (lead reviewer: Adam W.)

Thursday,  Feb. 24

• Mike (lead reviewer: Anne)
• Stephen (lead reviewer: Mike)
• Sammy (lead reviewer: Amanda S.)

Tuesday, March 1

• Livia (lead reviewer: Amanda V.)
• Amanda S. (lead reviewer: Morgan)
• Patrick (lead reviewer: Maggie)

Thursday, March 3

• Adam B. (lead reviewer: Tony)
• Claron (lead reviewer: Adam B.)
• Katlyn (lead reviewer: Sammy)

Tuesday, March 8

• Morgan (lead reviewer: Livia)
• Maggie (lead reviewer: Katlyn)
• Adam W. (lead reviewer: Patrick)

Thursday, March 10

• Anne (lead reviewer: Claron)
• Tony (lead reviewer: Jen)
• Alex (lead reviewer: Stephen)

Journal Database Project

As we've discussed before, one of your final projects for the end of the term is providing proof that you've submitted a poem or poems to at least one journal, and to aid you in this process (and, hopefully, in future literary endeavors) we'll be assembling a database of literary journals that publish poetry. 

Each student will be responsible for writing brief profiles of two (2) journals, providing answers to the following questions:

• Website URL
• Is this solely an online journal?  Solely print?  Print and online?
• What is their submission window (rolling, open during certain months, etc.)?
• What is their preferred submission method (mail, e-mail, online submission manager)?
• How many pages/poems will they accept?
• Do they accept simultaneous submissions (i.e. can you send the same poem there and somewhere else at the same time)?
• How would you characterize this journal?  Is it student-run or independent?   Traditionalist or experimental?  How long has it been around?
• What notable poets (if any) have been published in it recently?
• Give an example of a poem or two (ideally with link) that you read in this journal and liked.

You'll want to make sure that the journals you choose are ones where undergraduate poets might reasonably expect to be published (though don't feel upset if your work is rejected -- it happens to all of us, a lot), so please leave the biggest venues The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, etc. off the list.  Also, you'll want to make sure that the journals you profile are still active — make sure that their last news update wasn't in 2007, or that their submission guidelines page lists a deadline of October 31, 2009 — though this can be deceptive.  Coconut, for example, a once pretty great online journal hasn't updated in two or three years, not that you can tell from their site.  Those of you who are special ed. majors might want to consider professional journals or newsletters within your field that might accept work.  Those of you who're active readers of contemporary poetry should look in the acknowledgments of books you like to see where those poets are publishing to get ideas, or feel free to profile your favorite journals.

All of this will be posted in Blackboard, and you'll want to reserve journals by putting up the titles as soon as you find one you like.  All profiles will be due on March 1st, and I'll compile everything into one document.  To help get you started, here are a few long lists of literary journals:

• Poets & Writers' guide to lit. mags
• NewPages Guide to Best Lit. Mags
• A similar list organized by Rutgers

Finally, though this doesn't count towards your required submission, I wholeheartedly recommend that you consider submitting work to Short Vine, UC's undergraduate literary journal.  We're open for submissions to our online Winter issue from today until the 28th, and I'll paste the complete call for submissions below:

Short Vine, UC's student-run undergraduate literary journal, will be supplementing its annual print issue with quarterly online issues starting this winter.

Our first issue of Short Vine Online will be coming out at the end of the quarter, and will be open to submissions for the next two weeks.  Please send up to three poems or one short story (up to 25 pages in length) to shortvine2011@gmail.com along with a brief bio, no later than February 28th.  Work should be sent as attachments in Word or Rich Text Format, with your name and title in the filename.  Please indicate in the subject line whether your submission is poetry or fiction.

All UC undergraduates are welcome to submit work to Short Vine, regardless of their major.

For more information, please visit our Facebook page.


- the Short Vine editorial team

Writing Prompt #7: Abecedarian Hijinks

"ABC" (shown above) is perhaps one of former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's most infamous poems, and a classic example of the abecedarian form.  A lot of the exercises I've given you have dealt with the nuts and bolts of language and this one is no exception, as, of course, there's no more rudimentary raw material for poetry (or any other writing) than the alphabet itself.  So I'm asking you to write something that considers the alphabet from an inclusive perspective.  This might take one of several forms:

• a straight, minimalist ABC poem like Pinsky's with 26 words in alphabetical order
• some variation on this, using all of the letters but in mixed order
• a 26 line poem in which each line begins with a letter in alphabetical order
• some variation on this, but mixing the order
• a "quick brown fox" poem (as in "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," a pangram, or phrase that uses all of the letters of the alphabet -- you may choose to use as few or as many additional letters as you'd like: see here for some crazy examples).

Part of the trick of this assignment is figuring out how to deal with the less common letters (for example, taken together  J, X, Q and Z account for less than one half of 1% of the letters used in the English language).  Accounting for these letters (and other uncommon ones like Y, P, B, V and K — all used less than 2% of the time) will force you to bring words that you otherwise wouldn't have thought of, therefore expanding your poetic vocabulary.  

Have fun with this assignment, but don't be lazy!  Challenge yourself to use the alphabet in ways that you hadn't considered before, and post the results on Blackboard for us all to see.

Writing Prompt #6: Into the Archives

As I mentioned in class yesterday, this is less of a prompt and more of a useful reminder.  Whether you've been writing for a few months or a few years, you probably have some unused material lying around in your archives: maybe just a great title that you've never used, a few scattered lines or even almost-ready pieces that were abandoned for some reason and never picked up again.

So I'm encouraging you to take a look at those computer files, those e-mails, those old notebooks, and see what you can do with it.  I'm a big fan of cooking competitions like Chopped (watch below) where the contestants are given unexpected raw materials and expected to come up with something great in a flash.

 

We leave old projects behind for a number of reasons — including the fact that they're just not good — but I've often been happily surprised to go back to a forgotten document and find something that I like a lot, and have even found fully-formed poems that I'm very happy with.  While it's rare to find a complete poem, it's very likely that you'll find a few good lines, or a good image, something you can work with, whether that means using it as as starting point for new writing or combining them with similar materials from other abandoned poems to make a new/old poem.

For example, I just finished a poem for a collection on the topic of alchemy that drew together lines from old computer files and old notebooks from over the past 17 years — whiny notebook mewlings from high school, college poems, essays from my working years, grad school stories, etc., which was combined with new material to make something that attempted to approximate my entire writing life.    You can do the same thing, even if your writing life has only been a few months!

This is a particularly good exercise when your writerly esteem needs a bit of a boost or the words just aren't flowing, or as an exercise unto itself.  I'll make a thread on Blackboard where folks can post any poems that they come up with through this method.

Writing Prompt #5: Dream Logic

I'm giving you two writing prompts at once because while you can start on #4 right away, this one is going to take a little time to do properly.  This one's borrowed from Bernadette Mayer's (in)famous "experiments list", from her workshops in the 1970s at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City.  Here's how she explains the writing assignment:

Dream work: record dreams daily, experiment with translation or transcription of dream thought, attempt to approach the tense and incongruity appropriate to the dream, work with the dream until a poem or song emerges from it, use the dream as an alert form of the mind's activity or consciousness, consider the dream a problem-solving device, change dream characters into fictional characters, accept dream's language as a gift.

Mayer proposes keeping a journal of your dreams (one of several journals all going simultaneously) and there are many ways in which you can do that, from keeping a notebook near your bed to using your phone in a variety of ways: leave yourself a voice-mail, use a text-to-speech program to transcribe your dictation, or  (my favorite) send yourself an e-mail (I use a consistent subject, "Line," so that I can easily search for and find all such notes I've sent myself — perhaps you'd want to use "Dreams").

One question to keep in mind, as Mayer notes, is how to represent the odd logic of dreams properly in the poetic setting.  How can something be both realistic and surrealistic at the same time, or how can you render the jumpy narrative, the surprises, the abrupt endings (i.e. waking up) of dreams in your poetry.   Additionally, you might want to consider whether to clearly identify your poem's source in dreams, or present it in a more straightforward manner, letting its oddness, its lack of coherence, present a challenge to your reader.

Because you can't will yourself to dream, I'm putting this prompt up now, but not setting a deadline for completion, however when (and/or if) you write a dream poem (or poems) please post it in the appropriate forum on Blackboard.

Writing Prompt #4: Steinian Still-Life

While Gertrude Stein (left) is best known for epic  books such as The Making of Americans or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, many poets' favorite Stein work is a slender, modest volume first published in 1914 entitled Tender Buttons.  Broken into three sub-sections (Objects, Food, Rooms), each consisting of hybrid-genre portraits of inanimate objects, Tender Buttons subjugates meaning to music, finding new meanings in a tired old language, as well as a great deal of rhythm and sonority.  Put more simply, they don't mean much, but they sound great.  Tender Buttons is a meta-poetic work, that is writing about writing (or writing that explores and challenges the expressive potential of writing), or more succinctly, writing for writing's sake.  Here are a few examples:

COLD CLIMATE.

A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.

MALACHITE.

The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.

AN UMBRELLA.

Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. Not more in front in peace of the dot.

A PETTICOAT.

A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.

A WAIST.

A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.

Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom.

A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.

A woolen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of practices any of them in order is so left.

A TIME TO EAT.

A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.

A LITTLE BIT OF A TUMBLER.

A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing.

A FIRE.

What was the use of a whole time to send and not send if there was to be the kind of thing that made that come in. A letter was nicely sent.

A HANDKERCHIEF.

A winning of all the blessings, a sample not a sample because there is no worry.

RED ROSES.

A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot.

So what I want you to do is try to write a poem (or poems) in the mode of Tender Buttons.  In part, this is an extension of the Micro-forms prompt, however, while that exercise aimed to help you write one well-honed phrase (with the thoughts that if you can write a solid line or couplet, you can build a great poem out of solid lines), this assignment is all about sound,  juxtaposition, image, rhythm and repetition, providing you with an opportunity to play around with those very important poetic components without concern for meaning.  So write lines that sound wonderful but don't mean a damn thing — or write lines that assert an ambiguous meaning, but are presented in an attention-grabbing cadence.  Try to make a portrait of an everyday object, or just write for the sake of writing.  Finally, don't feel constrained by length here: as you see above (and you can read the book in its entirety here) there are some very short, one-line poems and some that extend to much greater lengths, either in a lineated poetic form or in prosey blocks.  Disconnect your poetic expression from meaning and see what glorious sounds you discover!

Workshop Schedule: Round 2

Feb. 1

• Stephen Rosemire
• Claron Haden
• Jen Derrick

Feb. 3

• Patrick Abdallah
• Livia Dilts
• Katlyn Niehaus 

Feb. 8

• Sammy Vance
• Tony Schlachter
• Adam Bradley

Feb. 10

• Maggie Abney
• Morgan Anderson
• Amanda Vandermolen

Feb. 15

• Amanda Staples
• Anne Flavin
• Mike Jones 

Feb. 17

• Adam Wulfmeyer
• Nicholas White
• Alex Baer

Writing Prompt #3: I, Incrementally

Chuck Close, Maggie (1996)

Because we're all narcissists at heart, there's often no topic we'd rather write about than ourselves, and I'd like you to indulge that instinct for this writing prompt.  Specifically, I'd like you to write a self-portrait poem, but in a way that you're not necessarily going to be inclined to write that poem.

I'd like you to build your self-portrait in a fragmented fashion, working in that geometric field method we talked about in last Thursday's class — presenting discrete, disconnected images, ideas, bits of speech, etc. that delineate a larger abstract field and leave many if not all of the connections between the points unstated, so that it's up to the reader to make those intuitive leaps, bring it all together and make sense out of it.  Working with that idea, I'm making the suggestion that you work humbly, concretely, mundanely, multifariously: don't write about your greatest achievements, your deepest convictions, the existential dramas that keep you away at night, but rather take the simple everyday matter of your life and present it in a way that illuminates it for both you and your readers.

What exactly might that look like?  How's about a catalogue of the contents of your pockets, or a list of the clothes you're wearing from head to toe, or three things you overheard while going about your business today, or a list of boring secrets, or twelve memories conjured up by browsing through old photos on your computer, or a conglomeration of disconnected items that embody qualities you possess, or four places you'd like to go, or the various things that the keys on your keychain unlock, or explanations for all of your scars, or the last five books you read, or the haircut you'd like to get next, or the piece of jewelry you most treasure, or what you'd buy your best friends if money was no option, or what you'd grab first if your house was on fire, or things the bus driver would say about you, and so forth.

Don't just choose one of these, but rather pick a few and run them together, or invent some of your own.  Some of these are more personal than others, some more oblique, and hopefully you'll find a good mix of the two.  Your finished poem should say a lot about you, but not be obvious or straightforward.  Remember fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition are key ideas here, so break your poem up into parts, make them clash with one another, make it say something about you that you've never said before.

Oh, and one final challenge (though this one is tough, so feel free to disregard if you're so inclined) — write your poem without using the pronoun "I."

If you can write something for this prompt by Thursday's class, that's great, and please post it to the thread on Blackboard — we should have some extra time to discuss your experience of working with this prompt then — and if that's too short notice, then this prompt will perhaps be useful in getting poems together for your next workshop.

Film Screenings Tonight and Next Tuesday

As I mentioned in class today, I'll be screening two Beat Generation documentaries tonight and next Tuesday night. 

First up is Chuck Workman's critically-acclaimed documentary, The Source, a really fantastic introduction to the Beats, beautifully edited with a marvelous soundtrack (Sonic Youth, the Rolling Stones, Charlie Parker, etc.) that does a wonderful job of rooting the Beats in their historical contexts.

Next week, I'll be showing Richard Lerner & Lewis MacAdams' 1986 documentary, What Happened to Kerouac?.

Both films will be shown in McMicken 046, and I have the room reserved from 5:00-7:00.  We might start a little after 5:00 so students from the Countercultural Literature course, which ends at 4:45, can go grab a bite to eat, and feel free to bring dinner as well. 

Lead Reviewers Needed

We're closing in on the end of our first round of workshops, and since Anne volunteered to go on Tuesday, and we have two students who were absent last class, that leaves us with four people to go.  I've divided them up alphabetically, putting Alex on Tuesday and the remaining three on Thursday.

However, we still need lead reviewers for Anne, Alex, Mike, Katlyn and Amanda V.  If you haven't yet served as a lead reviewer, please sign up for one of these workshops by adding a comment to the appropriate threads.

This week's hiccups notwithstanding, we should still be on track for a slightly gentler schedule of 3 workshops per class for the rest of the term provided we make it through next week as planned, the weather behaves, and we don't continue to have issues with absences.  That's a big if, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Writing Prompt #2: Microforms

Here's a good small exercise to practice while you're drifting off to sleep at night or waiting at a red light.  Inspired by Jen's comment that she can't even write a haiku, I thought it might be useful to share Jack Kerouac's notion of the "American Haiku":

The American Haiku is not exactly the Japanese Haiku. The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined to seventeen syllables but since the language structure is different I don't think American Haikus (short three-line poems intended to be completely packed with Void of Whole) should worry about syllables because American speech is something again...bursting to pop.

Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.

Thus, for Kerouac, the haiku becomes a sort of Zen snapshot, a momentary glimpse of one discreet moment in life's big hustle and bustle. You can read some examples of his work in this form here, or listen to a ten-minute selection with musical accompaniment by tenor saxmen Al Cohn and Zoot Sims below:

The specificity, the vibrancy of image and/or idea that these tiny poems aim to achieve, is something that we want to be present in our work in general, and if you practice by working on these tiny little gems on their own, you'll be more capable of working a similarly powerful line or stanza or thought into your longer poems.  So write at least one for Thursday's class and bring a copy, because if we have time at the end of class, we'll do a quick round-robin reading.

Here are a few other examples of micro-poems:

• Ted Berrigan's "Remembered Poem" [link]
• John Ashbery's "The Cathedral Is" [link]
• Ron Padgett's "December" [link]
• Richard Brautigan's "Haiku Ambulance" [link]

Another possibility is to work a number of these fragmented pieces together into a longer collage piece, sometimes organized thematically, other times not.  Here are a few examples:

• Ted Berrigan's "Rusty Nails" [link]
• Kenneth Koch's "In Bed" (excerpt, scroll down) [link]

Workshop Candidates Needed

Since we didn't have any additional volunteers to be workshopped during Thursday's class, we now find ourselves in a bit of a dilemma concerning turnaround for this coming Thursday, therefore, I need four (4) volunteers with poems ready who can be workshopped on Thursday and four (4) volunteers to be lead reviewers for those people.  Feel free to e-mail me in advance of tomorrow's class to volunteer for either one or both roles and if I don't have willing participants, then unfortunately I'll have to start picking randomly.  As always, write me at hennessey.michael@gmail.com to sign up.

If UC is closed due to snow on Tuesday, then our 3 poets set for Tuesday will go first on Thursday with one additional workshop (the first volunteer I hear from) and we'll move forward with 4 workshops in both of next week's classes to help us catch up.  I fear that this might be the case (my gut tells me that Greg Hand will cancel classes starting at noon), but if so, then our schedules are flexible enough to absorb the extra workshops.

I've been enjoying reading through everyone's questionnaires and prompt poems and will look forward to talking about both when next we meet.

Writing Prompt #1: Music Obsessive / Playlist Poems

To get you started, here are two related writing prompts: feel free to write to both, but be sure to write at least one poem in this mode and post it to the appropriate forum on Blackboard no later than 9am next Tuesday:

1. Music Obsessive: Ever since I was young, I've been a rabid music fan and it filters into seemingly every facet of my daily existence.  While my listening habits change from time to time, one constant is my propensity to latch onto one particular song, deriving great pleasure from listening to it over and over and over again, and even years after this brief swoon, I still feel a special connection to that song.

For this prompt, I'd like you to replicate that process: choose a song that you've had a similar reaction to (or that you're currently having a similar reaction to) and listen to it over and over again — ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, keeping your notebook or a blank Word document open as you do so.  Jot down emotions, images, free associations and connections that spring to mind when you hear this song; let snippets of lyrics filter into the poem.  Can you capture qualities of the song's tone, its mood, the characteristics of different sections or instruments, in your poem?  Then go back and listen again — what can you add? what needs to be taken out?  Let your entire composition of the poem be contained by that song —if you want to return to this poem to edit it, then you need to put the song on as you do so.  Can you make a poem that effectively translates what you love about this song?  That captures the space it puts you in?  Can you construct it so that someone else who reads it is able to identify it in an instant, or would you prefer it to be more oblique? 


2. Playlist Poems: a currently popular meme asks you to answer a series of personal questions by cutting and pasting the titles of songs selected by your iTunes' random shuffle mode.  For this prompt you'll do something similar: compose a poem that consists entirely of song titles.  There's no formal restraint here, other than the source of poetic raw materials, though this sort of pastiche of borrowed language is technically a cento, a form we'll probably look at in greater depth later in the term.  You'll have to decide whether to brainstorm titles from scratch, search through your music collection for certain keywords or let the shuffle mode make the decisions for you.  Can you limit your title choices to just one band, or settle a long-standing musical rivalry (ex. the Beatles vs. the Stones)?  Do you want to tell a story or create an image?  What sort of detritus lurking in your iTunes library can you use to deconstruct this form?

Workshop Format and Responsibilities

Welcome to our poetry workshop!  I hope that the next ten weeks will be a productive and exciting time for all of us.

Given my past experience with workshops of all sorts, I've come to realize that the truest value of the time we'll spend together isn't so much the work that we'll do in and of itself — the poems we'll write, the feedback we'll give and receive — but rather the relationships that will begin here and carry on into the future, as well as the habits we'll develop, the objective self-assessment we'll learn to perform, the things we've never tried before that we'll do here because we're forced to.  Towards that end, I've tried to structure this workshop so that you'll get the most out of our limited time, but also be well-set to carry on independently after the quarter is over.

In an ideal world, this workshop would be twice as long and half as many students in it.  Because that's not the case, we'll try to do our best to ensure that everyone is able to have as many opportunities as possible to receive feedback on their work, and in addition to formal workshop time, there will be plenty of exercises for you to take part in over the course of the term, receiving more informal feedback from me as well as your classmates.

We'll have to run a tight ship in regards to scheduling this term, therefore discussions of student work will be timed and limits will be strictly enforced (though it pains me to do so).  If we keep on schedule, we should have enough time for all 20 students to have a poem workshopped for 3 periods of 15 minutes each this quarter — and with this time limit, we'll be sure to have extra time to discuss readings, exercises and our final projects, but more importantly, should school be canceled due to inclement weather (something that's been inevitable over the past few winters), we should be able to absorb those missed workshop periods without too much hassle.

It should come as no surprise to you that your final grade will be largely dependent on the quality of the work you produce this term, and here are some of the assignments that will factor into that:

• your response to our initial workshop questionnaire
• the three poems you present during your workshop sessions
• the poems you present in response to our various supplemental writing prompts
• your two close reading responses
• your contributions to our journal database
• your final portfolio, which will consist of 5-7 poems with revisions and a self-assessment
• the chapbook that you'll create and distribute at the end of the quarter

Because everyone comes to our workshop at different points in his or her writing life, there's no objective standard applied when evaluating student work.  Instead, what I'll aim to measure is your openness to the workshop environment — i.e. your willingness to devote serious attention to the assignments, be self-critical and accept constructive criticism, and above all demonstrate a marked development throughout the course of the term.  Moreover, your efforts towards your own work aren't the only reason why you're here: to be a good citizen of this workshop, you'll spend almost as much energy addressing the work of your peers as you do your own.  Specifically, here are some of the things you'll need to do for your classmates:

• you'll provide a thoughtful and constructive critique of all poems up for workshop on a given day, making use of the comments function in Word (select text, then go under Insert > Add Comment); after you add your first, a comments toolbar will appear) to add marginalia, notes, suggestions, etc. as well as writing up a more substantive response to the poem approximately one page in length.
• you'll serve as "lead reviewer" for the workshops of three of your peers' poems — this means that you'll a) write a longer, more detailed critique of the poem being discussed (approximately twice as long as what you'll be expected to write normally) and b) start our discussion of that poem by speaking to the poem's strengths and weaknesses for 2-3 minutes.
• you'll show up to class each day prepared to actively take part in our class discussions

Finally, a word about aesthetics: each of us is continually developing our own idiosyncratic poetics, and the diversity of our perspectives should be a strength for our workshop, however, an important part of constructive criticism is making an honest effort to understand the author's intentions and work within that context, and the same goes for form, scale, etc.  If your tastes run to the traditional side, but you're responding to the experimental work of a classmate, it's probably not the most helpful advice to casually suggest that she implement strict iambic pentameter; likewise, suggesting a long, rambling addition to a poem working in a minimalist fashion probably won't help much.  At the same time, there may be cases where you feel that radical changes are necessary, and if you can explain your convictions behind these beliefs, you may very well be doing your peer a great favor.

You'll be expected to meet the following deadlines in regards to the workshop process:

• poems being workshopped on a Tuesday should be posted to the appropriate Blackboard forum no later than the previous Saturday
• poems being workshopped on a Thursday should be posted to the appropriate forum no later than the previous Monday
• your marked up copies of the workshop poems should be posted to the appropriate forum by 9:00 AM the morning of the workshop
• poems written in response to one of the supplemental prompts should ideally be posted by the same time

Lateness in regards to any of these deadlines will negatively affect your grade.

Here are a few other important policies:

Attendance and Participation: The importance of both regular attendance and class participation cannot be understated — without both, our workshop will fall apart. In most of the classes I've taught at UC, most students have taken our collaborative work seriously and attendance hasn't been an issue.  Ideally, I'd say that you shouldn't miss any classes this term, but I understand that illness, the weather and other contingencies are likely to intervene, therefore I think that missing one or two classes (if necessary) is acceptable.  However, students who miss more than four classes will automatically fail the course.  This is one more absence than I usually permit, due to it being the winter quarter, and think for a second about what this represents: if you miss five classes out of the eighteen that we'll have after today, you'll have lost almost a third of the quarter.

Communications: because of the strengths and weaknesses of each component, we'll use a variety of methods to communicate this term.  Because I believe in open pedagogy, we'll be using this blog for the majority of our course announcements and assignments — please use the links above to subscribe via e-mail or RSS, or if you're on Blogger, "follow" this blog so that you'll be kept up to date.  Last term I experimented with using Facebook for more informal class communications and conversations and was very happy with the results, so please be sure to join this group as well (there's a link on the sidebar also).  Finally, Blackboard is really dreadful but it does offer a secure and confidential venue for easily posting documents, so we'll be making use of our class forums to share poems, critiques, etc.

Communications (2): Please make use of my posted office hours, the time before and after class,   e-mail and/or Facebook to discuss your performance in the workshop, pose questions you might have, etc. If you're having trouble making a contribution, feel that you're doing poorly, or just not getting  into the spirit of the course, it's better to ask for guidance sooner rather than later. Unofficially, you should meet with me at least once during the quarter.

Technology: In theory, technology is a wonderful thing, but in the classroom, it can be a distraction. Please make sure that your cell phone is turned off (or at the very least in silent mode) before class begins, and keep it in your bag throughout. Texting during class will not be tolerated.  Laptops may only be used by students with appropriate paperwork from Disability Services explaining its necessity—otherwise, a notebook or binder will have to suffice (even if it's terribly old-world).

Special Needs Statement: If you have any special needs related to your participation and performance in this course, please speak to me as soon as possible. In consultation with Disability Services, we can make reasonable provisions to ensure your ability to succeed in this class and meet its goals.

Evaluative Criteria

When responding to your classmates' work, the most basic questions you'll want to answer are:

• What is the poet trying to say/accomplish here?
• How well does her or she accomplish that?
• What elements of the poem help or hinder these goals?
• What elements of the poem are aesthetically or stylistically pleasing?

If you want a more detailed evaluative rubric, I'm quite fond of the method proposed by Ann Lauterbach in an interview in Daniel Kane's book, What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde:

DK: Is there a method or series of steps that you might recommend teachers to take in presenting "On (Open)" [a poem of Lauterbach's they'd been discussing] to high school students not so familiar with poetry?

AL: A poem is not a puzzle to be solved. A poem is an experience, an event, in and of language. It should be approached as such:

• What kind of event happened to you when you read this poem?
• Did you get a feeling?
• Did you have an idea?
• Did you get reminded of something?
• Did you go elsewhere, away from the familiar world into another, stranger, one?
• Did you look up words and find out new meanings, as you would ask directions in a strange city?
• Why do you think the poet made this word choice, and not another?
• Why do you think the line is broken here, at this word, and not at another?
• How is a line break in a poem different from a comma or a period in a prose sentence?

Workshop Questionnaire

Please take the time to give thoughtful responses to the following questions, posting your answers to the Blackboard forum no later than noon on Sunday:

• How long have you been writing poetry?
• How would you describe your poetics — that is, what are you trying to accomplish in your poetry?
• Describe your compositional process: when/why/how/where do you write?
• What living poets have had the greatest influence on you? What dead poets? If none (or in addition to poets), what other sorts of writers/artists/musicians do you admire?
• Have you ever been published? Do you submit your work for publication?
• Is this your first workshop? If not, what other workshops have you been a part of (with whom, where, when)?
• What do you hope to get out of this workshop?