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)