This semester course is for senior Creative Writing students interested in studying the art of poetry and writing original poetry. An open mind and supportive attitude will be essential as we workshop each other’s poems. We will be exploring several approaches to the art of writing poetry through a variety of different exercises to generate poems in open and closed forms.
Please take some time to journal and reflect on your personal definition of poetry. What is poetry to you? Why does the creative writing we do matter? Whenever I ask myself this question, I always refer back to a letter written by my own poetry teacher, Jack Ridl. He wrote:
"... let's also remind ourselves that while it can be good to do good and good to combat what destroys the good, it is also crucial that we continue to create good. We are creative beings. We arrived with that as a given. And when you create a poem, you have placed good into the world... We artists are questioned over and over again about our "usefulness." We are vitally useful. Our use is to heal, comfort, to lead to realization, to bring laughter, to sing the blues, to celebrate, to be of soul-filling USE. This is a great good thing we do.
The Christmas after 9/11 Sharon Dolin, Billy Collins, and I were asked to read our poems in NYC. Can you imagine how we felt? What could we possibly do to be of any "use"? We told those present that we would do what we could to give them two hours for their hearts, souls. And that's all we could do. After the reading, the audience stayed and stayed and said how much that two hours mattered."
I hope you know how much your poems matter!
We are going to take a look at a poem or two by Billy Collins today.
Some bio information:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/billy-collins#poet
Video of Collins reading "Names" and reflecting on 9/11
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/301
You can listen to "Workshop" here:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19755
You can read here:
Workshop
I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.
And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem
and tells us that words are food thrown down
on the ground for other words to eat.
I can almost taste the tail of the snake
in its own mouth,
if you know what I mean.
But what I’m not sure about is the voice,
which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,
but other times seems standoffish,
professorial in the worst sense of the word
like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face.
But maybe that’s just what it wants to do.
What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas,
especially the fourth one.
I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges
which gives me a very clear picture.
And I really like how this drawbridge operator
just appears out of the blue
with his feet up on the iron railing
and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging—
a hook in the slow industrial canal below.
I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s.
Maybe it’s just me,
but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost. I need help.
The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the scene keeps shifting around.
First, we’re in this big aerodrome
and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles,
which makes me think this could be a dream.
Then he takes us into his garden,
the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose,
though that’s nice, the coiling hose,
but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be.
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.
In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.
But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite.
This is where the poem wins me back,
especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.
I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,
but I still love the details he uses
when he’s describing where he lives.
The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,
the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,
the spool of thread for a table.
I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep,
and that gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.
Billy Collins, “Workshop” from The Art of Drowning. Copyright © 1995 by Billy Collins. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press, www.pitt.edu/~press/.
Source: The Art of Drowning (1995)Please post a reaction to the information/poems provided today and/or the value of workshopping our own poems in this class. Develop your thoughts and respond to others in order tio receive full credit!
Please join this blog and comment on this post for credit!
Poetry, I believe, is almost like another language: capturing vivid images, expressing whirlwinds of emotions and just speaking directly to one’s soul. It’s more than just random wording but I think a poem, just as most advanced literature, always has more than one meaning. There’s the one that’s pretty face value, the general or obvious idea, then there’s the underlying meaning, the one you have to read between the lines for and dig really deep to decipher. There could be more than one poem in all, it either means something, everything or nothing. As a poet and song writer myself I know how important these things are.
ReplyDeleteI find this rather comedic to read a poem about a person reading a poem. I really appreciated Billy Collins’ poem on Workshopping. Not only does he describe the process involved but his own personal reactions, his confusion in deciphering what it means and what compels him. I love how he even confirms the statement I say in the paragraph above, “In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here is really two poems, or three, or four, or possibly none.”
I think workshops are very important, because a poem isn’t just for the writer, but for the reader. When someone reads a poem, they are changing it. They are putting their own past and preferences into the words. They are transforming it to mean something to them. So when you workshop, you are able to get a peek into what others may see or feel when they read your work. When you pick out things you like in other people’s poems you can see what you like and what you want to try to do.
ReplyDeleteWorkshops are incredibly important to the writing process. Since writing is a solitary activity, writers are often isolated from the ideas and opinions of others in the context of their work. It is important to get feedback from other writers in order for your work to reach it's full potential. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can help bring a poem or story to life. Other writers can help to fix problems, inspire new ideas, and ask thought provoking questions that can help a piece become more fully developed. Feedback from a workshop can help to change a writer's opinion of their work, or it can help to strengthen their position on the choices they made for their piece. Just as playwrights stage readings of their plays to hear what their words sound like out loud, or how they may be perceived by audiences, writers must seek workshops as a constructive part of their writing process.
ReplyDeleteAs everyone before me has said, workshops are ridiculously important. When it comes to writing, the first draft will not be perfect, no matter what. There's always additional work to be done on writing. While the writer can edit by themselves, it's crucial to have other eyes looking at the work to get different perspectives, to know how it's received by others. Writing can be good on its own, but workshopping allows for the writing to become even better. If just the writer sees the writing, then their mind will be twisted by what they wanted to say, and it's more than likely they'll believe they got the message through. Workshops help to show where there are issues with the writing, where the meaning is lost, and what just doesn't work.
ReplyDeletePoetry is a bit harder to evaluate in a critical sense, as there is a lot more free reign without the structural limitation of grammatically correct sentences and much more artistic "leg room" in a poem overall. However, workshops are still very important for poems as well, just in a different way. Whereas in prose a writer anticipates criticism and tries to improve upon the "weak spots" in his story, feedback on a poem focuses less on the pragmatic and more on the emotions of the reader. A poem might as well be a letter to whoever is reading it, and everyone interprets a poem in a different way based on their preferences and past experience. So a workshop for a poem should give the writer a better perspective of their style and feel (which is hard to objectively evaluate on your own), as opposed to balancing the pros and the cons of their work.
ReplyDeleteJust like everyone else, I think workshopping is immensely important. It can be embarrassing to show people what you've done, but when it's over you have a lot of material to improve your writing with. You can only do so much yourself, and getting another perspective can provide so much good feedback about your writing. A lot of things that might seem normal to you will be weird to other people, and workshops help you spot those things. Especially since we're all writers workshopping together, we can help each other so much more. A regular person can help find typos, maybe help spot weird parts, but a writer can give you ideas and advice that nobody else could. And I think that having other people see and discuss your writing just helps refresh you and keep you from developing bad habits you might not notice if you don't show anybody what you write.
ReplyDeleteI see poetry as a method of expression and communication. When working on a poem on my own, I can develop what I'm trying to express and communicate, but I think that to achieve a finished piece, I need to bring it to a workshop to see if I'm succeeding in my attempt to convey ideas and emotions to other people. A workshop might not help at all, or I might get really lucky and advance a poem a lot with the help of other writers. The results could be anywhere on that scale, and the results will never be damaging. I think something I'll probably have to focus on in the near future is trying to share and describe my poetry when I'm not inclined to, and I'll have to remind myself that the workshop can only improve my work or not change it.
ReplyDeletePoetry for me has always been a form of communication and way to share knowledge and culture. With its close ties to Hip-Hop and Rap poetry reaches the ears of millions of people every day who may not even realize that's what it is, as well as having a major effect on their lives and how they may think and act. I think that in terms of poetry, workshops are much more complicated than if it were regular writing due to how personal the writing can be. If someone constructs a poem a certain way they may not wish to change regardless of feedback. I think the important part is making sure that the reader felt some sort of emotion or message, regardless of how it effects them, by the end of the poem.
ReplyDelete