Workshop: EVERY MONDAY STARTING NEXT MONDAY, ARRIVE WITH THREE COPIES OF A NEW POEM TO HAND TO YOUR WORKSHOP GROUP FOR EDITING.
EVERY MONDAY NIGHT, EDIT THESE POEMS WITH UTMOST CARE. THESE ARE BABIES, AFTER ALL, DESPITE HOW UGLY THEY MAY BE, SOMEONE HAD FUN MAKING THEM!!
Return your Belfry forms and $15.00 asap (By Thursday, Sept. 18th at the latest).
If you were absent today, ask me who is in your Workshop group.
Today:
I collected the Patrick Lane responses.
We workshopped the Reasons For . . . poems
Homework: If you were absent today, call a friend as it is too complicated to explain here.
Create a poem using these words: gooseberry, shoelace, Titanic, lust, etc
When writing, don't get ahead of yourself.
When you write the word shoe on the page, immediately you are flooded with memories, TV images, Shakespeare's language, and all the relationships to that word
BUT . . .
so is your reader . . . .
Stephen Dobyns says the poet must fight not only our own prejudices, complacencies, apathies but ALSO our reader's.
So . . . .
Here is one way to do that.
Add three items to SHOE or whatever the word happens to be.
Emotion: I hate this shoe.
Well, there's an emotion. Or it could be, I am angry with this shoe, I feel sorry for this shoe, I miss this shoe, I am afraid of this shoe . . .
Now you have the reader's attention, at least.
But, we don't know why the narrator is angry with the shoe.
Offer a reason . . .
Setting:
I hate this shoe
on my mother's foot
at the bottom of the coffin
Great. We have context but still no reason to hate the shoe. It's a shoe afterall. Most of us don't have much feeling toward our shoes.
Add conflict:
I hate this shoe
on Mother's foot
at the bottom of the coffin
as if she will return
leave it at the top of the stairs
for Dad
to trip on.
This way you add emotion, setting, context, and conflict and
you get the reader involved as she/he must infer.
Make the reader infer. Make the reader feel.
Change reality. Make things up.
Use your imagination. It works.
