April 27, 2008 archives

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April 27, 2008

poetic license

by gl. at 5:23 pm

it must be national poetry month! i've attended a plethora of wordly events this month:

• i started out the month by attending the poemcrazy workshop. we collected words from books & "word tickets" and pooled them together, words like orphans, orchestra, pandora, vigil, eve, mistletoe, rose, admit, doctor, moon, roof, roll, orpheus, fallen, angel, moment, ghost, venus, dark, wine, rumour, grace, plum, devotion, glow, tedium, terror, window, daylight, grim, heretic, dwell, love, clouds, atoms, hollow, swallow, honor, translate, clutter, promise, binge, and trouble.
  
  we spun in place and sat down to try to write to such prompts as i am/i am not/i used to be/i want to be/i love/i remember/i forget, combined with chanting things like my heart says/my mind says/my soul says/my mother says/the door says/the moon says/the river says, and inserting lines like can't give you up/come back to me, later when it's over. we could answer questions like what's an object in the first place you remember living? what container would you be? what source of light would you be? what scares you?
  
  that was a lot to deal with in a short amount of time, and then it was time for lunch! one of the great things about a workshop at innerstandings is that a hot lunch is provided for you (spanikopita, cucumber salad, and tiny cups of ben & jerry's ice cream).
  
  after lunch we gathering objects outside in a little box to use as inspiration for our next writing prompt. we ended the workshop writing about contrast: sleep/awake or inside/outside, like this:
  
  "inside i am raining. outside i am another moon. inside i am columns that support a hall of justice. outside i am a mouse. i am an orphan inside, safe while invisible, a wordless winter. outside i am true, even in the summer sun. stars appear like fairy tales. inside i am a frozen ocean. when i breathe it's like thunder. outside, a yellow bird vanishes. i shiver. safety is written in tiny letters. inside i am a maze of rooms connected by a path of broken china. outside, a golden field rustling against the mountains."
  
  in our spare time we could look at a huge collection of poetry books, read her manuscripts, and look through her photos of boxes & journals.
  
  she thought i had beautiful, if illegible, handwriting. this became important because instead of us reading what we wrote aloud, she read it so we could hear it from someone else's voice. my handwriting is definitely influenced by calligraphy, but the artist's way morning pages style has also affected it: you can't write fast and pretty at the same time.
  
  dayna wrote about her experience at this workshop, too.

• later in the month i went to see lucille clifton. "breaklight" was the first poem i remember saving in high school. i didn't expect her to hear my telepathic request for her to read it, and she didn't. but of course, what she did read was great. dot hearn wrote about the experience on her blog.

• then i took michaelmas to the "secrets & lies" show at 23 sandy. all the books there are poetry, even if they're narrative in nature. i really love book shows at 23 sandy because she has a "hands on" policy, and a book show that doesn't let you handle the books is essentially a sculpture show.

• last night i attended vox: a spoken-word chorus. they took a handful of actors and had them speak a dozen or so poems in chorus. sometimes the arrangements were straightforward, and sometimes they were heavily rearranged. "howl" is quite good like this. and e.e. cummings is also very conducive to this sort of arrangement, and so it was no surprise that they featured three poems by him, one of two repeated poets. awesome space: an odd little corner of a shambling industrial building by the railroad tracks by the fremont bridge.

• finally, "wolf moon" has been published at counterpunch. it's part of a series of poems i'm writing about the old names for the full moon.

posted by gl. | permalink | comments (3) | categories: classes & workshops, exhibits & events, writing