Project Challenge
Posted on January 18, 2008
Filed Under Poetry, Teaching |
I’m going to spend the next five Saturday mornings teaching a poetry writing workshop to fifteen-year-olds. My university runs the a program for local students in which we bring students to campus faculty teach them something about their discipline. Tomorrow morning, my wife Carole is going to come along and show the students how to stitch together a blank book with a handmade paper cover to use as a journal / notebook. Then, I’m going to give them a first exercise which tries to channel the spirit of Kenneth Koch without literally copying one of his exercises. Here’s the exercise:
First Exercise: Words & Things
Part 1.
Poetry is a special use of language that often concerns itself with the specific details of the world we live in - trees, rocks, doorknobs / running, closing, sleeping - in order to make the reader of the poem feel and understand something more clearly. And even though it seems strange, the more concrete and specific the language, the stronger the feelings to poem evokes in the reader. Surprisingly, abstract words like love or courage or beauty usually don’t work as well in poems (or stories) as more concrete and active words like the ones listed above.
For this part of the exercise, then, I want you to take a fifteen minute stroll - walk slowly - by yourself around the building. (If the weather was nicer, I’d send you outside.) Use your notebook to make a list of at least twenty things (physical objects). You may use single words or short phrases.
Part 2.
When you come back to the classroom, we are going to do a speed-write a poem according to the following pattern:
I saw a __________ [doing something] to a ____________ . Where you fill in the blanks with one of the words you have connected.
Examples:
I saw a doorknob watching a chair.
I saw a window breathing like a student.
I saw a carpet bouncing like a computer.
Notes & Advice:
- Don’t worry about rhyme. If something rhymes, okay, but don’t go looking for rhymes.
- Don’t worry about making literal sense.
- Feel free to write things that seem silly or even stupid.
- Avoid the words be, being, am, are, were, & is.
Follow-up:
There is no official homework in this class, but if you want to use your new notebook to collect some more words and to try out some more lines, that would be great. You might also try rearranging your lines to give them an interesting shape or to tell a story. You can of course put anything else you want in your notebook.
Update: My 11 students were delightful. The followed through beautifully as Carole showed them how to sew up the pages of a journal. They were smart & funny — & by the time the left the each had a hand-sewn notebook made from really nice paper & the beginnings of a poem. I’m looking forward to the rest of the sessions.
Comments
7 Responses to “Project Challenge”
Joe — I did this a few years ago, under the auspices of a local youth organization. Elaine Fernandez, , the head of the organization, had an idea which I resisted, but turned out to be a good one.
She wanted to have a reading at the end of the workshop series — a fund raiser for the organization, as I recall. There was an admission fee, which parents and relatives, at least, were glad to pay. But that’s not the interesting part. Elaine wanted to get prominent local poets and actors to read for the kids.
This was the part I resisted, and it turned out to be a great idea. Kids that age are generally terrified to read their own work in public, and a reading will feature reluctant kids mumbling through their poems as fast as they can. But still, would this be taking something away from the kids? Not at all, as it turned out. They loved it. They were thrilled to hear skilled readers reading their work. We had some very good people, like Nancy Willard and Gioia Timpanelli — people will give of their time very generously for kids. I know I will. The teenage poets and their readers shared the stage.
what tad richards has written sounds like fun.
and good for the kids and their parents. gives them a different view of their works, and shortcircuits the condescending (or is it patronizing) approach of some parents and the writers and their friends to poesm written by children. edward mycue
What a great idea! I’ll see if I have time to get something organized. I had already planned to create a little chapbook of the students’ poems, but this would be lovely, too.
Good stuff. Makes me wish i was still doing a spot of English teaching!
It’s a nice thing to be able to give something back, in this case poetry to people who might otherwise encounter it only in the confines of a formal graded classroom instead of in a workshop.
“Well, I have nothing to say”?–of course you do. Everyone observes life from where they encounter it. To work with observation one has to lose the idea that poetry is About anything that anyone tells you it is. Sometimes you simply have to lose the idea of poetry entirely if you wish to give something back. Via my church I am looking at a workshop on job-hunting and career development for presumably privileged suburbanites who have been displaced, and are either unemployed (yes, even savings run out) or severely discontented. It is really an exercise in community-building, in recreating even in a presumably privileged setting the concept of base communities discussed in Liberation Theology…and I hope to lead it only because I have had far too much experience in these areas over the last six years. Poetry can come later. Or maybe it must be worked into workshop sessions about the usual stuff like networking, creative writing on a resume, etc. We’ll see.
Ken, an astronomer once told me that you have to look just beside a faint star if you want to see it clearly.
well, your discussion, joseph, of ‘project challenge’
has elicited thoughtful responses that are a tribute
to you and your great heart and good head. don’t ever retire. edward mycue