This semester I've assigned a totally new book: Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. By Virginia Tufte, it was strongly recommended to me last summer, and I thought it would be a strange but fun treat for the class. Advanced writing classes are good places to examine the sentence, the basic unit of communication.
Besides ughs, grunts, and eye-rolls, that is.
And besides gerund-filled invective and hair-twirling.
So, let's call it one of our basic units of communication. Fine. Still, in a creative writing class, it's pretty crucial to truck in sentences. Better still is the ability to really manipulate them. We want to know when a short, emphatic sentence is going to give a kick to the paragraph, or if the form is just going to belabor a point already made. Will a winding, langorous Henry James-ish sentence seduce your reader into the narrative scene or will it merely make her impatient for the point (or the period)? These choices are generally unconscious for writers, at least at first, and they remain largely unconscious for me. Yet our ability to think about them surely enlarges the project here, this semester. This semester we'll take a step back from the sentence, and from our sentences in particular, to see what they are doing for our work as a whole and to learn what a few alterations and adjustments might do.
25 January 2010
28 April 2009
Lines Written Using a Google Search of "Poetry Totally Dead"
Poetry Totally Dead
I.
Dem bones was shivering
and shaking. Williamsburg totally
time for the mixer (why
speak?) for the windows
toward the world. A big
thanks beautifully
crafted, deeply felt, totally
earned, these
poems of love and bereavement.
II.
Without that poem everyone would be
dead, so poetry totally looks after
its own. Gangsta. The world and hope,
the possibility, the proverbial
country bucket. Sometimes you eat
the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.
note. search run at 10:52 a.m. 28 April 2009. every word above found on first page of search results, selected at random in order of appearance. some periods and capitalizations added or retracted.
I.
Dem bones was shivering
and shaking. Williamsburg totally
time for the mixer (why
speak?) for the windows
toward the world. A big
thanks beautifully
crafted, deeply felt, totally
earned, these
poems of love and bereavement.
II.
Without that poem everyone would be
dead, so poetry totally looks after
its own. Gangsta. The world and hope,
the possibility, the proverbial
country bucket. Sometimes you eat
the bear, sometimes the bear eats you.
note. search run at 10:52 a.m. 28 April 2009. every word above found on first page of search results, selected at random in order of appearance. some periods and capitalizations added or retracted.
15 April 2009
Not sorry in the morning and not planning on being sorry in the afternoon
Fear is the devil said that lady of the house
at the house, grandmother's house. Get
rid of it now, she said on a visit
from some far place whose name
devils but Cast it out, she said, that
lady of the house, lady of grandmother's.
On another day same dying world same
chop up the food to feed her realm
the real grandmother seemed to
whispered If you'd been mine,
I'd have raised you different though
her grammar had been impeccable.
at the house, grandmother's house. Get
rid of it now, she said on a visit
from some far place whose name
devils but Cast it out, she said, that
lady of the house, lady of grandmother's.
On another day same dying world same
chop up the food to feed her realm
the real grandmother seemed to
whispered If you'd been mine,
I'd have raised you different though
her grammar had been impeccable.
20 November 2008
Leslie Scalapino says:
There’s no hierarchy (in existence), though it occurs socially created and created by animals, authority does not derive from it. The writing enables one to see that and be ‘without’ it. A poem can be a terrain where hierarchy can be undone or not occur (in the writing), but obviously the writing does not make it not occur in the world. So, its subject is also the relation of conceptual to phenomena, conceptual being an action also. Yet even proposing conceptual non-hierarchy frequently meets with great resistance (usually).
06 November 2008
How to recognize a poem
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ... Is there any other way?"
--Emily Dickinson
--Emily Dickinson
29 October 2008
A Personal Blog is Art
A Personal Blog is Art, or so says Lani Geison of Blogging Personal.
The matter has been hotly debated, but I'll say that it's art, as well as practice, process, and personal expression. It's by nature a multi-media art, linking illustration and writing, or photography and poetry, or sound to text. (Has anyone experimented with sound? I'm waiting!) And that is why I'm so pleased with the results here with my Advanced Creative Writing students.
Recently I've been talking to a couple friends about how to publish their blogs. This is a strange concept because of course a blog is already published! The blogger command options are either "Save Now" or "Publish Post"--make it available for the whole wide world to see. But we're definitely in new territory, new territory brought about by our new age of Aquarian brotherhood and instant communication, courtesy of the cool technology. In this way, this semester we've created a community of published authors.
For the past two weeks, I've encountered a little techno-jam to the effect that sometimes my notes to students cannot be sent. Blogger Bleak Down. So I've gathered the wholly random notes and some links to help you all in exploring and getting a handle on each other's work.
To begin, in Reviving the Forgotten, Kally did something I wish everyone did more often. She opened a dictionary. Her post begins:
"The word prompt is defined as: "to move to action, to assist by suggesting or saying the next words of something forgotten or imperfectly learned." I find this Merriam Webster definition to be extremely relevant to the context within the poetry prompts. These are in fact exercises used to revive images stored in the memory, in order to complete a work."
Great points, I took it a step further and investigated the etymology of the word prompt. (Etymology is about all I use dictionaries for lately.) According to the Webster's New Universal here in the adjunct office, the roots range from "to incite" to "to distribute" -- both of which seem wonderfully relevant. For doesn't a prompt act to incite us to ideas, to writing? And isn't writing a sort of distribution--of mental materials and sparks?
Jezmarie, in her blog, First Timer...Be Gentle, has posed a crucial question re: description: This is truly the question of the class. I have a few ideas naturally, but I would love to see a few more responses from the rest of the class. (Okay: I would say that it's really important to slow down. Often, my first thought about a person or place is a cliche--and that is not helpful. So I need to think past the cliche and really look at the situation--the person, the problem. Also, I want to make sure I've got the senses included. The tangibles such as smell and taste and temperature along with physical description. Those help to guide me to a fuller, richer picture, which is what I'm trying to convey--desperately trying to get the images out from my mind into your mind--the magic process of imagination.)
That's enough for now, I suppose--though of course it isn't, it's never enough. I trust you are all reading Joyce and re-reading, too. Rereading is the only way to rejoice over Joyce....
The matter has been hotly debated, but I'll say that it's art, as well as practice, process, and personal expression. It's by nature a multi-media art, linking illustration and writing, or photography and poetry, or sound to text. (Has anyone experimented with sound? I'm waiting!) And that is why I'm so pleased with the results here with my Advanced Creative Writing students.
Recently I've been talking to a couple friends about how to publish their blogs. This is a strange concept because of course a blog is already published! The blogger command options are either "Save Now" or "Publish Post"--make it available for the whole wide world to see. But we're definitely in new territory, new territory brought about by our new age of Aquarian brotherhood and instant communication, courtesy of the cool technology. In this way, this semester we've created a community of published authors.
For the past two weeks, I've encountered a little techno-jam to the effect that sometimes my notes to students cannot be sent. Blogger Bleak Down. So I've gathered the wholly random notes and some links to help you all in exploring and getting a handle on each other's work.
To begin, in Reviving the Forgotten, Kally did something I wish everyone did more often. She opened a dictionary. Her post begins:
"The word prompt is defined as: "to move to action, to assist by suggesting or saying the next words of something forgotten or imperfectly learned." I find this Merriam Webster definition to be extremely relevant to the context within the poetry prompts. These are in fact exercises used to revive images stored in the memory, in order to complete a work."
Great points, I took it a step further and investigated the etymology of the word prompt. (Etymology is about all I use dictionaries for lately.) According to the Webster's New Universal here in the adjunct office, the roots range from "to incite" to "to distribute" -- both of which seem wonderfully relevant. For doesn't a prompt act to incite us to ideas, to writing? And isn't writing a sort of distribution--of mental materials and sparks?
Jezmarie, in her blog, First Timer...Be Gentle, has posed a crucial question re: description: This is truly the question of the class. I have a few ideas naturally, but I would love to see a few more responses from the rest of the class. (Okay: I would say that it's really important to slow down. Often, my first thought about a person or place is a cliche--and that is not helpful. So I need to think past the cliche and really look at the situation--the person, the problem. Also, I want to make sure I've got the senses included. The tangibles such as smell and taste and temperature along with physical description. Those help to guide me to a fuller, richer picture, which is what I'm trying to convey--desperately trying to get the images out from my mind into your mind--the magic process of imagination.)
That's enough for now, I suppose--though of course it isn't, it's never enough. I trust you are all reading Joyce and re-reading, too. Rereading is the only way to rejoice over Joyce....
22 October 2008
What Is True and Right for This Blog: A Question
As for myself, I'm delighted to be a blogger at last, like so many of my friends. However, I do feel a certain constraint in my position here, as the instructor in the creative writing class. Like someone might be looking to me for an answer. Or a question, a really good question.
In fact, these days most of the conversation in my in box and in my outbox has to do with politics. And politics, I've come to believe, is irrelevant and possibly deleterious to the job of instructing.
On the other hand, every half-wit poet knows to quote Williams on this topic....
“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
(From William Carlos Williams’ Asphodel That Greeny Flower.)
So here's a question:
In fact, these days most of the conversation in my in box and in my outbox has to do with politics. And politics, I've come to believe, is irrelevant and possibly deleterious to the job of instructing.
On the other hand, every half-wit poet knows to quote Williams on this topic....
“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
(From William Carlos Williams’ Asphodel That Greeny Flower.)
So here's a question:
Have you ever read a book, story or poem that saved your life?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)