Tag: College

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Writing Exercise: Limisymbology

Note: Last week, my Grad Poetry Workshop didn’t have time to do this exercise in class, so I sent them home with it. Later this week, I’ll find out how they liked this exercise inspired by some authors in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics.

How far can we push language so that it still makes sense? What is “sense” anyway? And what happens when we remind ourselves that all written language is made up of symbols? 

The title of this exercise come from the combination of liminality (that is, “occupying a position at, or on both sides, of a boundary or threshold”) and symbology (“the study or use of symbols”). As such, we will locate the liminalities of our language through the use of symbols, “ungrammatical” syntax, and unique typographical choices.

Poets Andrea Abi-Karam, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and Mai Schwartz all use some of these techniques in the excerpt from We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics assigned for today’s class by Samuel Cormac. Attached are poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Jos Charles that also work with these strategies.

After discussing these poems, freewrite in your daily writing journal and incorporate one or more of these techniques, i.e. using a symbol to stand in for a noun, changing spellings, compressing words, and/or introducing symbols/punctuation where they typically don’t go. 

After freewriting, reflect in your journal: What does this do to your poem? How does it change its pacing? Its tone? Its “meaning”? Its appearance? What associations does this choice bring into the poem that weren’t there previously?

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1/8 Lesson Plan and Writing Exercise: “The Art of Losing”

Note: This will be my first meeting with my combined intermediate and advanced, undergraduate workshops. I hope that this exercise will open up our class in such a way that we get to know one another better and we begin to discuss meaningful craft elements. Like all of my writing exercises and readings beyond the required, book-length texts, this information is provided to students through a Google Document I call the “Course Reader,” which I update throughout the semester so as to provide necessary materials and instructions while developing a log for the course, the latter of which is especially meaningful for students who need to refresh on a class experience and/or who missed a class. I also like to have a record of our conversations, and so after each class I usually provide a quick, bullet-pointed list that recaps our conversations and/or important class decisions.

ENG 326/426 Writing Poetry: Intermediate/Writing Poetry: Advanced
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Spring 2018

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Writing Exercises: “Poem of My Humiliations” and “Admit It”

ENG 326 Writing Poetry: Intermediate
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fall 2017

9781555977788.pngNote: My intermediate poetry class is wrapping up their discussion of Erika L. Sánchez’s Lessons on Expulsion. All three of these poems appear in the final section of the book, and they model two approaches of the  “function” of a poem. In the first exercise, students will list humiliations and embarrassments in a move toward candor and intimacy, and, in the second, they will think about the rhetoric of the imperative, its insistence and (sometimes) hesitance.

10/19 Writing Exercises: “Poem of My Humiliations” and “Admit It”

We will do two back-to-back writing exercises based on three poems by Erika L. Sánchez—“Poem of My Humiliations” for the first, and “Circles” and “Six Months after Contemplating Suicide” for the second—if time allows.

Writing Exercise #1: “Poem of My Humiliations”

  1. Re-read “Poem of My Humiliations” (62) by Erika L. Sánchez. Discuss.
  2. Craft a poem that is a list of things that humiliated or embarrassed you (only use things with which you’re comfortable sharing). You must create single-sentence stanzas with no line breaks.

 

Writing Exercise #2: “Admit It”

  1. Re-read “Circles” (64) and “Six Months after Contemplating Suicide” (72). Discuss.
  2. Write a poem in which you use the imperative mode (an insistent instruction)— “Admit it”—to the self or (a real or imagined) beloved.
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Writing Exercise: “Praise House”

ENG 326 Writing Poetry: Intermediate
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fall 2017

Note: My intermediate poetry class is wrapping up workshop on their third poems and they are getting ready to turn in their fourth workshop poems this Saturday. This exercise is meant to allow them time and space to try something new (some have wondered aloud about if there can be “happy” poems) and draft something they can develop into their workshop piece. I always allow my students to revise in-class writing into their workshop poems, as this gives the class (optional) scaffolding of their assignments and helps to alleviate pressure surrounding “writer’s block.” (Side note: I don’t believe in writer’s block, as it often boils down to students second guessing themselves before they even begin, but they believe in it, so I want to help them overcome that fear in whatever way I can.)

 

9/28 Writing Exercise: “Praise House”

  1. Read “Praise House: The New Economy” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi and “To a Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” by Ross Gay.
  2. Freewrite a poem in which you praise a moment or a whole lot of things that you love or for which you are grateful.
    • Note: This exercise introduces you to a new form, the praise poem, while also giving you the option of continuing to cultivate your skills at using a poetic catalog (i.e., a list) in your poems.
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Writing Exercise: “99 Problems”

ENG 326 Writing Poetry: Intermediate
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fall 2017

Note: My intermediate poetry students completed this exercise at the beginning of class on the third day we discussed There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker. Six students shared their work, and some of them framed their poem as “99 Problems” whereas others framed it as a countdown or as a list of tweets experienced on social media. This exercise presented a lot of flexibility, and it allowed students to think about implied narratives rather than explicitly rendered narratives.

9/21 Writing Exercise: “99 Problems”

  1. Let’s spend a little time discussing “99 Problems” on pgs. 66–69 of Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things…
    1. What is her strategy for moving from one “problem” to the next?
    2. What are your thoughts about the form of the list poem?
  2. Write a list poem. You can either use the “99 Problems” as a frame, or you can write a list poem with some other function.
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Writing Exercise: “I Mean…”

ENG 326 Writing Poetry: Intermediate
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fall 2017

 

There-Are-More-Beautiful-Things-Than-Beyonce-2ndEdNote: My intermediate poetry students completed this exercise at the beginning of class on the second day we discussed There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker. Four students shared their work, and all of them wrote their best poem so far in response to this exercise. These poems were full of such unexpected turns and provocative declarations.

This exercise could easily be adapted for other kinds of classrooms, especially because the poem “Welcome to the Jungle” is available online (linked below), in addition to the book. That being said, I highly recommend the book and all of Parker’s work, and it has been especially popular among my undergraduate students.

9/19 Writing Exercise: “I Mean…”

  1. Let’s read “Welcome to the Jungle” by Morgan Parker and discuss.
    1. What do you notice about the way that this poem is constructed?
    2. What about the grammar (including punctuation)?
    3. How does Parker get from one statement to another? Let’s look at it statement by statement, line by line, paying special attention to the associative leaps between each statement.
  2. Freewrite a poem. Your only three parameters are that 1) you cannot use punctuation and 2) you have to start with a declarative statement that 3) you will later have to requalify (e.g. “With champagne I try expired white ones / I mean pills I mean men” and “had a party had fifty parties”).
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Writing Exercise: “Ain’t There One Damn Song That Can Make Me Break Down and Cry?”

ENG 326 Writing Poetry: Intermediate
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fall 2017

8/17 Writing Exercise: “Ain’t There One Damn Song That Can Make Me Break Down and Cry?”

  1. Re-examine the lyrics of the favorite song you brought into class, and respond to the following questions in your writing journal:
    1. What genre is the song? What are the requirements (instrumentation, performance, subject matter, etc.) of a song in this genre?
    2. Do you recognize in this song any of the key poetic concepts/terms we went over earlier today in class? This might include figurative language, concrete language, cliche, etc. Try to identify at least two.
  2. Beginning in class and continuing over the weekend, write at least one verse and chorus as an imitation of your favorite song.
    1. An imitation borrows one or more features of a work, including but not limited to structure and subject matter.
    2. In writing these lyrics, you must include at least two passages that exemplify the key poetic concepts/terms we went over in class today.
  3. Share these in class next Tuesday. You can read them aloud or, if you’re feeling it, you (or a designated performer) can sing or rap your lyrics.
  4. On Tuesday, we will discuss how listeners of music are often more equipped to read and write poetry than we initially realize, and then we’ll explore the ways in which we can develop these skills so that they are more conducive to the expectations of poetry readers.
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Writing Exercise: “In Defense of ‘Moist'”

ENG 326 Writing Poetry: Intermediate
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fall 2017

8/15 Writing Exercise: “In Defense of ‘Moist’”

  1. Read the poem “In Defense of ‘Moist’” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib and discuss.
  2. Recall your favorite or least favorite word from the Introductions handout. If you selected your favorite word, title your poem “Against ‘[the word]’”; if you selected your least favorite word, title it “In Defense of ‘{the word]’.”
  3. Draft a poem as an argument against your favorite word or for your least favorite word, after Willis-Abdurraqib.
    1. You may write this poem on the back of the Willis-Abdurraqib handout and add it into your writing journal later.
    2. Try not to let your critical, editorial part of your brain enter into the drafting process, as this will only limit you.
    3. Your skill level is irrelevant, as we’re all asked to draft right here, in the moment. We’re all on the same page, in terms of the poem’s parameters, and this ongoing writing and sharing in class will help us all improve, not to mention try something new in our work.
  4. Share with the class and, in doing so, we’ll begin to discover ways we can best provide and receive feedback on poetic works.
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Craft of Poetry Writing Exercise: “Exercising It Out”

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Students’ Materials

  • Writing journal, with plenty of paper and/or your laptop
  • A previous draft of one of your poems

Room Setup
Six “stations” will be set up at even intervals around the room, each with its own set of instructions. They will be identified by the following names:

  1. Anaphora
  2. Heavy Enjambment
  3. Sentence Fragment
  4. Lack of Punctuation
  5. Cut
  6. Splice

Instructions
There will be six rounds of writing, each lasting 10 minutes. For the first round, Group 1 will be at Station 1: “Anaphora,” Group 2 at Station 2: “Heavy Enjambment,” etc. For subsequent rounds, the groups will rotate to new stations in numerical order. Students should have their previous poem draft and writing notebook at each station. Upon arriving at a station, each group member should read and follow the instructions on the card. After completing the assignment, you should have revised your previous draft into a whole new poem. If there’s time, each student should share their new, revised poem.

Station 1: Anaphora
Read your poem draft, and circle a phrase that is the most charged, most crucial to your poem. Re-write the poem and introduce a repetition of this phrase or syntactical unit. Read Joy Harjo’s “She Had Some Horses” for an example.

Station 2: Heavy Enjambment
Locate all of the end-stopped lines in your poem and circle them. Remove half of those end-stopped lines by breaking the line elsewhere in the sentence and thereby introducing enjambment. Take a look at Ross Gay’s “Love, I’m Done With You” for an example; pay special attention to incidence of enjambment in the first seven lines.

Station 3: Sentence Fragment
Turn at least two complete sentences in your poem into sentence fragments. See Chen Chen’s “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” for an example of a poem that employs many sentence fragments.

Station 4: Lack of Punctuation
Remove the punctuation in all or half your poem, like Morgan Parker in “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” or “If You Are Over Staying Woke”  respectively.

Station 5: Cut
The poet Jean Valentine tapes her poems up on her door after she initially drafts them. Every time she passes the poem, she cuts one word. In the next ten minutes, cut at least five words from your poem. Read her poem “God of Rooms” for inspiration.

Station 6: Splice
Steal 1–2 lines full or partial lines from a group member’s poem. Try to make them work in the dramatic situation of your poem. Check out Matthew Olzmann’s “Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz” as an example.