Tag: Teaching Creative Writing

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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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Writing Exercise: One Line

Note: My MFA students are discussing “On the Line” by Kazim Ali and “Line and Syntax” by James Longenbach in today’s class. Between this discussion and their workshop of Poem 1, they will do this short exercise that gives them an opportunity to think about the line as a unit that has expressive and impressionistic powers. You can download a PDF version of this exercise, with attached scans of Sappho’s fragments, by clicking on the link above.

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Writing Exercise: One Line

On pg. 36 of “On the Line” Kazim Ali writes:

The poetic line ought not be buckled to conventional syntax, it ought to demonstrate the actual powers of poetry to move the mind beyond the mundane, as in Jorie Graham’s truncated Wyatt quote that opens The Errancy— “Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.”

The poetic line ought not be buckled to conventional syntax, it ought to demonstrate the actual powers of poetry to move the mind beyond the mundane, as in Jorie Graham’s truncated Wyatt quote that opens The Errancy—”Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.”

It [the poetic line] ought to be able to do more, be more, transcend the pedantic definition of language as a carrier of discursive meaning and by its motion enable the mind to follow and have an understanding that is past intellectual and enters conceptual.

Ali later quotes a few of Anne Shaw’s one-line poems posted to Twitter:

“help to winter me a small belief”

“i (in)visible”

“you bereft believer say you will return”

“begin again in whether”

We might also be reminded of some of the fragments of Sappho, which are attached here. Let’s read them together and discuss what holds these “poems” together, how our brains react when “meaning” is more diffuse and phrasing/musicality/impression are more apparent.

In this exercise, you will write a single-line poem. 

In order to do so, you will reject traditional syntax, maybe even working only in fragments. Write the single-line poem several times, with several different syntactical orders. 

How many ways can you write this line and it still make sense? 

After you finish, share and discuss.

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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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“Spin” Reading and Writing Exercise for ENG 2031

For “Spin,” students will be negotiating subtext, rumor, dramatic irony, subjectivity, objectivity, and context in our readings and their own work. Students will discuss the elements of reportage and rumor in their icebreaker text, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and then discern the difference between Rowling’s subtext and the subtext, however erroneous, read into the actions of the protagonists by other characters. Students will likewise watch a clip from the 1966 film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and identify elements of dialogue, actions, body language, and gestures that reveal subtext, and then they will do a writing exercise in which they describe the innocent actions of a character in public and then re-describe them in the point of view of a law enforcement official, private investigator, reporter, or suspicious bystander who misconstrues, willfully or automatically, the actions of that innocent person.

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“Debate” Writing Exercise for Craft of Prose

In the “Debate” writing exercise, students are asked to create two characters—political candidates—with unique syntax and diction in order to debate a phony issue, like whether muffins should actually be called cake, for example. In doing so, they learn how to format dialogue; to progress action through dialogue; and how to demonstrate a character’s values, motivations, and background through dialogue.

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“Pop Art” Writing Exercise for my Online Prose Workshop

Last week, my Online Prose Workshop read “Hepburn and Garbo” (pgs. 151–165) and “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend” (212–221) in Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind; “Upon This Rock”  from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead;  and “Looking Around” from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. They then completed the following reading discussion:

Changing My Mind is a series of occasional essays. Select one of Smith’s essay from your Introductory week assignments and one from the Week 1 assignments, and compare and contrast the occasions for these pieces. How do the occasions for each piece change the tone of the piece? (Hint: describe the tone of each piece and then make the connection between each essay’s occasion and its tone.) Please upload this by 11:59 pm on Saturday, September 17.

This week, they are completing a writing exercise called “Pop Art”:

Freewrite 250 words about your experience encountering something to do with pop culture. This could be about the time you met a celebrity or the time you camped out for tickets for a concert. It could even be about watching the VMFAs in your pajamas on the couch. Please upload this by 11:59 pm on Saturday, September 24.

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Class at Hudson Valley Writers’ Center Tomorrow!

Tomorrow, I’m teaching a one-day course called “Walk the Line: The Tension Between Line & Syntax” at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. We will consider the relationship between poetry’s vehicles of meaning: the line and the sentence. In doing so, we’ll investigate the ways in which these structures support, nuance, and deny one another to achieve resonance, depth, and subtext within a poem. This course will be generative, with exercises that rely on close reading and formal manipulation of texts, as well as the drafting of new pieces. Whether you want to learn more about what your favorite poets are doing with their poems or discover how to break lines in your own, this course will insist that poetry is a craft, honed by exercises and study.

When I finalize the course packet, I will share it here on Ears Roaring with Many Things. If you’re still interested in signing up, register through the HVWC website.

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“In Medias Res” Writing Exercise for Craft of Prose

In “In Medias Res,” students write and re-write a scene in the three different points of view from a YouTube video of a man texting and running into a wild bear. They likewise create a character profile for their point of view character to navigate Anne Lamott’s suggestion of an “emotional acre.” In doing so, they negotiate the scope, immediacy, and language of each point of view, and consider how “in the middle of things” each point of view feels.