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Eamon Grennan “Detail”

May 17, 2015 By Word Cafe

May 14, 2015

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile
Photo credit: Jennifer May

“I’m going to read a few poems for about three hours,” declared Eamon Grennan. All of us laughed, but as soon as he started reading, we wished he actually would.

The Dublin-born poet and Vassar professor emeritus read five of his own poems: “Painter’s Diary,” “Swifts Over Dublin,” “Landscape With Teeth,” “Detail,” and “The Horse at Hand” (all but the last in his Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems), interleaving the poems with observations about their construction and our topic for the evening, Detail.

Eamon described “Painter’s Diary” as “a litany of what I could see,” likening it to collage, a medium he loves because “it forces a curious breakage–it breaks the logic, the linear.”

On “Swifts Over Dublin”: “All we’re trying to do is word the world. Detail is one way we do that. We enumerate, notate, name the things seen.”

“Landscape Over Dublin” led to a riff on how to get out of a poem; he observed that he doesn’t know exactly what the final lines mean.

He described the prose poem “The Horse at Hand” as “another example of things piling up,” noting that it starts with a list of negatives, what the subject is not.

Of “Detail,” he said, “It’s really only about paying attention. You’re concentrating on craft, and suddenly, out of left field, the poem is telling you something else.” He used to tell his students at Vassar that poems need to have both data and rapture. “They have to be grounded and also able to levitate.”

Eamon often sets himself specific challenges: finish a poem every day for two years, then go back to see what you have and do a lot of editing, converting them all into poems of 13 lines (“disappointed sonnets”). These formal constraints, he says, give him “something to kick against.”

He also suggested reading writers’ journals and letters (Thoreau, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, Wallace Stevens), looking at paintings, and going on walks. “When you don’t know what to do, you just set off,” he said. “Don’t think. Look. If you look hard enough, the thinking will come.”

THE EXERCISES:

Eamon read Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Gift,” which has, he says, “a kind of lift at the end.”

He asked us to start a poem with the line “It was that kind of day:”, write five more lines, and end with “Just ordinary light.”

Nina’s exercise: Describe an object in this room in vivid detail, without using any visual references at all. Since most of us rely on sight to describe the world, this is a way to stimulate the other senses. How does this object smell, sound, feel, taste? What does it do or suggest?

Gretchen Primack, “Form & Freedom”

April 19, 2015 By Word Cafe

April 16, 2015

Gretchen Primack treated a rapt group to a reading of poems in many forms: sonnets, haiku, iambic pentamenter in tercets, a suite of Yiddish-inflected limericks, an ekphrastic poem (i.e. inspired by another art form) and “a form only real poetry nerds will know,” a paraclausithyron, or lament sung through a lover’s locked door. She found this and other deliciously obscure forms in The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (which you can order it from The Golden Notebook, where she works on Sundays and Mondays).

So: why form, and how freedom? Gretchen defined “received forms” (forms offering preset rules, which of course you can break, bend, or alter) as “something from the outside that gives you limits, which is ridiculously freeing.” She later described the sonnet form as a garden trellis, with the set number of lines providing a scaffold on which a vine can “climb freely and do crazy things,” adding, “It’s so comforting that you have this structure. You will write a different poem than if you sat down and wrote free verse, guaranteed.” (For the record, Gretchen also writes free verse, and beautifully: see Doris’s Red Spaces, Kind, and The Slow Creaking of Planets for examples of her poems, both trellis-and-vine and free-range.)

She pointed out that received forms were “all there was in the Western tradition” until Walt Whitman busted it open, redefining notions of what poetry can be. Whitman’s long lines were a revelation; Gretchen says most poets habitually gravitate to lines and poems of similar lengths, and that using short lines (“poems shaped like Chile”) or very long ones can “shake things up, in a good way.”

Poetry requires “such an attention to every element on the page, a heightened attention to language and form.” Reading poetry requires time, slowing down to savor and linger. Nina added that poetry calls in all the other art forms, with its attention to visual layout on the page, to musical rhythm, and to the performer’s breath. It’s also a form that demands concision, Gretchen affirmed. “I really like the idea of sloughing off chaff. I like cutting away what isn’t necessary, leaving just that plump, polished seed.”

This attention and focus was demonstrated immediately, as we had the quietest mid-class break in the history of Word Café, with a record number of people coming forward to read wonderful short poems and openings.

THE EXERCISES:

Gretchen passed out a worksheet (download pdf) with two exercises. Nutshell version:

— Write ten lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter (iambs are the two-syllable “heartbeat rhythm” of Shakespeare: daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM… Gretchen commented that five iambs is “about the length of a breath.”)

— Read a poem you love (she chose a sonnet from Marilyn Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmett Till”) and circle five words. Write a new poem that uses those five words.

Nina offered a third formal exercise, riffing off the OCD poetic form called the sestina, which rearranges the same six end-words in a preset pattern, creating a ripple of repeated words. Nina’s “sestina unplugged” has only one rule: the last word in each sentence (prose) or line (poem) must recur somewhere in the following sentence or line. (If you want to add one more sestina rule, circle these “end words” as you go along, and repeat more than one in your final lines.)

MARK WUNDERLICH, “Rhythm & Image”

September 18, 2014 By Word Cafe

MARK WUNDERLICH was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in rural Fountain City, Wisconsin. His first book, The Anchorage, was published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and received the Lambda Literary Award. Voluntary Servitude was published in 2004 and The Earth Avails, both by Graywolf. He has published poems in The Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. His work has been included in over thirty anthologies and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. His work has been translated into Italian, Bulgarian and Swedish. Wunderlich has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Ohio University and San Francisco State University. He has taught undergraduate writing and literature courses at Stanford University, Barnard College and Stonehill College. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. Wunderlich lives in New York’s Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill.

Read Nina Shengold’s Chronogram profile.

“Rhythm & Image” 9/18/14 – The Exercises

At our third class, the delightful Mark Wunderlich read four poems from The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014) and a new poem he wrote this summer. He talked about his writing process (it involves a lot of getting up and washing dishes, going back to work, splitting kindling, going back to work) and how poetry involves breath and music. “Whenever we speak, we’re singing to each other.”

It’s also a visual form. Mark pointed out that prose is fluid, flowing from margin to margin, where poetic lines are specific. They don’t “break” so much as “breathe.”

MARK’S EXERCISE:

Imagine a place from your past and spend five minutes listing favorite words you associate with it. (Examples from his family farm: muskrat/chokecherry/milk pail.) Don’t overthink or censor yourself. Keep your pen moving constantly. If you can’t think of the next word, keep writing the same one till a new one comes to you.

Choose ten favorite words from this list and print them on a separate sheet of paper.

Now trade pages with someone you don’t know. You have ten minutes to write a poem using all ten of the words you’ve been given. Go.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Describe something you find beautiful in as much detail as you can, without using any adverbs or adjectives. (Examples: it can’t be “big,” but it can dominate the room. It can’t be “green,” but it can smell like pine.) Ten minutes.

Both exercises impose limitations (time limit, rules about what words you must or can’t use). Mark observed that writers can become overly invested in producing a product–a finished thing–and lose their sense of playfulness, invention, and accident. “All of poetry is a conversation between freedom and restraint,” he said. “When you engage the good soldier with rules and patterns, the reptile part–the id, the wild woman–gets to come out and do its thing.”

He also proposed some uses for “those little notebooks people always give you as gifts when they know you’re a writer”:

— A book of possible titles

— A book of quotations and overheard dialogue

— A “good lines” box for things you wind up cutting: Recycle your darlings.

If you can’t clear the decks to give yourself uninterrupted blocks of writing time, you can always find 20 minutes to check in with your creative work. Make lists, do exercises, get something started.

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