Word Café

a master class for readers and writers

Cornelius Eady “The Music of Words”

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WORD CAFE EVENT ARCHIVE CORNELIUS EADY – 5/28/15

cornelius-eady at word cafeA hero’s welcome to poet-musician Cornelius Eady, who sat in a northbound Manhattan traffic jam for more than an hour to come up and join us! (And while we’re spreading gratitude, thanks to Word Café’s genius webinatrix Nan Tepper for valet-parking Cornelius’s car in uptown Kingston so he could come right in.)

Cornelius made up for lost time with his presentation on “The Music of Words.” Tuning and retuning his Baby Martin travel guitar, he first recited the poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Sterling A. Brown.

Then Cornelius sang us the song setting he’d written for Brown’s words.

Next he sang us his own song (words and music) “Twilight is the Hour.”

So what is the difference between writing song lyrics and writing poetry, which has its own musicality and rhythm? “Same throat, different muscles,” said Cornelius, echoing Nancy Willard’s words about writing across different genres: “Many buckets, same well.” It’s a difference of intent, he continued. Lyrics are meant for melody, and though poems are meant to be recited, we usually encounter a poem first on the page, before we hear the poet.

Continuing the musical theme (also found in the opening poems of his new chapbook Singing While Black), Cornelius read a poem from his book Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems. Its title, “I’m a Fool to Love You,” comes from a Frank Sinatra song.

The poem grew out of a conversation he’d had with his mother shortly before her death. He asked her favorite song (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”) and how she’d met his father. After the book came out, Cornelius reminded her of this conversation and she told him a totally different story about how they’d met. “And that’s fine,” he explained. “Sometimes when you write, you get the idea it has to be true. But it’s her story–the way I heard her story; it’s not necessarily the truth. The truth is out there somewhere. The poem is here.”

When Cornelius teaches beginning poets, one of the first things he tries to do is break down resistance to approaching poetry “like it’s an opera in Italian, in a specific language for specific people. It’s just a human voice, human experience. We all have different ways of capturing that. If you don’t capture it, we lose.”

He also said, “You have to get used to failure if you’re going to be an artist. Sometimes the lousy poem has to die to give birth to the good one.”

As for criticism, seek out family and friends you trust to be tough but fair. But ultimately, “It doesn’t matter. This is your art, this is what you do. It’s not a debate. You own it. It’s yours.”

outdated cafe

THE EXERCISES:

Nina asked people to write down a line from a song or poem you love, then trade lines with someone sitting nearby. Read the line you’ve been given, and use the whole line, or some word or phrase within it, as the springboard for a new poem. Try to follow its music back to the line you gave to somebody else.

Cornelius’s exercise had two parts. First he asked us to review the day we’d just had, from the time we got up to the time we sat down at outdated. Locate a quiet moment and write about it as fully as you can. After a few minutes, he asked for a few volunteers to read what they’d written.

The second part: Write a poem about your first kiss. Again, he asked a few people to read their work. What was different?

Cornelius Eady Word CafePoetry, said Cornelius, is about language, image, sound, and memory. While both of these prompts involved sharing an intimate moment, the first memory was recent, quiet and contemplative. The second was active, with an inherent intensity. It requires specifics: you’re trying to explain who did what to whom. It’s detailed and particular; you break it down. Also, Cornelius explained, you need to get to a specific “pow!” moment (he clapped his hands). How do you frame that? What frames YOU? How did you become the person we see? It’s about taking a risk, being bold enough to get it down and share it.

Language, image, sound, and memory. Go!

feet-nina-cornelius

Edwin Sanchez “Making Drama”

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Edwin Sanchez “Making Drama”

May 21, 2015

edwin sanchezPlaywright Edwin Sanchez gave us a tantalizing ​and hilarious ​sneak peek at his forthcoming novel Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod​, along with​ some wonderfully down-to-earth advice about writing (“You just sit down and do it.”)

Do playwrights and fiction writers approach their work differently?  Not really, says Eddie.  “We all have the same box of crayons.  We just use different ones for different things.”  For him, the joy of writing fiction was getting to go inside a character’s head.

When he teaches playwriting, he asks his students the following questions:

— Who’s the main character?

— What does he want more than life itself?

— What’s stopping him from getting it?

Nina observed that the character’s obstacle can be internal–something he’s scared of or struggles with–an outside circumstance, or both at once. The bigger the obstacles, the better the drama.

Eddie often starts out by writing a monologue for his lead character (“A good monologue is like an aria.”)  Then he starts thinking about who’s hearing this monologue and how they might respond.  We talked about the elasticity of writing for theatre.  It’s a collaborative form, and a script isn’t fully alive until it’s performed.  Plays take place in present tense, in real time and space, and no two performances are alike.  Different actors and directors may approach the same character in ways that surprise you, for better or worse.  But when you write a novel, the buck stops with you.  “You don’t get to say it was miscast,” Eddie said.

Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod is distinctly not miscast.

 

EDDIE’S EXERCISE:

Write a character’s dream ​(​or nightmare​)​ as a scene, monologue, or poem.

NINA’S EXERCISE:

Write a two-character scene in which one character has something the other wants.  What does the second character do or say to get it, without ever coming out and asking “Can I have that?”

As usual, the concentration was intense as a roomful of writers went to work on these prompts.  As Eddie and I sat and talked quietly, one of the vintage signs on the wall caught his eye.  So here is Exercise #3:

Write a short play entitled EAT CHICKEN DINNER CANDY.

Eamon Grennan “Detail”

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May 14, 2015

eamon grennan by jennifer may

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?