poetry Archives - Word Café

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

cornelius-eady at word cafe A 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.”

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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 Cafe Poetry, 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!

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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.

Cornelius Eady “The Music of Words”

MARK WUNDERLICH, “Rhythm & Image”

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