St Mark’s Poetry Project Writing Workshop Report Fall 2005

VERSions: Writing Our Enthusiasms

As an alternative to following a sequential or thematic approach, I aimed, in this workshop, for each activity to be a kind of spoke in a wheel, at the center of which was the morpheme, “vers-“. Each class meeting had a word containing “vers-“ as its watchword: versions/ reversions, animadversions, subversions, perversions, introversions, diversity, vertigo, quauaquaversion, conversation, and extroversion. Thus, the structure of the class more resembled the sort of poems we were reading and writing – not, for the most part, narrative pieces that foregrounded content, but attentive dances with and around terms and tropes.

We began by reading a poem of Nick Piombino’s “With Open Arms,” which paradoxically defines poetry’s indefinability. Every line of the poem begins with “poetry”; I followed up by having participants write their own statements beginning with the word “poetry.” For the next class, participants read two very different poetics statements, one by Louis Zukofsky and one by Tristan Tzara, which we discussed and compared. We also read a number of contemporary poems by, among others, John McNally, Susan Howe, and Jen Bervin, that had been written using archaic language or text sources. Each participant had brought to class their own sample of archaic language and set about making a poem with it – a “reversion”.

For the next class, I asked them to bring a recent tabloid newspaper and to read an essay by Sianne Ngai, “The Poetics of Disgust,” in order to prepare them to write their “animadversions” (strong criticisms of the prevailing order). In class, we read poems by Gregory Corso, Ted Joans, and Carol Mirakove. We discussed our varying points of view about the role of political themes in poetry. Their assignment was to write a poem using only the language contained within the tabloid. In the following class, to prepare participants to write subversions/controversy/ and perversions I introduced them to the “flarf” group of poets, and we read poems by Gary Sullivan and Drew Gardner. The flarf poets commonly use Google to seek out vocabulary and phrases for poems, but since we didn’t have computer access in class, I decided instead to bring in a list of “spam” language that I had found online. I gave each participant a different page of these very random and exotic words, and had them write a piece using them.

For the next meeting, I asked participants to bring a poem or passage of language that they wanted to transform in order to write “versions” or “conversions.” Gary Sullivan was the guest poet; he read from his translations/versions of the German naïf poet Ernst Herbeck. Then I gave everyone a copy of a poem by Ted Berrigan, “Red Shift,” and asked them to write their own version of it.

The focus of the next meeting was “introversion.” Commenting that we had so far focused on ways to find language for poetry from “outside” us, I told participants that we were now going to explore inner “pondwater” [my term] language. I led them on a deep relaxation (I am a certified hypnotherapist) and visualization, then asked them to write from that experience.

We moved from there to focus on “diversity.” Students brought in texts and artifacts from “other” cultures to use as prompts for writing. I showed some scenes from Indian films that had particularly inspired me, and read some poems I had composed from utterances of my ESL students. We also read some statements (which I had found extremely germane to what we were looking at in the workshop) by visual artists (since visual art is, in a way, another “culture”) Carolee Schneemann and Robert Rauschenberg.

I asked participants to write collaboratively in the next class meeting, whose theme was “conversation.” First they determined what the constraints of the collaboration would be, and then wrote according to those constraints. Some of the constraints were thematic, others lexical, and others formal. One of these collaborative pieces developed into a wonderful play that three participants performed at the workshop reading.

We spent much of the next class talking about “extroversions” or approaches to performing a poem. Participants continued to work on their collaborative pieces as well.

There was one final class meeting in January that we had had to reschedule due to the transit strike – only a very few (the “core” of the class) showed up. We discussed structure and repetition; I said that very obvious pattern repetition was becoming less and less interesting to me, and brought in a poem by Clark Coolidge that demonstrated a more complex weaving-in of a lexical item. I also told them about a song that has been obsessing me by the Lebanese singer Mayada el-Hennawy; it’s 39 minutes long (and so I didn’t play it in class, but only described it!), and wanders into all different kinds of musical moods and territories, but is always brought back to a particular phrase, and every time the phrase appears, relieving the suspense caused by its absence, it gathers resonance. So I asked participants to choose a key term and construct a poem around it as complexly as they could.

On the whole, I was thrilled by how open the participants were to new techniques and concepts, and how well most of them responded to the unusual structure of the class. The rapport that developed among us was, I felt, exceptional. I should point out, though, that of the twenty or so people who signed up initially, only about eight or nine remained to really ride out the whole experience.

If I were to teach this workshop again, I’m sure I would narrow its focus. This workshop was intended as a survey of sideways approaches to verse (whose root actually does mean “to turn”) and I think worked fairly well as such, but there was certainly not enough time to really explore such important projects as collaboration or performance, or to look at any historical movement in depth. Still, the workshop was a wonderful experience, and I thank the Poetry Project for giving me the space to conduct it.