Greetings all.
I know this is an awfully late post for tomorrow's project, but it's meant only to encourage you to finish what I hope you've already started. If not, or if you're stuck, here's a reminder of our project and some discussion of what it could entail.
First, the project: to write a poem that uses content you wouldn't ordinarily associate with poetry.
Some of you might be thinking right now, THERE IS NOTHING OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POETRY!! And you'd be right. Take a look at all the variants of poems we include in the poetic art:
Poems about life, death, loss, love, birth, marriage, divorce
Poems about the struggle of the artist in an indifferent society
Poems about politics and war, fear and hope, desperation and triumph
Poems about places familiar and foreign, known and imagined
Poems about art (paintings, other poems, music, dance)
Poems that use old words in old ways and in new ways
Poems that borrow terms/ideas from other categories (law, science, religion, commerce, technology)
Poems that twist or challenge the rules of grammar and usage, etiquette, style
You can write about or "with" just about anything in a poem and poets are celebrated especially for doing so. Or can you? That's the objective of this little project, to test that theory . . . because it is a theory. The list above is off the top of my head and probably could be extended. But I doubt that as a writer of poetry I produce much work whose content falls outside this really very narrow set of subjects and treatments.
What I mean to say is that we may believe THERE IS NOTHING OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POETRY, and we might be right, technically. However, for most of us--who write within a culture, a timeframe, a community--there are some seriously limiting factors that determine FOR US what a poem is, what its content must be, how it must unfold across the page. It's hard for us to imagine writing poems outside of the context(s) in which we write.
When you engage with such art--and who knows where YOU will stumble across it?--chances are you'll run across some odd image or weird topic or head-scratching turn of phrase. You'll stop reading for a moment and say to yourself, I didn't know you could put something like that into a poem! * And your poetry horizon will be ever so slightly expanded.
Tonight, I'm still struggling with my poem of newness, as you might call this project. I'm looking for that bar of soap that Bennett found in my poem of last week, a little piece of content that I didn't set out to make "new" or innovative but that, for one reader at least, came across that way.
Can't wait to hear what you come up with for tomorrow!
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* Or your first response might be, "That's a mistake!" or "Huh?"
I know this is an awfully late post for tomorrow's project, but it's meant only to encourage you to finish what I hope you've already started. If not, or if you're stuck, here's a reminder of our project and some discussion of what it could entail.
First, the project: to write a poem that uses content you wouldn't ordinarily associate with poetry.
Some of you might be thinking right now, THERE IS NOTHING OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POETRY!! And you'd be right. Take a look at all the variants of poems we include in the poetic art:
Poems about life, death, loss, love, birth, marriage, divorce
Poems about the struggle of the artist in an indifferent society
Poems about politics and war, fear and hope, desperation and triumph
Poems about places familiar and foreign, known and imagined
Poems about art (paintings, other poems, music, dance)
Poems that use old words in old ways and in new ways
Poems that borrow terms/ideas from other categories (law, science, religion, commerce, technology)
Poems that twist or challenge the rules of grammar and usage, etiquette, style
You can write about or "with" just about anything in a poem and poets are celebrated especially for doing so. Or can you? That's the objective of this little project, to test that theory . . . because it is a theory. The list above is off the top of my head and probably could be extended. But I doubt that as a writer of poetry I produce much work whose content falls outside this really very narrow set of subjects and treatments.
What I mean to say is that we may believe THERE IS NOTHING OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POETRY, and we might be right, technically. However, for most of us--who write within a culture, a timeframe, a community--there are some seriously limiting factors that determine FOR US what a poem is, what its content must be, how it must unfold across the page. It's hard for us to imagine writing poems outside of the context(s) in which we write.
I've spent several days this past week struggling to come up with something for a poem that I wouldn't ordinarily think of writing about (subject) or using (image) or developing (line of argument, style of presentation, etc.) . . . and I mean struggling! The project has sent me back to some very old poems, like Robert Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," which uses the high-tech term (for his time), liquifaction. I remember feeling grabbed by that word the first time I read the poem in a lit survey course, because it just didn't seem to belong in a steamy poem of 17th Century England. It puzzled me until I had to teach the poem in a lit survey of my own. That's when I was forced to really think about what Herrick was up to with it. And it was this: he was being a poet. He was creating a poetic work of art whose first purpose, like all art, is to draw attention to itself, to its materiality. And in the case of poetry, that materiality is language. What better way to do that than to jam a term of high-tech science (alchemy) into the middle of a sexy love poem?
This is why I often encourage you to engage with poetry that comes from some other set of rules or experiences or understanding about the art and what it can be. That might be non-Western, non-European poetry. It might be ancient or extremely current/cutting edge poetry. It might be poetry in a language other than your own.
When you engage with such art--and who knows where YOU will stumble across it?--chances are you'll run across some odd image or weird topic or head-scratching turn of phrase. You'll stop reading for a moment and say to yourself, I didn't know you could put something like that into a poem! * And your poetry horizon will be ever so slightly expanded.
Tonight, I'm still struggling with my poem of newness, as you might call this project. I'm looking for that bar of soap that Bennett found in my poem of last week, a little piece of content that I didn't set out to make "new" or innovative but that, for one reader at least, came across that way.
Can't wait to hear what you come up with for tomorrow!
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* Or your first response might be, "That's a mistake!" or "Huh?"
