student work – Page 5 – The Art of Compost

Student work: Phone number poems

Some phone number poems by my students. Tinkered to keep their actual phone numbers private! Again I’m struck by how good these are, how dynamic the line breaks, and compact the thought of them.

A clock,

Four chimes until sun
Hung lonely on a barroom wall
Tick tock.
Hank,
Red eyes, crooked spine
Twelve drinks until the night shift starts,
It’s only cycles
Tick tock.

What did you
do to make them so mad?

Insult their baking skills?
Or was it something worse? You
can tell me.

Well,
I said their baby was handsome.
Turns out, it’s a girl.

To be
just what I wanted
in the past, then
here
and now

falling down
getting up
just how I
wanted.

Hello there
I first saw you last night

Your face was set by moon light
Salty misty
Air
On the beach a glimpse of your
Red hair.
Hello there, if I may
I am in love with a silhouette.

Where is
my cat?
Is she hiding?
She hides in cupboards
sometimes.
She is an elusive ghosty.
Consistently
floats around my
house
like a spook.

Well well well,
Lookie what we have here.

An ambassador from my
hometown. You thought I’d left?

Negatory.
Still here.
I called finders keepers on
steering a bike with just one finger.

Melody
She sings as if it were life

She sighs soft songs
as if it were sad-
ness her
voice silences
the audience that
comes for her sweet sighing
of song

Can’t sleep.

I guess I rarely do.
I’m trying to keep my promise.
Hope.
I wish I could call,
I need your help.
He needs brothers.
The rain comes more often than it did.
They tore down the place you saved me.

I saw

no I have not seen it
I dreamt it sleeping sideways
on route to somewhere white
I had not yet an understanding
of what pictures could mean
I just felt you through the glass door
say nothing of truth
I know

☜ teaching portfolio

Student work: Found poems

From my students’ found poems (posted with permission). I’m stunned by how good these are. I sense in some a little imitation of the Ashbery I gave as example—but a little imitation’s no sin.

YOU ALWAYS

Every little bone
Lost and found

Some sickness
Coming home
Stretching you

Still I have to wait
Giving you a chance to go on

Source: bits of overheard conversation on local buses.

BUST TALK

Bring it to the boid. Where people do.
Moment of your. Ladies . . . ? Put antlers on my.
Can’t do it without. Don’t want kids.
Girls had to be escorted through the. Tilting it in besides using.
Fairly difficult to. Friends who couldn’t boil.
I can just carry. I lied I said I was.

Sources: the bus, roommates making dinner, the grocery store, a girl talking on the phone in the library, some girls in a parking lot.

(UNTITLED)

My life in the garden. A professional creep.
Measuring mortality. Underestimated desperation.
The God of eggs. Drops hundreds on stupidity.
Leeching souls. Rotting citrus. Raining hedgehogs.
A glottal stop. The crazy’s back.
Can’t trust delusion. In a house of stray cats.

Sources [this list makes a companion poem to the first] [some names changed to preserve anonymity]:

1. Meghan working in our yard
2. Kayla liking to explore attics
3. Liz, population issues
4. Dr. C., on human tendencies
5. Evelyn making snack
6. Me, on calling a lock smith
7. Sam’s dramatic description of a professor
8. Brandin, on the rotting fruit in our fridge
9. Kayla’s friend got a hedgehog, misheard “training hedgehogs”
10. Kayla, it’s a sound in Arabic
11. Meghan, on Arianna’s return to our house
12. Marylin, warning us about Arianna
13. Boston, describing our housemates as kitties.

FOR NEW ZEALAND

For New Zealand and
in Iceland over yonder
a bottle of wine . . . or two
so superficial
off the light like you.

Freaking cute!
My Hawks and future cowboy
perfect comment
so much ass
three times the national rate.

In your prayers, but
years from now
in the dark
a moment at the Texaco
tis the season to fawcking love this.

An Autumnal mood
Monday, like crazy
and outnumbered benefits
yummy Mexican, oh so texty
but fly as shit.

Source: Facebook statuses of friends.

(UNTITLED)

All of us on the road from Scotland to Silverado.
The sound and the fury as I lay dying.
Sex lives of cannibals, basic logic.
Kama Sutra, great expectations.
Two years before the mast. The poisoners. The Italians. The great pyramids.
A tale of two cities. Mumbo jumbo.
To a god unknown. Welcome to the monkey house, beat reader.

Source: a bookshelf.

(UNTITLED)

A dusty room. Deprived of sun.
Melancholy soul. Little sinks.

Against a rule. Being ignored.
The sun to night. To worlds of dark.
Of memories. With setting skies.

The patter of rain. A wound unmended.
Slept through. A candle blown.

Our sorrows in shades. Once a vessel.
And every song. A complicated knot.
About my regret. My every thought.

To never be found.

Source: Love and Misadventure by Lang Leav.

DID YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY?

Letter openers. Cardboard cutouts. Ibuprofen.
Kites everywhere. A nap midday. Chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.
His Hungarian going? Dry erase. Pink computer.

Things that actually kill us. Educated math students.
Happiness shaved off the Neverending Story.
The Hello Kitty blanket tastes like burnt meat.

Sources: The West Wing, overheard conversations at a friend’s house, class lecture.

MESSY PHRASES

Sweet Everlasting Voices. may have Blamed. Word for Word.
left on. Loose Paper. an Aged Man. the Sea swept.
He drew. says the Ghost. live in the Peeling Mansion.
with feeling older. let the Tongue slip. swap our Lies.
They made You. to fear Them. praise this Mess. the Slow Rain.

Source: poems on the Poetry Foundation website.

MEDIA OVERLOAD

Well the situation is
What’s wrong with the kids these
Staying high all the
Let’s forget these tragic
Days long ago

Hello folks
Drugs aren’t the
WRONG ANSWER!
Let’s continue on
With the sex drives of teens

…

Monsters aren’t
The only thing
Giving these all
Away to fairyland
Drug dealers are too

…

So in the end
Nothing makes me
HAPPY, HAPPY, FUN TIME
After this tragic
Floods in Florida

Sources: Listening to two or three media devices at once, tablet, desktop computer, phone, each on a different kind of media. E.g., one playing YouTube videos, one with live and old news, one streaming music.

Exercise: Exquisite Corpse (variant)

A variation on the well known Exquisite Corpse exercise dreamed up by the Surrealists. Begin with the words “I went down the stairs and around.” Each contributor only sees the words written by their immediate neighbour. Each contribution is to

finish the previous phrase
begin a new phrase (not a clause)
keep the sentence going (no periods)

Some were shaky on the phrase/clause distinction, so we didn’t quite get to the octopus (one clause from which innumerable phrases hang) of my dreams. But here’s one we wrote (apologies to my other section, that one got lost):

I went down the stairs and around the bend, then down the womping willow they scoured in their boots and in a moment that was tense, they almost were caught so they pretended to be in the circus with a group of cowboys and cowgirls that learned to lasso these silly bulls that stampeded from the mountain shaped like a monkey’s head which made many bystanders turn their heads and fall to the ground laughing so hard their stomach had an out of body experience while digesting the chili from the diner on the corner of Wall and Broadway, it steamed as though 3 men touched each others’ swords together in a loving embrace that ended in the joining of four souls which ultimately began edging towards the end of bombs and explosions.

Word. Or, phrase. (As in, that’s the unit we were on.)

Student work: Anagram poems

One more before this body heads to the gym. My students did great work with the anagram prompt. A few excerpts, posted with their permissions —

CHRYSANTHEMUM

musty men are her master
they see her as a chummy trashy muse

WANDERLUST

we learn as stars learn
sedated
wasted as a last sunset

PUGNACIOUS

pugs can coop up
in a soup can

GUNSHOT

shoot to sun
oh unhung sun
so soon

WEATHERS

Earth sews art,
water, seas

trees thrash
that were at rest

…

here we
are rare

we stare at stars,
aware

DREAMING

i dear am dreaming
in man-made greed

FINGERS

ginger grins
green ferns
fire rising

I see sense in freeing sin.

LUMINESCENT

sun: i see it set in mist
mice scuttle, still
insects teem in nite’s lull

ANXIETIES

I see sentient entities
six ants in tea

AUTHORIZED

I hear the tzar roar

I tour the tear
I hear the horror

☜ teaching portfolio

First thoughts fall quarter

Okay, the move’s mostly made, still a bit of unpacking to do, but we’re up and running.

I’m teaching two sections of Intro to Creative Writing this fall. A course I’ve taught lots before but doing a thorough reno on it this go through. Less on core concepts and genre conventions. More on creative mischief and sideways mindleaps. The old version was good on fundamentals but kinda sobersided. And at Western this course isn’t a gateway for creative writing concentrators who need to learn all that good stuff. Rather it’s an elective taken by a lot of non-majors and future elementary and high school teachers. Who’re going to want some ways to get their students excited about the creative import of their own minds.

The first thing they learn about the course (after my office hours):

First premise. There is no one who is not creative. To make art—to sing, dance, shape sound, movement, language, or paint, any medium—is a birthright, as natural to us as our powers of speech and affection are. Second premise. We have not always been well served by our schooling. School may have, in fostering some of our capacities, estranged us from others. Most of us were probably better poets at six than at sixteen. Tentative conclusion. It is one task of a creative writing course—especially an introductory course—to rekindle the spark that connects, not A to B, but Q to oranges, mosses to stars. I don’t know exactly what this course will be—I see it as a work in progress and collaborative—but I hope you’ll feel more awake to being-alive-here-now for having taken it.

Heavy. Time for a foolish picture.

And so our itinerary is, one stop per week —

Sound
Word
Phrase
Line
Sentence
Image
Paragraph
Figure
Person
Shape

My posts will probably fall out likewise.

Final projects: Caitlyn

Caitlyn assembled a source text from found material and then performed an erasure on it to generate

EVE

She thinks this is
morning, “I’ve got my

things, I’m on the
verge.”

                    Guess
                    I have
                        you

breathing.

Finally, this

two to one

static:

                        I swim across an
                    ocean
                from an empty

room.

(Erased from a base text made of the first words of each song on the album Everything in Transit by Jack’s Mannequin.)

One thing I really like here: how the poem combines (composts) two time-honoured practices — the found poem and the erasure poem — in a way that feels seamless and self-assured.

Final projects: Megan

She writes:

Whenever my family and I go on roadtrips I listen to music for hours and watch the scenery pass. I placed the first part of the poem between the headphones to visually show scenery passing to music. The jumble of wire underneath the headphones creates visual and mental pauses. The last part of the poem (describing the music) is placed near the plug-in because that is the part that allows me to listen to my music.

One thing I really like here is how the loops and curls of the cord (especially at the bottom edge) pass on and off and onto again the sheet of paper. A feeling of freedom or unboundedness in it.

Final projects: Zoe

Zoe took the “worm in a compost bin” exercise and ran with it, burrowing through paragraphs of her own work and arriving at prose poems like this.

I want to yearly remember your surviving and stay. I see you take your change, and with deeply you are in this small want. To hold each messy water-relapse and be daily when hard and heard. Parenting one or both of us is to stay. Edited puffy eyes, 7:33.

Spun to folds I can be.

One thing I really like here is the rhythm of her sentences — the prosody of her prose, as one of my colleagues would call it. Zoe and I talked a little about counting syllables or words in each phrase, clause, or sentence, and seeing what patterns emerge. Usually you’ll see trends of increase or diminution or equilibrium. Sometimes when a passage just won’t come right it’s because the rhythm is wrong for that place or that thought.

This piece feels masterly to me rhythmically. But let’s see. If we count syllables per phrase and phrases per sentence we get:

9 5|5 16 10 6|5

Yup, there’s a pattern. The number of syllables per sentence climbs from 9 to 10 to 16 and then drops back to 10. The last sentence in the main body stands out, for instead of continuing the diminution, it grows in size again. So the startle we get from the shift in diction (from high lyrical to compressed technical) is reinforced by a deviation from the expected rhythmic pattern.

Lots more we could say here — on the deferral of the expected short sentence to the following paragraph, on the difference between a 10 and a 5|5, on the primacy of five- and six-syllable units, on the counterpoint between syllables per phrase and words per phrase — but my day is done, time to ride to Joe’s Gardens for corn and blueberries. THANK YOU to all my students who’ve allowed me to post their really very striking work on this blog.

Final projects: Risa

Risa devised a really neat composting practice she’ll summarize below. But first one of the poems resultant:

MURDER

Water the piece I
visit. Such that I
could be alone. I
want to develop
the thought of you
before I start.

You were the same this
time. None of those
modifiers used
before. Each decade
they drive me to
murder.

One thing I really like here is how each sentence or fragment feels both a great distance from, and intimately bound up in, its neighbours. That a poem can be both fragmentary and whole (see, for instance, Creeley’s Pieces). And the fierce enjambments enact the same paradox line-by-line — each line both broken and intact. And the process by which the poem was generated is remarkably close to invisible.

Risa’s account of the process, with some abridgement:

Choose a word you’d like to end your poem or paragraph with. Google search the word (for example, “murder”). Scroll to the end of the first page of results and find the last substantive word in the last search result (for example, “decades”). Note that word down (so you now have a list with two words on it, in our example “murder” and “decades”). Repeat the process, using the second word as your search term, and adding your third word to the list (for example, “each”). Continue until you have around 15 words or get bored. Then compose a poem that uses each word, either in the order they were found in, or in the reverse order (as in our example).

The words Risa used to compose “Murder” are boldfaced above.