The Tolerance Project Archive

Hi Brennen. I really enjoyed reading your poetry this week. I’m very interested in the direction that “Guide to Poetry” has taken. All of the implied violence of the first section has become more explicit here, and I am interested in seeing how what I would characterize as “Guide to [the world in which] Poetry [must operate]” speaks to the first “Guide to Poetry” section. The first section utilized the structures and discourses of the world in which poetry must operate, but the second section seems more explicitly concerned with that world and its events.
see lightness
the enemy loves lightness
fuck the lightness
into the infinite lightness
holding the reins of lightness
with the wrath of God’s lightness
wasted to fuel the lightness

The first page of this section was most exciting to me, I think because of its being structured around the words “lightness,” “synapse,” “ammunition,” “accident,” and “music.”
the cutting edge of the synapse
wired to the digital synapse
the pain is nothing but synapse
down to his last uncomprehending synapse
the afterglow of a dying synapse
let the vicious synapse
with every synapse with every concussion

I thought a lot about why you might have chosen these words as structuring principles, or themes, perhaps, for the poem. I found that lightness can mean “want of force,” that an accident can be “anything that happens,” that music is a term for a company musician, and for the sound of gunfire in the U.S. military. These definitions seemed to go well with ammunition, but not synapse.
the indelible sharpness of his ammunition
pours the ammunition
all this ammunition
his goddamn very own ammunition
O pitiful ammunition
our ammunition
accidents of ammunition

I’m not sure that I really needed there to be an explicit connection between all five words, but I was interested in thinking about what the use of them together might mean. How, for example, is a word like “accident” or “lightness” changed when placed in the same textual position as “ammunition”? Or, how does “synapse” relate to “accident”? Is the connectedness implied by “synapse” now random? And what does it mean that “accident” is negated, although it is inisisted in its repeptition? Thinking through these questions was a difficult but very pleasurable exercise.
it is no accident
there can be no accident
and deny the accident
no earthly accident
because there is no accident
impervious to accident
accidents of ammunition

I felt that the combination between these words was the most compelling and powerful part of the packet. I thought that the way that you appropriated this call-to-war voice was quite frightening, and the way that you exposed the repetition within that discourse was very apt. In addition, it made me wonder, since music was one of the words, what the implications of this being part of a guide to poetry are. Where does art fit into this world of
gunner listening to music
the complete music
armor piercing music
do you hear the music
swift terrible music
in the glorious music
the supreme music

What is the role of music in this scene, and what does that say about music/poetry/art?
It will be interesting to see how this section speaks to the leaves on the bedroom wall or poet falling down in the parking lot. What will we (your readers) think happened to the poor poet then? It was nice to see her safely swiveling in her office chair in the third section. I was starting to get worried about her.

no thing ascends into air

Plateau of leaves each takes its selecting time meeting ground, the placement

,after life ,they’re always dead first clinging to ,paper thin tissue

,illusion of greenery ,original budding orb

Yesterday of a

wind dive threads into

one leaf dog-eared waves winks a tiny green flame. Flag surrender

the tip pul(invisible st

ring)led into half pirouette (A second yawns) and is drawn out

through wind (again) needling the collection.

Color strewn across cement is only a gesture

to
wardsin
evitable
pile

What builds into a mound of leaves into mounds?

Cease murmur: the tree apologizes

Whisper whisper on the branch layer growth grow into your layers

Seething skinskinsininsksinkin

(A is (for no (change) grafted onto) into air

Sarah Dowling
Prof. C. Bergvall
ENG 790
24 March 2005
Response to Divya Victor
Dear Divya,
I really enjoyed reading your work over the past few days. I have been thinking about it a lot. I am intrigued by the ways in which this packet of work foregrounds presence and absence, opening and closing, consensual and forced actions. After receiving the work, I read it several times, and again, I felt that it was quite sad. This section, although quite different from the previous sections, maintains the concern with/for the interrelation of language and the body, language and land, and the slippage between animal, plant and human. The reason why I found the work sad was that everything in this section appears to be on the cusp. Few actions are completed or possible, the bodily regions described are extremely intimate, and the sentence construction is often conditional (“as if,” “given”). In this sense, the reader is presented with the possibility of communication or community, “as if we had answered,” but this is foreclosed or problematized by the complicated folding that preoccupies the text. What can be between? How can the folds be negotiated? The text’s focus on complication and difficulty, and the location of that problematic as inside of or near to the inside of the body, and the association of that problematic with language create an extremely dense layering of discussions. I’m going to use this response to investigate a few threads that I was able to trace through the work and to reflect upon what these suggest about the packet as a whole.

The first thread that I will discuss is the text’s articulation of proximity and distance. In beginning my work on the text, I made a list of all of the words relating to “far & near, between, together & apart.” The list included nearly every word on the first page and a good portion of the words on the remaining pages: “answered,” “held,” “together,” “near,” “coincidence,” “slough” (to break off, shed, exuviate), “excerpts (removed), “girdle” (around), “lolling” (out), “fret” (intersecting), “anon” (in/to one body or mass, together), “unowned,” “suture.” The list went on for two full pages. Many of the words on the list, such as “arpeggio” suggested both proximity and distance, as an arpeggio is a chord, and therefore denotes harmonious connection, but is broken into its component notes, suggesting disjunction. Similarly, some of the words on the list suggested an incorrect or imperfect connection, like “calque,” which brings up the problem of translation and its imperfections. Many of the words relating to proximity and distance emphasized the ending of proximity: “lolling,” “fledge,” “egress,” “estuary” and “unbuckling” all suggest separation, although “unbuckling” may suggest a separation in order to join. In this sense, the text foregrounded the ideas of proximity and distance, most often articulating these ideas in order to suggest either the ending of proximity through the imposition of distance, or to place the two together in such a way that the difficulties of proximity came to light. In this sense, tying proximity and distance to language and the body, this section of Exuviae placed great emphasis on the difficulty of intimacy, focusing most closely on the female body.

The next thread I traced through the text was that of language relating to the body. I paid special attention to words that connoted the female body or femininity because after the appearance of the words “girdles” and “flange” on the first page, I thought that that might be a central concern of the work. Although this packet is extremely concerned with the body in general, its particular attention to the female body is interesting, especially as this is often inflected through imagery relating to mollusks and their shells. There were not many words referring specifically to the female body: “girdles,” “flange,” “roil” (a stoutly built woman), “fig,” “buttons,” “purl” (sonic involvement with “pearl,” therefore has clitoral connotations, also related to the feminine through knitting), “mince,” and “gaud” (in the sense of finery, gewgaws and toys). When considered in conjunction with words describing or connoting mollusks and words describing folding, the list expands considerably: “aperture” (the mouth of the shell of a mollusk), “gape” (to open the shell of a bivalve”), “dactyl” (a mollusk, the piddock), “cowries,” and “suture” (can refer specifically to the closure of the valves of a shell) all suggest the female body through the well-established cultural association between the shells of bivalve mollusks and the vulva. Similarly, words denoting folding, and therefore suggesting invagination, include: “flange,” “plaited,” “draped,” “aperture” (opening of what is involved, intricate, restricted), “knot,” “diptych,” “gusset,” “pleated,” “purl” and “rivelled.” Interestingly, the text also contained many words with specific nautical meanings, or words referring specifically to the ocean, which has been connected to the feminine in many ancient mythologies. In this sense, the text seemed anchored (forgive the pun) in the feminine, tied very tightly to the specific condition and construction of the female body, and very much articulated its concern with proximity and distance, indeed with the impossibility of community and communication through the female body.

Finally, words suggesting language and the difficulty of communication are present throughout the piece, from “answered” in the first line to “parse” in the last. As with the words suggesting proximity and distance, words describing language often suggest difficulty in communicating: “parlance” and “dialect,” for example, suggest very specific, perhaps even exclusive usages. “Gargling,” “hiccough,” and “laughter” describe non-linguistic sounds; “doggerel,” “gammon” and “blague” describe poor poetry, things that one would not want to hear or enter into communication with. “Excerpt” suggests removal or incompleteness, while “answered,” “spake” and “eulogies” explicitly suggest that something has ended, either the utterance or the life of a person, complicating communication. In this sense, the language of communication most often foregrounds the difficulty of communication, or suggests the incompleteness of linguistic communication. What is especially interesting about this section of Exuviae is that it does not juxtapose the body or nature against language; instead, the articulation of proximity and distance, the intimate descriptions of the body, and the descriptions of all language all articulate a similar difficulty in communion or communication. The body is not allowed to become a facile solution to the problem of linguistic communication; instead the difficulty of communication is extended beyond linguistic articulation and is placed in the body’s most intimate regions, inside of the mouth, and in or near the genital area.

It is in this sense that the text is able to express a certain sadness, as it recognizes its own imperfect ability to communicate and expresses that imperfection through complicated language, conditional sentence structure, sound play and puns, and sentence fragments. The reader is placed in proximity to a body, only to be pulled away from it, is offered communication, only to have that bungled and complicated, and is forced to become active in the text, as if it were possible to answer, as if it could be parsed.

That’s what I thought it was about.

Re.writing Re.ducing: 7 Days in the Life of Unclaimed Language

This is a good place to begin.
I tried to find some
Will you go back to the
as when I . Last night we I so
the envelope.
he leans back in his chair
back to him

Process:

This task put me in the difficult position of having to assign a timeline to Karen’s task, “Seven Days in the Life of Unclaimed Language.” Although many parts of the task were quite explicitly dated, such as the postmarked letters, it was hard to discern the process that Karen had used to appropriate these texts. In this sense, another confusing element was the inclusion of Lyn Hejinian’s The Beginner. Was this text intended as a “day” in the life of unclaimed language? There were minimal markings in the book, but nothing that could really be considered an appropriation, just pencil lines in the margins. Karen’s task therefore put me in the position of having to consider what constitutes an appropriation. Were the letters and the Hejinian book appropriated because they appeared in her task, or were they only appropriated once she had photocopied or painted on them? I also had to think about what constitutes “unclaimed” language. Surely the Hejinian book constitutes “claimed” language? The text appears in standard book form, it is produced by Tuumba Press and has an ISBN, and the author’s name on the cover and title page. Similarly, the letters may not have authors in the same sense as the book, but they are dated and signed, their materiality an object form indicating a particularity. Even if they aren’t authored, surely the letters have signatories in the Foucauldian sense: are they still unclaimed?

Because of these questions, I began by transcribing Karen’s task, trying to begin “re.writing” by “claiming” Karen’s unclaimed language for myself. In this transcription I began to notice different patterns of repetition in the work, mainly derived from the letters: Mopsie the “poor pup” dying, the car accident in which Owen’s friend was injured and his friend was killed, Owen’s shell shock, and Doll’s isolation. These ideas emerged repeatedly through Karen’s photocopying and manipulation of the letters, eventually appearing alongside phrases about beginning taken from The Beginner. Transcription of Karen’s text therefore allowed me to notice certain thematic trends concerning endings and beginnings, apt in a task dealing with dating and the passage of time.

Transcription still didn’t allow me to develop a strategy to proceed with “re.ducing” Karen’s mass of text, and proved problematic in certain instances, for example when several layers of text were visible, or when the text had been cut into overlapping, hairy loops and knots. Instead, I decided to consider the order of the texts and how Karen might have placed them in terms of days. I decided that Hejinian’s The Beginner was probably the first day, as its title seemed to suggest that and as it might be considered as an influence for the task. Having assigned that work as the first “day,” I decided to assign the original letters as the second day because they appeared to be the raw materials of the other days. I decided that the “hairy” knot of text stapled to what appeared to be a print of a Renaissance painting would have to be the third day according to the logic that I had been following in assigning the previous days. The print of the painting was unchanged apart from the text stapled to it and a few lines of text written in the center of it, which represented the lowest level of appropriation.

I had a very hard time deciding how to assign levels of appropriation after the third day, as the envelope, the photocopied letter with the bars painted across it and the over-written and under-written letters seemed all to be about equal in terms of how much they had been manipulated. I eventually decided that the envelope would be fourth because like the hairy knot, it did not include any paint. The letter with the painted lines, which included some cutting and some paint would be the fifth day, the over- and under-written letters would be the sixth day because they included the most paint and a small amount of collaging (which I related to cutting). Finally, the “poster” entitled “The Many Adventures of Unclaimed Language” would represent the seventh day because it seemed to tie all of the previous elements together, referring back to the Hejinian text, to the letters, and to the techniques of collage. This remained problematic, however, because the element of painting was eliminated and I thought I could detect the inclusion of a new voice. In this sense, I realized that my ordering of the texts, while it followed a certain logic, was completely subjective. The texts could be reordered in any manner at all.

Having transcribed and ordered the texts into seven “days,” I needed to determine a procedure for “re.ducing” them into the seven lines required in the rubric of the second task. As previously stated, I had detected various thematic trends running throughout Karen’s work and I considered trying to trace several of these, however to do so would merely involve repeating a line from one of the letters with a few minor variations. Further, I was unable to find any line or similar lines that recurred seven times; most only occurred two or three times. This plan was further complicated by the Hejinian text, which obviously would not include the lines from the letters and the text of the seventh day (“The Many Adventures of …”), which was less oriented toward the more troubling themes I had identified elsewhere in the letters and Karen’s manipulations of them. Instead, this text was oriented toward Doll’s implied sexual adventures or her friends’ misinterpretations of her sexual status and toward theoretical meanings of unclaimed language.

I also wanted to get the idea of unclaimed language across in my reduction of Karen’s text, so I decided to use the order that I had generated and to put my seven lines in that order. Further, I would choose the line from the text that corresponded to the order of the texts, so that I would choose the first line from the first text, the second line from the second, and so forth. Applying the process to Karen’s text was quite simple, the only problem was with the sixth day. When the writing overlapped I needed to decide what came “first,” Karen’s hand-written text, or the typed text? As the typed text was a little higher up than the hand-written text, I was able to be decisive and assign an order to this text that was consistent with the ordering of the other texts.

I think that the resulting seven lines are interesting. The idea of the epistolary exchange, of beginning and ending and returning, is replicated in the repetition that is generated. I’m not sure that the text is as rich in thematic content as what Karen had generated, but it provides an interesting comparison.

The Beats and the Tape Recorder
Sarah Dowling and Natacha Leonard
31.03.05

What does the tape recorder do to conceptions of subjectivity?

A voice traditionally suggests a present subject, as we are not only able to produce sound from within our bodies but also exist within the sound produced by other subjects and objects. By placing the voice within a machine, the equivalence between voice and present subject is complicated in several significant ways. Since the late 1950s, the commercial availability of tape technology has allowed artists to dissociate the voice from the body temporally and spatially by inscribing the voice on the tape and preserving it there. In this sense, the voice is distanced from its originary body in that it has been physically severed from the body and can appear in times and places where the body is not. Manipulation of the time and space occupied by the voice also becomes possible through tape recording technology, as the artist is able to cut the tape forward and backward and to explore the effects of the human voice through the micro and macrophonic effects offered by the tape recorder.

Anyone who has made a BBC recording and been in on the editing session may emerge feeling that he [sic] can no longer call himself his own. Cuts and transpositions can be and are made. Halves of sentences spoken at different times can be amalgamated to let the speaker hear himself say the opposite of what he knows he said. Hearing oneself say something and continue with something else said half an hour earlier can be particularly disconcerting. You might have the feeling that if you went quickly out of the studio you might catch yourself coming in. (Roy Walker qtd. Hayles 80, emphasis added)

Theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Steve McCaffery have suggested that “manipulating sound through tape recorders … becomes a new way of producing a new kind of subjectivity” (Hayles 94), as the tape both recuperates the live voice and in doing so creates a form of subjectivity that is not reducible to a single voice emanating from a single body. However, exactly what kind of subjectivity is produced by the tape recorder is a matter of critical debate. Hayles suggests a “new subjectivity ambiguously located in both the body and the tape recorder,” (94). On the other hand, McCaffery asserts that “for the first time in history,” there is a “physical and ideological separation” between speech and the voice, suggesting a linguistic act that is in an important sense noncorporeal. However, McCaffery affirms that in “avoiding a negative stance toward technology,” poets can envision a “recuperation back into acoustic performance,” which may or may not involve the body (157-158). In this sense, the degree to which the body and the tape recorder are intertwined remains a matter of critical debate.

Michael Davidson offers a useful model of conceptualizing the recorded subject, in his essay “Technologies of Presence,” stating that in recuperating the live voice through the use of the tape recorder, poets

hoped to suture a social body together by recovering a private body of sounds. But ‘technologies of presence’ will always offer a hybrid voice – a voice in a machine – that cannot speak entirely for itself, even though it posits self-presence as its ground … When the complicity between presence and technology is acknowledged … the tape recorder cease[s] to be a passive receptacle for a more authentic speech [and becomes] an active agent in its deconstruction. (100)

In Beat texts where the presence and complicity of technology is acknowledged, such as Ginsberg’s The Fall of America and Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded, the tape recorder functions as both an extension of and an agent external to the writer’s body; it is an active force in the composition and the tool that allows the poet to execute the composition. In this sense, the tape recorder approaches the status of a separate body or subject, but its involvement in and debt to the authorial body and subjectivity prevents it from being completely autonomous. The hybrid voice created on tape is separated from the authorial voice in space and in time, but it still bears reference to the authorial body both in the hand that manipulates the machine and in the quotational nature of its speech.

CWP Activity Ideas and Exercises

The following ideas and exercises are based upon Beth Baruch Joselow’s Writing Without the Muse: 50 Exercises for the Creative Writer, Robin Behn & Case Twichell’s The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach, Kinereth Gensler & Nina Nyhart’s The Poetry Connection: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems with Ideas to Stimulate Children’s Writing, and Alan Ziegler’s The Writing Workshop, vols. 1 & 2. There are no individual bibliographical references for individual exercises, but I have provided a full bibliography at the end of the document. The exercises are divided into four categories: Group/Collaborative, Memory, Details and Noticing, and Experimental and Lists, although there is a considerable amount of overlap. Several exercises are listed in multiple categories. Exercises worded as they would be presented to students are written in italics.

Group/Collaborative:
• Intriguing Objects/Show and Tell: Everyone brings in an object that has an interesting story to tell, passes the object around and shares its story. Everyone takes notes. After the oral part of the exercise is finished and everyone has presented her/his object, all of the participants make a piece of writing, using as many objects, descriptions and stories as they like.
• Secrets and Lies: Think up a secret about yourself. It can be true or untrue. Write it down on a slip of paper and don’t sign your name. Put all of the secrets in a hat and draw one. Then, write a poem about the secret that you have drawn from the hat. Your poem might tell the story of the secret, or it might explore the way the secret makes someone feel. When everyone is finished, read the poems aloud so that everyone can hear how their secret was transformed.
• Extrapolation: Bring in 5 or 6 unrelated objects. As a group, have the participants describe the room or space in which they think those objects could have been found. Was it indoors or outdoors? Light or dark? Each participant may then do their own piece of writing about that space, or about one of the objects in it.
• Party of the Century: Begin with a 1-page hoard of words, and give each participant a copy. Try to find words from at least 2 distinct subject areas, and provide a number of synonyms for “party.” Participants will be writing a long poem called “The Party of the Century.” On a separate piece of paper, each participant should write what they consider to be one section of the poem, using as many words from the hoard as they can. Once this section is complete (or once a specified amount of time has passed), participants pass their paper to the person sitting next to them, who, again using the word hoard, writes the next section of their neighbour’s poem. Once their original section comes back to them, each participant should take some time to edit it and rewrite it on a clean page. When everyone has had a chance to revise, the resulting poems can be read aloud and discussed.
• Emotional Landscape: Begin by reading a poem aloud. Listen to it carefully, and afterward, without looking at the poem, write down all of the evocative words that you can remember, or any other words that the poem triggers. Now, imagine that you are in a place that is familiar to you. Try to show your reader what that place is like, using the evocative words from the poem that you just listened to. Let the borrowed words suggest details, mood, or other important things about the place. When you have finished, share your poem by reading it aloud and see where those same words took your fellow writers.
• Associations: As a group, generate as many associations with the phrase “rainy day” as you can. They can be memories, smells, feelings, images or anything. Now, individually, form the whole list (or parts of it) into a poem, or choose one that you find especially evocative and write about it.
• Verbal Cut-Ups: Take an anthology of poetry and tell the participants that you will be flipping through the pages, reading words and passages at random. Although you will be reading slowly, it will be much too fast for them to copy down everything that you say. They should write steadily as you read, so that about half of what they write will come from what you say, and half will come from their own thoughts. After about 10 minutes of this, each student should have a page filled with strange images, odd combinations of words and gibberish. Give the students a chance to revise what they have written and edit it down or develop it further. Students should be aware that making linear sense is not a priority, but if narrative develops, that’s fine. Have several participants read theirs aloud. Although everyone started with the same input, the final products will vary greatly.

Memory
• Version 2.0: Retell a famous story, fable, etc. from another character’s point of view. Alternately, you might consider what would have happened if the story had developed differently.
• Old Faithfull: Try writing down one of the stories that you always tell (when something funny/terrible/amazing happened). Write it for someone who doesn’t know you, making sure to fill in all the details that they will need to know. If it’s difficult to write it from your own perspective, try writing it from someone else’s.
• Associations: Jot down 10 associations you have with the phrase “rainy day.” They can be memories, smells, feelings, or anything. Now, form the whole list into a poem, or choose one that you find especially evocative and write about it.
• Favourite Memory: Think of one of your favourite memories. What are some of the details that make it attractive to you? Where did it happen? What was that place like? Try to write the memory so that it would be equally interesting to someone who wasn’t there at the time. Include lots of details.
• Lost Things: Make a list of things you’ve lost that were important to you. You can interpret “lost” however you like. Try writing down why one of the items was important to you, how it was lost, and how your life changed after you lost it. Or, try writing a list poem about all of the things that you’ve lost.
• Think Small: Think of a small thing or moment that you would like to describe (putting your shoes on, diving off a diving board, opening a can – something that takes about a minute). Then write a detailed moment-to-moment description of that action. Let the reader see everything.
• The Dinner Party: Think of a meal that you can remember well, preferably one where something happened, not just one where you enjoyed the food. You might choose, Thanksgiving, a birthday, or a meal where something unusual happened. Write about it including lots of details: who was there? How was the table set? What did the room look like? What was the weather like outside? What was said? What was not said?
• Five Sentences of Something that Happened: Imagine a person whom you know well, or invent a person. Imagine the place where you might find that person. The five sentences: describe the person’s hands. Describe something that s/he is doing with her/his hands. Describe the place where the person is. Mention what you would like to say to the person. The person notices you and reacts – what does s/he say? Try to convey whether they have said what you wanted to hear.
• Where We Were: A poem about childhood. Try to think up an event that you otherwise might not think about – an important event or an everyday one. Think about what triggers the memory, why the experience could be important, and what might have changed since then.
• Your Mother’s Kitchen: Write a poem in which you describe your mother’s kitchen. Remember that your reader has never seen your mother’s kitchen. What it is like in there? What does it make you think of? You can either put yourself in the poem or not. It might be interesting to think of your mother’s kitchen without anyone in it, or if it is usually empty, what would it be like if everyone were there?
• Afterimages: Make a list of 20 physical experiences that you have had. Some might be ordinary and some might be unusual; they can be all different kinds. Choose one that seems particularly vivid and reflect on it. Using words and phrases that went through your mind during that experience, or anything you remembered at the time, write a poem. Alternatively, try making a list poem about all of the experiences you wrote down.
• Object: Write about an object, including physical description, memories involving the object, and why the object is important to you.
• Occasional Poems: write a poem for an upcoming or a past occasion, such as a school, civic, or national event.
• A Place Altered by Moods: Describe a place you know well (your bedroom, kitchen, classroom). Now choose a mood and describe the place again, trying to get this mood across through your description. Try to do this without actually using the word for the mood (for example, if it’s a sad kitchen, don’t use the word “sad”).

Details and Noticing

• Acrostics and/or mesostics: These can help students notice details of language, and provide controls on length, form and possibly subject matter that may help students handle writing “safely.”
• Bring in objects designed to trigger certain memory responses: cloves, vanilla, vinegar; silk scarves, a feather, a brick; photographs or reproductions of paintings, objects with abstract patterns; music; foods. Have the students freewrite on one of the sensations.
• Ways of Looking: bring in a poem like Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and read it aloud. After a discussion, have the students mimic Stevens’s poem, trying to write a poem that offers multiple perspectives on a single object.
• A Room With a View: Have the students go to different parts of the room and sit in one spot for 15 minutes. Encourage them to observe the room using all 5 senses, noting the details (“Jenny is scratching her foot and there are dead flies in the light fixtures. It smells dusty over here”). When the 15 minutes are up, have the students form their notes into a poem.
• Stories from the Newspaper: Bring in some newspapers and have the students choose a story that interests them. Have each participant write their own version of the story, answering the questions that the newspaper does not address: why was the girl on the highway at 2:30 in the morning? Why did the balloonists want to cross the Atlantic? What is the judge in the trial like?
• Bring in a variety of poems of at least 10 lines in length (multiple copies may be necessary). Have the students choose one that interests them. Each student should write an answer to the poem that they have chosen, using 10-12 words or phrases from the original poem.
• Writing from a Photograph: Bring in enough photographs for each participant and distribute them. Have the students write a response to the photographs. They might put themselves into the photo or describe what is happening in the photo from the point of view of a person depicted in it. Alternatively, they might simply describe the photo, noting down all the details.
• Writing to Music: Listen to music when you are writing, not just as background noise, but as something you are paying attention to and thinking about. You can write about the music itself or just let your ideas and mood be affected by it.
• Think Small: Think of a small thing or moment that you would like to describe (putting your shoes on, diving off a diving board, opening a can – something that takes about a minute). Then write a detailed moment-to-moment description of that action. Let the reader see everything.
• Sentence from a Book: Close your eyes, open a book, and put your finger on the page. Now open your eyes and write down the sentence your finger has fallen on. That’s the first sentence of the poem you will now write. What do the words sound like? What do they make you think of? Is anything happening in the sentence?
• Five Senses: get a piece of fruit. Look at the fruit and describe it in as much detail as you can – size, shape, colour, and placement in its setting. Smell the fruit and describe its odour. Touch and listen to the fruit. What does it feel like in your hands? Against your fingertips? What do you hear when you rub its skin or shake it? Cut it open and describe what you see. Now taste it and describe in detail what it looks like. Use all of these notes to write a descriptive poem about the fruit.
• Twenty Questions: What are some of the things you wonder about regularly? Try to make a list of some of the questions that frequently occur to you: how does an internal combustion engine work? Did Grandma ever love anyone other than Grandpa? What would it be like to be famous? Pick one question and invent an answer to it, making up lots of interesting details.
• One’s Self, En Masse: Write about 2-3 paragraphs describing one particular member of a set (a single sparrow in a flock of sparrows, one baby in a nursery of babies, one scream in a stadium of screams, etc.). Try to think of the qualities of the group (what makes them all the same?) and the qualities of the individual (what makes him/her different?).
• Intriguing Objects/Show and Tell: Everyone brings in an object that has an interesting story to tell, passes the object around and shares its story. Everyone takes notes. After the oral part of the exercise is finished and everyone has presented her/his object, all of the participants make a piece of writing, using as many objects, descriptions and stories as they like.
• Five Sentences of Something that Happened: Imagine a person whom you know well, or invent a person. Imagine the place where you might find that person. The five sentences: describe the person’s hands. Describe something that s/he is doing with her/his hands. Describe the place where the person is. Mention what you would like to say to the person. The person notices you and reacts – what does s/he say? Try to convey whether they have said what you wanted to hear.
• Our Suits, Our Selves: Make a metaphor or simile that likens you to an inanimate object. It can be serious or funny: “I am a car tire,” “I am an air conditioner.” What does this new nature say about your personality? Your body parts? What is your heart like? What do your eyes see? Your hands touch?
• Your Mother’s Kitchen: Write a poem in which you describe your mother’s kitchen. Remember that your reader has never seen your mother’s kitchen. What it is like in there? What does it make you think of? You can either put yourself in the poem or not. It might be interesting to think of your mother’s kitchen without anyone in it, or if it is usually empty, what would it be like if everyone were there?
• Block, Pillar, Slab and Beam: Write a poem in which you build something and/or take something apart. Think about the parts of the thing and how they fit together and about the kind of instructions you might be following. What is the object made out of? Where do the materials come from?
• Patterning: Write a poem in which a phrase or word is repeated throughout. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same each time, but it should be recognizable.
• Visual comparisons: Make a visual comparison between two objects, but don’t explain it: “Fluorescent lights look like ice cube trays,” “a blackboard is light the ocean at night with fish leaving foam trails,” “Composition paper is like a swimming pool with racing stripes.” Don’t be afraid to make outrageous comparisons. Try to generate as many as you can in 10 minutes.
• Word Combining: Write down 5-6 words you have strong feelings about. They might be words you like the sound of or words you think are strange, or even words you don’t understand. Now write a short, unrhymed poem using all of the words. They don’t have to be in the order you wrote them down.
• Gestures and Movement: Write a scene with dialogue, exaggerating the use of gesture and movement. Don’t be afraid of using too much movement, this is practice. It might make it easier if you first conceive of the situation (two people at a dance, two people at a restaurant) and the kind of people (awkward or elegant). Or, write a scene with no words, perhaps with two people who don’t speak each other’s language or two people at the library or someplace where they must be silent.
• Gestures and Movement 2: Describe an observed movement, such as a police officer directing traffic or a basketball player throwing a foul shot.
• Gestures and Movement 3: “Choreograph” with words a series of movements and gestures: instructions for an individual or group to move in whatever ways you tell them. You might want to think of this as a scene for a ballet or a play in a football game, or even a scene for a movie. You don’t have to stay within the realm of physical possibility.
• Mimicry: distribute poems to the students – preferably ones that have been discussed by the group and that the students like. Have the students attempt to mimic the poems at hand, paying attention to the ‘voice’ and sentence structure. Let them know that if they get stuck, they may copy a line from the original poem.
• Behavioural Self-Portraits: This assignment deals with a character you know well: yourself. Most visual artists paint their self-portraits at some point. A Behavioural Self-Portrait works the same way for a writer, but rather than focusing on physical features, it emphasizes behaviour and attitudes. Isolate aspects of yourself by asking, “What are some of the components that, when added together, make up ‘me’?” If you aren’t sure how to begin, try listing some of the activities that you do in a regular day.
• Night: Have a discussion with the students about night, thinking of some of the details of night, things that happen at night, and maybe even the psychological components of night. Once the ideas are flowing, have the students write their own poems about night: a mood piece describing a place at night, a narrative piece describing something that happens at night, etc.

Experimental/Lists
• Cooking with the Dictionary: Open the dictionary to any page and let your finger fall on a word. Repeat this about 10-12 times until you have list of about that many words. Now write a poem where you use all of them.
• Maps: Think of or draw a map of a route you walk every day. Choose about 5 spots on the map and write your way from one spot to the next until you reach your destination. What you write for each spot could be a list of things that you might find at that spot, a conversation that you have overheard there, etc. Your poem doesn’t have to tell a story, it can just be things that you would find in those places.
• Angry Editor: Take any piece of writing and a pair of scissors. Cut out everything from the writing that doesn’t interest you. Don’t add anything. What’s left? Can you make a poem out of it? Out of the parts that you cut out?
• No Sentences But in Things: Choose about 15-20 things that you think are important. They can be things that you own or that your friends own, or they can be concepts. Write one beautiful sentence about each one. Now put all of the sentences in an order that interests you. Create a poem that is simply a list of all these things.
• Mad Libs or N+7. Prepare mad libs from newspaper articles or famous poems for all participants, or have them do N+7 on a piece of writing of their own choosing.
• Afterimages: Make a list of 20 physical experiences that you have had. Some might be ordinary and some might be unusual; they can be all different kinds. Choose one that seems particularly vivid and reflect on it. Using words and phrases that went through your mind during that experience, or anything you remembered at the time, write a poem. Alternatively, try making a list poem about all of the experiences you wrote down.
• Patterning: Write a poem in which a phrase or word is repeated throughout. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same each time, but it should be recognizable.
• Permutations: Choose a short word or phrase. One that is a common expression (“beauty is skin deep”) would be a good choice. Now put the words in different orders, trying to work out every possible order they could go in (“beauty is deep skin,” “deep in skin beauty”). Arrange all of the different versions. There’s your poem!
• Private Sense: Write a poem using only inside jokes and private references that no one else will understand, or using unconscious associations. Try to pay as much attention as you can to the sounds of the words.
• Verbal Cut-Ups: Take an anthology of poetry and tell the participants that you will be flipping through the pages, reading words and passages at random. Although you will be reading slowly, it will be much too fast for them to copy down everything that you say. They should write steadily as you read, so that about half of what they write will come from what you say, and half will come from their own thoughts. After about 10 minutes of this, each student should have a page filled with strange images, odd combinations of words and gibberish. Give the students a chance to revise what they have written and edit it down or develop it further. Students should be aware that making linear sense is not a priority, but if narrative develops, that’s fine. Have several participants read theirs aloud. Although everyone started with the same input, the final products will vary greatly.
• Found Poems: distribute a variety of “source texts” (preferably non-literary prose) and encourage the students to find a passage that is interesting to them. Then, have the students copy the passage and put it into verse form.
• Lists: Begin by discussing list poems or any famous lists, such as Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book lists. Have the students make their own Pillow Book lists: Awkward Things, Things that Make One Think, Things that Improve By Painting. Look at how Sei Shonagon’s lists interpenetrate and encourage the students to try similar effects.
• Missing Links: students write a series of words or short phrases with a minimum of filler. Each word should be carefully chosen and doesn’t need to fit into a sentence. All the words can be about a single topic or a few related topics, and can be arranged in any way the student wants.

Other Ideas:

General:
Most of the books I have looked at to date emphasize the importance of presenting poems for the students to read and mimic. They also offer a variety of poems written by students and suggest that using student poems to illustrate concepts or the aims of certain exercises may be just as effective as presenting the work of professional authors. In several of the books, student poems are provided along with the exercises, so once we have decided which exercises to do during which sessions, I will forward some of the student poems to you.

Gensler and Nyhart also suggest a few basic criteria for selecting poems to present to children: immediate appeal and “specific elements that can get children started on their own poems,” including particular techniques, ways to play with words, interesting subject matter, and a “strong feeling that reverberates” (9). Of course, Gensler and Nyhart caution against poems that are too technically or intellectually sophisticated, and recommend that children see and hear the poems from a variety of sources (hearing them read aloud, listening to a recording, etc.), and be allowed to use them as models in any way they like, rather than having a particular use specified for the poems.

All of the authors I have read so far stress group discussions prior to writing, which may focus on a set of poems, a particular way of writing (for example, lists), or on a given concept that the group will write about (night). Alan Ziegler refers to this as an “Open Session,” and suggests that in these sessions, the group discussion may generate the writing assignment, which can be either an individual project or a class collaboration. These discussions stress associative thinking, and are detail and image oriented. For example, the group leader might supply a word or concept, and each participant would then supply a related word or image. The group leader’s job is simply to guide and summarize the discussion and articulate the writing possibilities, and Ziegler argues that this works well early on to show the participants how associative thinking can lead to writing possibilities. An open session can be begun with a simple request or question (“tell me something I don’t know,” “what happened today?”), and as the students begin to tell stories and share anecdotes, these can be developed into longer narratives by the group, then split into shorter writing assignments to be tackled by individual students. An open session can also be opened with an evocative poem or prose excerpt.

Experimental Writing in Workshops for Children:
There is a useful section in Ziegler’s The Writing Workshop, vol. 2 discussing Language poetry in the writing workshop. Ziegler suggests that students can easily understand that just because language can clearly communicate narrative events or ideas, doesn’t mean that it should have to do so. Presenting and discussing short, evocative poems can encourage even very young children to consider other ways in which language is working. Ziegler encourages his students to write poems with “private references” (78) in order to encourage them to write their own language poetry. If you would like, I will photocopy this section for you, as it provides many useful examples of student work.

Practical Concerns:
I’d like each student in our workshop to have a notebook that they can take home, as well as a folder to keep at the center. I also think that paper and pens will probably have to be provided by the center, and that we should be sure to ask whether we will be allowed to do photocopying at the center, or whether we will have to do it at Temple. Also, I wonder whether we might receive any money to buy other materials, including, possibly, for a magazine or chapbook.
Bibliography:

Behn, Robin & Case Twichell, Eds. The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets
Who Teach. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.
Gensler, Kinereth & Nina Nyhart. The Poetry Connection: An Anthology of
Contemporary Poems with Ideas to Stimulate Children’s Writing. New York:
Teachers & Writers, 1978.
Joselow, Beth Baruch. Writing Without the Muse: 50 Beginning Exercises for the
Creative Writer. Brownsville, OR: Story Line, 1995.
Ziegler, Alan. The Writing Workshop, vol.1. New York: Teachers & Writers, 1981.
---. The Writing Workshop, vol.2. New York: Teachers & Writers, 1984.

CWP – Tentative Plan for the First Session

Introductions.
• Hand out workshop materials: folders, paper, pens, notebooks?
• Discussion of workshop format: has anyone ever been in a workshop before? What happened in it? What did you dis/like about it? Presentation and explanation of how this workshop will be run. (10 minutes)

Ice breakers – “Silent Interviews/Imagined Narratives”
• Have the participants pair up and, for 10 minutes, note as many details about each other as they can, without speaking.
• Based on the details of their partner that they noted, each person should write a short story/poem about that person. (10 minutes)
Each person will then present what they wrote to the group.

Questionnaire:
• Why do you want to write poetry?
• What do you think poetry is?
• Who is your favorite artist?
• Why?
• What do you want to happen in this workshop? Why are you here? (10 minutes)
Discussion of participants’ answers to the questions and sharing of some poetry (including recordings from PennSound and photocopied poems). (30+ minutes)
Questionnaires will be collected for compilation in the final magazine, or to be given back to the students at the end of the summer session.

Break?

Writing Exercise: Behavioral Self-Portrait:
This exercise offers a chance to “answer” to the Imagined Narratives.
Example poems will be distributed, read aloud and discussed by the group before the writing begins.
This assignment deals with a character you know well: yourself. Most visual artists paint their self-portraits at some point. A Behavioral Self-Portrait works the same way for a writer, but instead of focusing on physical features, it looks at behavior and attitudes. Isolate aspects of yourself by asking, ‘What are some of the individual things I do that, when taken together, make up ‘me’?’ If you aren’t sure how to begin, try listing some of the activities that you do in a regular day, or perhaps some of your favorite things to do. (15-20 minutes)
Presentation of Behavioral Self-Portraits to the group:
• Each participant may read their Behavioral Self-Portrait aloud, and the group will comment (parameters for comments will be clearly defined – i.e., each member of the group will be asked to tell the reader what their favorite part of the poem was, or to say which word/sentence stands out in their mind, or the most interesting detail, etc.) (15-20 minutes)
• If time allows, participants may then begin revising their self-portraits, adding more detail, etc. At this point we can go around the room and give individual comments the participants.

Examples of Behavioral Self-Portraits by Students:

My arms are wrapped fast around myself.
I hear my sister breathing loudly down the hall.
The Begonia is living.
Lenore is my friend.
There are cigarettes I hate on the dresser.
The door is wide open.
No one is coming in.
Steve is away, camping alone for four days.
My dog has a tumor.
My mother and father have jobs.
I don’t.
I’m middle class in America.
I love my country.
I walk the streets at two a.m. nude.
No, I don’t.
My older sister is married.
I will go to college soon and be an adult.
Ducks laugh in the pond at night when no one’s there.
My other sister is homosexual.
I can drive a car well.
I love the black sweater in the closet.
My father gave it to me.
I am seventeen and a spy.
My body is on the chair.
I don’t shave my legs.
I am a woman.
It’s autumn and cold outside.
Not inside.
My hands are ripe for you.
I cry.
I hate to go to sleep.
I love the desert and the sun going down on the highway overpass.
Kiss me.
-Amy Smiley, high school student.

Me
Pulling Up My Sleeves:
I always seem to pull up my sleeves
hot or cold even in snow
it never fails me
I pull up my sleeves

Putting On My Watch:
Every morning when I get up
I put on my watch
even if I’m not going anywhere
I put on my watch

Combing My Hair:
I always comb my hair
when it’s neat I still comb it
twice in the morning, twice in the afternoon
and twice at night
I comb my hair.

Leaning Back in My Chair:
Every time I sit down
I lean back in my chair
even in a formal place
I lean back in my chair
even at my house I do it
I lean back in my chair

I Always Want To Punch Someone:
I seem to do it
playing or not
I ask if they’ll do it playing
and if they don’t
I punch anyway

-Daniel Hano, elementary school student

Tentative Plan for Second Session

Reminder Introductions

Musical Writing: a freewrite to music (hopefully a musical selection will be provided by one of the students). Try not to think of the music as background noise, but as something that you are paying attention to and thinking about as you write. You can write about the music itself, or about any ideas it suggests to you, or you can just let your mood and ideas be affected by it. 10 minutes.

Opening Discussion: how did the last session go? What did you find interesting/weird/ annoying/fun, etc.? Did anything surprise you? Did you enjoy the activities? Were there any other things you would have preferred to write about that we didn’t get to? (15 minutes)

This can flow quite organically into the Open Session discussion.

Open Session: using group process to arrive at assignments collectively. An Open Session will begin with a discussion of a topic (perhaps something that emerges out of the previous discussion, or something based on the last session? This can be a general concept, such as ‘night’ or ‘loss,’ or something more specific and related to daily life, such as a particular kind of TV show). Associative thinking will be stressed, and each participant will be asked to provide words and images associated with the particular topic chosen. The group will also brainstorm things that could happen in a piece of writing about the topic at hand, moods associated with it, etc. Depending on how the poems go over in the first session, the Open Session might even begin with an evocative poem or prose excerpt. (20-30 minutes)

Writing Exercise: The Open Session will lead to a writing assignment, which will be related to the topic of the discussion. (15-20 minutes).

Presentation of the Writing Exercise to the Group:
• Again, the group will be asked to offer comments on their peers’s work, but the parameters of these comments will be very narrowly defined. (15 minutes)

Break?

Another short writing exercise: depending on the topic of the previous assignment, this may be something more play-based. (15 minutes)

Questions:

Can the students be provided with paper, pens, folders, and notebooks?

Is it possible to play music during the workshop?

For some exercises, we would like to use visual and oral stimuli from movies – is this a possibility?

Will there be blackboards in the room where our workshop will be?

Will we be allowed to do any photocopying at the center, or will we need to figure out an alternate arrangement for reproducing our handouts?

We’d like to create a short magazine of the students’ writing at the end of the session; something that they can keep and distribute to their friends and family. How can we fund a project like this (cardstock for the covers, photocopying the students’ poems, etc.)?

Is there anyone from the Young Playwrights workshop we could get in touch with to discuss how their workshop went and any recommendations they might have for us?

Will the participants already know each other?

Contact Information:

Sarah Dowling
dowlings@temple.edu
267 978-5729

Janet Neigh
neigh@temple.edu
215 545-1640

Divya Victor
dvictor@temple.edu
443 694-3909

Minutes of First Meeting, Tuesday, 31 May, 2005, 7:30pm, The Last Drop.

In attendance: Divya Victor, Janet Neigh, Sarah Dowling

Discussions of aims for program:

Dan Lodise, our contact person from Project HOME/the Honickman Learning Center, has stated that one of the aims of the programs at the Honickman Learning Center is to give the participants in the Center’s programs ways of expressing themselves. In accordance with this, we discussed using readings and other forms of stimuli, whether the participants might have difficulties sharing their work, and what our role would be as facilitators of the workshop.

One of the most important points we came to was that it would be necessary for us to suspend our agendas to a great extent, especially the kinds of agendas with which we typically approach our teaching. Rather than trying to teach the participants about what we think poetry is, or to bring them to a certain understanding of poetry, we came to the decision that it would be more valuable to the participants in the workshop if we simply encouraged them to write as much as possible, and provided a variety of contexts and stimuli that would help that to happen. Therefore, in this workshop we will concentrate on writing exercises done individually and in groups. Readings will be shared with the participants according to their interests, but will not be the central focus of the workshop.

Discussions of possible activities:

We discussed the benefits of bringing in poetry for the participants to read and consider, and kinds of poetry that might appeal to them. We thought that it might be interesting to bring in some slam poetry or related sound-based work, for example by Tracie Morris or Linton Kwesi Johnson, as these kinds of work might appeal to the participants’ other interests, for example in music. This prompted a discussion of a possible writing activity for the first day which would include asking the students about their favorite artists, why they like to write, etc. These kinds of questions would help us to understand the participants’ interests in enrolling in the workshop, and would help us to tailor the writing exercises to their interests. We also discussed the possibility of having a local slam poet come into the workshop at some point. Finally, we discussed non-reading stimuli, including movies, music videos and other media, and the use of these as prompts to writing.

A variety of possible activities for the first day of the workshop were discussed, including:

- “Silent Interviews/Imagined Narratives”: participants are paired, must look at each other silently for about 10 minutes, noting down the details of their partner. They must then compose a narrative on the basis of this detail.
- Chain ekphrases: a group of about 4 participants are given 4 pictures (one/person). Each participant writes on their picture for a few minutes, and then passes along their writing and the photo to the next participant, who responds to the picture as well as the writing.
- Alphabet poem/acrostic story: participants compose a poem where each word (or sentence) begins with A, B, C, etc. (in that order).
- Compiling a short anthology of poems around a particular theme.

It was decided that we would all compile our experiments and share them with each other via email. Once we have generated a large “grab bag” of exercises, these will be grouped so that we can begin to plan our sessions at the Honickman Learning Center.

The next steps:

• Sarah will email Dan Lodise to ask:
• Whether we may use the Honickman Learning Center’s computers for our workshop.
• Whether there is official enrollment for the workshop, or a drop-in system.
• When the final workshop will be.
• Everyone will compile a list of all of their experiments and will share them with everyone else through email.
• Everyone will consider whether they know any slam poets who might be interested in speaking to the group at a later date, and Sarah will try to get in touch with a slam poet who spoke to and performed for a group of teenagers at Congreso de Latinos Unidos in December.

Reminder:

The philosophy of the Honickman Learning Center is to improve the lives of students through technology, unique opportunities and the building of essential skills, including self-expression. The poetry workshop at Project HOME/the Honickman Learning Center will be held from 2-4 pm on Thursday afternoons, beginning on July 7th. There will be 3-15 participants in the workshop, aged 12-15. Dan Lodise has informed us that there are at least 3-4 students using the Honickman Learning Center who have developed a passion for writing through their participation in the playwriting workshops and the production of a quarterly community newspaper.

Eng W107: Book Project.
An extended experiment in appropriation and visual poetry.

Due: 11 March 2005

Introduction:
This extended experiment asks you to select and reflect upon a text and its form as a book, and to interact not only with the words on the page but the form in which they are delivered to you. It may be useful to think of this experiment as a reflection, an image in a mirror, a distortion, a way of thinking, a flashing back, rebounding (rebinding?), a redirection. When you are finished, your work will be a version of the book you started with, an image of that book as though seen in a distorting mirror.

Process:
• Look at the following texts:

From Out of Everywhere: Tina Darragh, “adv. fans – the 1968 series,” pp. 27 – 34.
From How2, vol. 1, no. 8
Susan Johanknect: “Modern (Laundry) Production”
http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1_8_2002/current/new_writing/johanknecht.shtm
Kristin Prevallet: from “Merge”
http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1_8_2002/current/new_writing/prevallet.shtm
On Blackboard:
Go to the “External Links” section and scroll down to The Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry. Scroll down past all the author names to “Lettriste Pages.” Enter “Lettriste Pages” and click on Isidore Isou. Read the short introduction to Isou and click on “A Sampling of Work by Isidore Isou.” Have a look at the selection of work and note the calligraphic and “over-writing” techniques.

• Select a short book (less than 20 pp.). Read over the book and carefully consider how you will interact with the text. You might want to make color photocopies of the pages so that you can practice before you write on the book itself.
• Devise a strategy for generating your own text. This might include incorporating other texts, cutting parts out of the book that you have selected, gluing new elements in, or over-writing, but there ought to be a process determining your interference.
• Incorporate your own material into the form of the book.

Congratulations! Upon completing this experiment, you should have a visual poem of about 20 pp. in book form.
Hints: Try to choose a text with some illustrations to interact with/react to. Remember to choose a short text, as you will need to interact with every page. Remember that the strategies or process you devise should be motivated in some way by the text that you are working with, it should not be completely random. It is a good idea NOT to use a literary text for this experiment.

Eng W107
Final Essay on Practice:
The time has come to begin thinking about your final essay, which will accompany your 12-page manuscript of experiments and poems. The essay will attempt to situate your poetic practice in relation to the work that we have read this semester and to any other work that interests you.

Successful essays will (in no particular order):
1) Put forth an argument about the concerns of your work, discussing this on the levels of form and content.
2) Explain the arguments put forth in an essay on poetics (either one that we have read this semester, or another essay of your choosing, approved by me) and will relate the ideas in the essay to your own work.
3) Discuss one or two of your own poems in relation to one or two works by poets we've read this semester.

Strategies:
There are several effective strategies that could be employed for this essay. Choose only ONE. Other topics or strategies could also be effective, but you must discuss them with me first.
1) Experiments: which of your experiments was most successful? Why? Compare one or two of your experiments to the poems and statements of poetics to which they responded. Explain the author’s ideas about poetry, how they compare to your own, and how your experiment(s) and their poem(s) show this.

2) Politics: we have spent a lot of time discussing whether and how poetic texts can be political or can enact a politics. Choose one poem that you think is political and compare it to one of your own poems, preferably one that you think is also political. Using the poet’s statements on poetics, explain the poet’s politics and how they are enacted in his or her poem, and compare this to enactments of politics that you see in your own work. For this topic you might want to choose a theme like identity, the everyday, or difficulty to help focus your discussion.

3) Notions of authorship. What is an author? Compare the notions of authorship, or the conceptions of what an author is, demonstrated in one of the works that we have read this semester, to your own ideas of authorship as demonstrated in your own poems. Some things to consider: how does the author’s statement of poetics explain their activity in writing the poem? What do their poems suggest about the role of the author? What do you think an author is? Why? How do your poems represent this?

The length of the essay is only 3-5 pp., however, adherence to the conventions of the academic essay and correct MLA citation are expected. Your paper must have a thesis and a clear argument, and must use ample evidence to demonstrate its ideas. Remember that any quotes you use need to be analyzed and explained in detail.
You may email me a rough draft before the 7th of December. The final paper is due on the 12th.
Eng W107: Guidelines for Writing Reviews

A review ought to provide a description of the event attended as well as a critical reflection. In this sense, you will need to do some preliminary research on the performer/poet and their work in order to find out what kind of writing they normally do, what it is like to read this work on the page, and to discover (if possible) some critical perspectives on the performer/poet’s work. Your review should begin by introducing the performer/poet using this information.

You will also need to take copious notes during the performance: what texts did the performer/poet read from, how did the performance of these texts differ from their rendering on the page/online (if this information is available), what kind of response did they generate? You should also refer to any other relevant issues from “Poetry Issues.” Be sure to make a note of your own response to the performance, along with the reasons for it.

Your review should be about 1-2 pp. in length, and ought to include logistical information such as the date, time and location of the event attended. If you decide to attend a lecture by a poet as opposed to a reading, you will need to provide a summary of the argument along with a critical reflection on it. In the event that you attend a lecture, try to apply the poet’s argument to his or her work, or to provide an analysis of the poet’s work in light of the information in the lecture.

Experiment for the weekend of 25.03.05: Sounds of the Everyday

• Listen to “From Slave Sho to Video aka Black but Beautiful” and “Chain Gang” by Tracie Morris (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Morris-2002.html).
• Listen to “About Face, With Pets” and excerpts from Goan Atom by Caroline Bergvall (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bergvall.html) in the “Reading at the Bowery Poetry Club” file.
• Spend 30 minutes in a public place. Try to record all of the sounds that you can hear, both linguistic and non-linguistic.
• Take your record of these sounds and combine it with one of your previous experiments or another piece of your writing.
• Work the combination into a sound piece, preserving as many of the non-linguistic sounds of the public place as you possibly can.

Things to think about / keep in mind (keep a record of your answers):
• Does Morris include elements of the everyday in her texts? How?
• Does Bergvall include elements of the everyday in her texts? How?
• How will you render non-linguistic sounds in your own text?
• How are the Morris texts like and unlike the Bergvall text (“About Face”)? What does it mean to read or listen to both of these authors in the same section of the course?
• How can the everyday be rendered in language?

Experiment for the weekend of 25.03.05: Sounds of the Everyday

Listen to:
Caroline Bergvall. “About Face.” (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bergvall.html) (linked off of Blackboard in “Assignments” folder.)
Follow along with the text available at Electronic Poetry Review (http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue6/text/cnotes/cb.htm) (also linked off Blackboard in “Assignments.”)

Answer the following questions:
• How is language interrupted?
• Do the sound fragments (t, mm, sh, k) convey emotion? How?
• What are the different registers/types of language present in the piece?
• How do the quoted theoretical sections function with the more personal, emotional sections of the text? What does the contrast suggest to you?
• What are the different tones in the poem?

The Experiment:
• Choose one poetic text that you think conveys emotion.
• Choose another text on the same subject that you think doesn’t convey emotion.
• Splice the texts together.
• Attempt to fragment and interrupt the language in a way that will highlight the emotional content of the texts. Think about how you would read the piece to bring out the emotion.
• Practice reading the text aloud. How does the performance differ from the written text?

Experiment for the weekend of 18.03.05: Interruption and Fragmentation.

Extended Sound Experiment
Due April 29, 2005

The purpose of this experiment is to become newly aware of the sounds around you and the sounds that you can produce. The experiment is meant to raise questions about the expanse, possibility and limitations of poetry as a form that uses only written means. The experiment may also raise questions/interests/issues in using other performative forms of expression that go beyond traditional poetry—it may raise questions like: Is it possible to go beyond language? What lies beyond language? How can our body participate in communication? You will need to reflect on the texts and recordings we have looked at this semester and revisit them in order to complete this experiment successfully.

You will, at the culmination of the project, hand in:
1. an “in-progress” sound-piece developed according to the task rules and
2. an introduction to your sound-piece, reflecting on your experience in creating the piece and discussing of any one of the authors/performers/poets we’ve studied this semester and their work and it’s impact on your own work.

Task Rules:
1. You will subtitle your piece “A week in sound.”
2. You will create a “documentary” of SEVEN days. Each day must be dated. The dates should also be used to structure your piece (the dates need not be consecutive).
3. This documentary must rely entirely on TEXT and SOUND. Accordingly, this “documentary” must not use any visual tools—i.e: video recorders/photography/painterly means/collage etc.
4. This documentary must not contain any words written by you. ALL language used in the poem/documentary/sound-piece must be taken from the texts that are found around you. You may of course manipulate these words in any way you like.
5. This documentary must rely not only on borrowed language but also on borrowed sound. Ambient sounds must appear on the page. For example, if I am documenting a bathroom event I would find a way to translate/perform the sound of toothbrushes, the faucet, etc. (Note: writing “ch ch ch ch ch” may not be the most effective way of depicting a sound.)
6. Your documentary can document anything—not necessarily you, or your dog or your love life. Defining a narrow concept of what you will record (a week in the sounds of 8:15 am, a week in the sounds of the corner of Broad and Norris) will be key to the success of the project.
7. Your document must employ/experiment with the methods and strategies used by the poets you have read and listened to this semester. You must mention these methods in your introduction and your reasons for choosing to experiment with them.
8. Your final document must appear as a score/page representation. Please do not restrict yourself to 8 ½ x 11” paper. You may create a sound recording if you have access to the technology.

Examples of scores can be found on Blackboard in the Assignments folder.

Experiment for the weekend of 01.04.05: Systems and Sounds.

Listen to:
• Brion Gysin, “No Poets” and “Junk is No Good Baby.”
• John Cage, “Song, Derived from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau.”

Read:
• John Cage, “25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey” in Postmodern American Poetry.
• Richard Kostelanetz, “Text Sound Art.”

All texts save “25 Mesostics” are available through the “Assignments” folder in Blackboard.

The Experiment:
John Cage uses the mesostic, a version of the acrostic to compose his texts. This is a very specific form in which the “string” phrase reads vertically while the “wing” phrases read horizontally. In its purest form, source texts are used and the letters in the string phrase that appear directly above and below a wing phrase will not appear in that line. Brion Gysin’s poems “No Poets” and “Junk is No Good Baby” are permutations, poems in which all of the possible word combinations of a single phrase are used, altering the meaning of the phrase and bringing out the sound qualities of the words.
Try using one of these procedures or forming your own procedure and use it to compose a poem. The performance of your procedural poem ought to highlight the sound qualities of the text.

Experiment for 08.04.05:
Read, Listen and Answer.
• Jaap Blonk.
• “Seahorses and Flying Fish.” While listening read the print version, Hugo Ball’s “Seepferdchen und Flugfische.”
Answer the following questions:
• What do you imagine or visualize when you are hearing the piece?
• How are the sounds contributing to the formation of emotions or images?
• Are familiar sounds becoming unfamiliar? Unfamiliar sounds becoming familiar?
• What is the effect of hearing poetry performed in a foreign language?
• How do the variations in volume and tone affect your response to the performance?
• How does meaning evolve through the alteration of volume, tone and/or pitch?
• Christian Bok. All chapters of Eunoia and “Sea Horses and Flying Fish ” (again, follow along with the print version).
Answer the following questions:
For Eunoia:
• Make a record of the feelings/thoughts that each chapter stirs in you.
• How do the vowels gain personalities and identities?
• Compare two vowel chapters in terms of the types of moods/ accents/ ambience/implications/narratives that they produce directly or otherwise.
For “Sea Horses and Flying Fish”:
• How is his delivery of Ball’s poem different from Blonk’s rendition? How is it similar?
• What type of techniques and variations were used by Bok to make his version sound different from Blonk’s?

Using the chapter from Eunoia as a lexicon, try to generate your own text. You may only use the words contained in the chapter, you may not include any other words (the, and, it, etc.). How does working with a constraint on your lexicon affect your writing?

Sound Projects
ENG 107
Spring 2005
Sarah Dowling

ADD – have them look at some scores – possibly by the 4 Horsemen or similar. Split into a “set” of projects: i.e. look at one poet’s work one week, answer the questions, keep a “journal” of it – think of mini-experiments to do that are similar to whatever the poet is doing (with Bergvall and Morris – something about splitting words, interrupting, etc.). Work up to project after a couple of weeks. Have paper as “prep work” for final paper that goes with manuscript.

“ Rediscover the possibilities of the human voice, until it becomes again, something we can see and touch”
• Bob Cobbing c.1969

Hear, Read and Consider:
(all works available at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/featurd-authors.htm)

• Caroline Bergvall. “About Face.” Read the text of the poem at http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue6/text/poems/cb1.htm.
Answer the following questions:
• How is language interrupted?
• What are the different tones in the poem?
• What are the different registers/types of language present in the piece?
• Jaap Blonk.
• “Seahorses and Flying Fish.” While listening read Hugo Ball’s “Seepferdchen und Flugfische” which can be found at http://www.literaturwelt.com/werke/ball/seepferdchen.htm.
• “The Ringing of Bells.”
• “Letter Sound Images.”
• “Untitled.”
Answer the following questions:
• What do you imagine or visualize when you are hearing the piece?
• How are the sounds contributing to the formation of emotions or images?
• Are familiar sounds becoming unfamiliar? Unfamiliar sounds becoming familiar?
• What is the effect of hearing poetry performed in a foreign language?
• How Blonk vary his delivery?
• How do the variations in volume and tone affect your response to the performance?
• How does meaning evolve through the alteration of volume, tone and/or pitch?
• How does the repetition of the same line or sound, as in “Untitled,” affect the meaning and delivery of that line or sound?
3. Christian Bok. All chapters of Eunoia and “Sea Horses and Flying Fish” (www.ubu.com/sound/bok.htm)
Answer the following questions:
For Eunoia:
• Make a record of the feelings/thoughts that each chapter stirs in you.
• How does each chapter vary from the other?
• How do the vowels gain personalities and identities?
• Compare two vowel chapters in terms of the types of moods/ accents/ ambience/implications/narratives that they produce directly or otherwise.
For “Sea Horses and Flying Fish”:
• How is his delivery of Ball’s poem different from Blonk’s rendition? How is it similar?
• What type of techniques and variations were used by Bok to make his version sound different from Blonk’s?
• Tracie Morris. “Black but Beautiful” and “Chain Gang.”
• How does the break up of words work to emphasize/de-emphasize/represent particular ideas/concepts/words/issues?
• How does Morris choose to vary which words she breaks up and why?
• What is the variation of pitch like? What effect does it produce?

Read and Consider:
• Some statements on sound poetry by Bob Cobbing: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cobbing.htm.
• Text sound art by Richard Kostelanetz: http://www.ubu.com/papers/kostelanetz.htm

The Experiment:
The purpose of this experiment is to allow you to become newly aware of the sounds around you and the sound that you yourself can produce. The experiment is meant to raise questions about the expanse, possibility and limitations of poetry as a form that uses only written means. The experiment may also raise questions/interests/issues in using other performative forms of expression that go beyond traditional poetry—it may raise questions like: Is it possible to go beyond language? What lies beyond language? How can our body participate in communication? and so forth.

The assignment requires you to complete the sections on Listening and Reading before you can Experiment/work on your project. You will, at the culmination of the project, hand in:

1. an “in-progress” sound-piece developed according to the
task rules and
2. a three page paper addressing
a) an introduction to your sound-piece
b) a reflection on your experience in creating the piece and
c) a discussion of any one of the above listed authors/performers/poets and their work and it’s impact on your own work.

Task Rules:
1. You will subtitle your piece “A week in sound”
2. You will create a “documentary” of SEVEN days
3. This “documentary” must not use any visual tools—i.e: video recorders/ photography/painterly means/collage etc
4. This “documentary” must rely entirely on TEXT and SOUND.
5. This “documentary” must not contain any words written by you. That is: ALL language used in the poem/documentary/sound-piece must be found from the texts
that are found around you. For instance, if I want to document my 8.15 am event in the kitchen: I would use language from the cereal box, the sugar packet, the lyrics from ‘Bright Eyes’ playing on my CD and the words writing on post-it notes on my fridge.
6. I repeat: None of the words in this documentary should be your own—you may of course manipulate all the words that you “borrow” or appropriate in ways to suit you. You can deconstruct, break up, force connections, juxtapose etc.
7. This documentation must rely not only on borrowed language but also on borrowed sound. i.e.: ambient sounds—what is around you must appear on the page/performance. e.g.: if I am documenting a bathroom event: I would find a way to translate/perform the sound of toothbrushes, the faucet, the flush etc.
8. You documentary of seven days must be dated. The order/time/sequence etc is up to you, as long as you date seven days. You may interpret the “dating” any way you choose.
9. Your documentary can document anything—not necessarily you, or your dog or your love life. It can even document a week in sound of the mold growing in your toilet.
10. Your document must employ/experiment with at least TWO methods/strategies used by the poets you have listened to. You must mention these two methods in your paper and your reasons for choosing to experiment with them.
11. Your final document of a week must appear in two versions : a score/page representation and a vocal/performance representation.

Sarah Dowling
Dr. J. Osman
ENG 790
23 November 2004
Second Experiment for Adam Reich
Hi Adam. I was very excited to read your poems this week. They seem so simple, but are really so deceptively rich. It was very enjoyable to have a weekend to spend with this packet of work. What interested me first was the complication of the subject(s) and object(s) in the poem. The first place where this came to my attention was on the second page. I found it intriguing that there were five lines spoken in the imperative voice (1, 2, 6 – 8), a “you” and a “me,” but no really clear relationship between speaker and spoken-to. I couldn’t even tell whether “me” was the speaker, in other words, whether “I” and “me” were indeed the same voice. I noticed this on the fourth and fifth pages as well, as the poem seemed to answer itself and to position itself as the speaker and spoken-to. I was very interested in this because it seemed to me that you had created a sort of inclusive “I,” inclusive not in the sense that the reader could identify, but in the sense that the boundary between “I” and “you” (and “me” and “we”) was almost nonexistent.
Initially, I tried to experiment with how you had created this you/I/we. I isolated the lines that did not contain personal pronouns, and tried inserting personal pronouns into those lines. I used we first, then I, then you, rotating this pattern because I thought that a pattern would prevent me from constructing distinct subjects. It didn’t really work:
We fog.

I float above the tree.

Your fish in the stream and the hair on the wall.

Our surface in a single bound.

My white cancels that. The beneath your flesh.

Our seams of heat.

I’m holding onto the bank.

The eyes that are in your fingers.

We pour.

In fact, this produced pretty much the opposite effect from what I thought you had achieved. I was kind of disappointed, but it showed me how specific you had been in your placement of the personal pronouns, and in making “I” and “me” answer each other.
Since that experiment hadn’t really proven useful to me, I turned to the first and last pages. I wondered about how they were working with pages 2 – 5, so I decided to find out whether there were any links between the construction of the “I” and these lists of words. In order to see what was happening in these lists, I sought out what part of speech each word on the first page is. Did you know that of these 33 words, only “layered,” “creature” and “sepal” have one grammatical function? All of the other 30 words can function as at least two parts of speech:
Layered point clear garden path
a. n.,v., a., adv. n., v., a., adv. n., v. n., v.,

Void & full bloom fern wheel
a., n., v. n., v., a., adv. n., v., a., adv., n., v. n., v.

Turning sepal open stable lake green
vbl. n., ppl. a. n. n., v., a., adv. n., v., a., adv. n., v. a., n., v.

Whole light ear tongue senses
a., n., .adv., n., a., n., v. n., v. pl. n., v. (3rd. pers. sing. pres)
n. ppl. a., adv.

Skin arch open bow wing precipice
n., a., v. n., v., a. n., a., v., adv. n., v. n., v. n., v.

It was really interesting to do this dictionary work on your poem, even though I felt I knew and understood all the words. This work really made me reconsider what could be going on in the first and last pages. In the last page, of course, the use of “as” and “their” tie the words to a single grammatical meaning a little more firmly. On the first page, however, what seemed to be a list of words or ideas relating to the thematic or imagistic content of the packet in fact consisted of a set of words that were almost always nouns and verbs, but often adverbs or adjectives as well. In this sense, what seemed descriptive could function as a command, and this worked in a very interesting way when considered in light of the problematization of subjectivity in the other poems in the packet. Was I as reader being carried into the shifting and indeterminate you/I/we of the poem?

Sarah Dowling
Jena Osman
ENG 790
23 September 2004
Experiment for Darcy Sebright
Hi Darcy. I enjoyed reading your poems over the past week. What interests me most about them is their use of time. For example, “the seventh day,” “rain: 40 days in,” and “lizard & fireworks: 2 weeks in” all make reference to the speaker’s marriage as a very definite point of departure/new beginning, but the time after that is really quite elastic. In “the seventh day,” the poem takes place “between the now & the not yet,” but it also takes place in the past, “yesterday,” and makes reference to the future, to what “his bedroom will become.” I found it interesting that there never seemed to be any mention of time before the marriage, but that the time after it was slippery and seemed to move easily from past to present and even into the future. I also found it kind of interesting that grammar dictates that so much of the time after the marriage would need to be related in the past, even though this time period was being described as a kind of new present.
For my experiment I tried to pull different phrases that signaled the passage of time out of “the seventh day.” I wanted to see if in extracting these little sections from the poem I would see how you were effectuating the movement of time. Here’s what happened:

(not nothing … pto – smile).
The seventh day between
the now &
I don’t live here
not yet
the house is this
weekend
I took
she left
will become/after
yesterday
then
I cooked
he read
genesis
disoriented me.

I think the result of this experiment was that I was able to decide for myself that the poem could simultaneously be taking place on the seventh day, and on the six days leading up to it. Prior to the experiment I was experiencing some confusion, thinking that there was a major shift between “rings” and “yesterday,” and I didn’t really understand what the change was. After sorting out the passage of time for myself, I don’t think that my initial impression of that break was necessarily correct. But then I would question why I felt that it was a major shift in the first place. What was it about that line break that signaled to me that something radically different was coming? Did something radically different occur, and did I miss it?
Another question I wanted to ask you was about the sequence of numbers in the poem: 3-2-100. It seemed like it might be important since other sequential things (time, for instance) were foregrounded, but I didn’t quite understand the progression. Perhaps it was just a coincidence?

Sarah Dowling
Dr. J. Osman
ENG 790
4 November 2004
Experiment for Darcy Sebright
Hi Darcy. I found reading your work this week very interesting. I couldn’t help but think about this work in comparison with the packet that you handed in last time. It strikes me that in certain ways there are very similar impulses between the two packets. Last time you treated us to a very intimate exploration of personal experience. This time, there is some personal experience in the work, but I think that the intimacy now lies in the presentation: quotes from Coleridge are rendered personal/intimate in their scrawled, gestural appearance, editing and collage are viewed as physical acts of cutting and obscuring. Sometimes I was forced to be aware of the personal through the subject matter of the text (back of last page), but more often I was simply forced to be aware of the author as somebody physically laboring over these pages. It was interesting to always be confronted with the work of making the text.
For my experiment I looked at the second page. I wanted to think about how you had combined these foreign elements and what they were doing together. I put the poem into three columns separated according to the kind of script: typed, thin pen, thick pen. I wanted to see how these columns would appear distinct if they were not visually distinct. Would I find three coherent wholes? Here’s what happened:

Monday for I bear in my body wailing
the marks of
isn’t it just
isn’t it just surprising pushes its how the box of apples smell
on the kitchen table
through hallways
the hymns in my head
are hymns I want
Every god as a sung during my last days
Housewife BUT NOW
Ordinary time and the hymns lack
Morning hallelujah
So they don’t crash into today, wailing
The sin (?) (and it is my friend I am thinking switching over
About
It must must be that
Something is
Hot face She said he’d stood
With a looking
For something to take of
That is just as valuable
Check made out for the He grabbed the
Organ wedding fee That is not mine
He is going to move out
He is going to sleep on a couch
And walk by doorways
Where people stand with guns
My husband made me a tuna
Sandwich last night
(my head had just been thrown
much clutter we had to back mouth wide and vacant
move off of our bed he grips me
before sleeping every I want
God as a housewife pushing alarm clock buttons differently
I wake them up in the speaking of his way with us tonight
Morning so they don’t I have placed apples
Crash into the sun In our closets

I really didn’t find three coherent wholes, which I guess I was not expecting. But I was intrigued to find that the 1st and 3rd columns seem to function as marginalia to the 2nd in the beginning, and then come to discuss this intimate relationship on more equal footing at the end. Hmmm. Also, the 3rd column does not refer to god or church at all, although the 1st and 2nd columns are quite concerned with religion. It was interesting to see what references were absent from what columns, but I am not sure that this necessarily provides any clues as to how to proceed. Do all of the columns have to have similar references? I don’t really think so. But the 3rd column does speak quite differently than the 1st and 2nd.

Sarah Dowling
Jena Osman
ENG 790
30 September 2004
Experiment for Divya Victor
What interested me most about Exuviae was the richness of the sound. I think that it is through the careful development of this richness that the poem/s is/are able to talk about discourse and language in such an effective, interesting and enjoyable way. The words are able to mean tonally, often in such a way that I was completely unconcerned with their connotative and denotative meanings. This is not to say that the words were stripped of these meanings, quite the opposite. I found that I was able to find normative meaning from all the words without going to the dictionary because Exuviae (at least this part of it) basically leaves syntactic structures intact, which allows the reader to infer meaning based on the grammatical position of words in the sentence.
I was also interested in the way that narrative elements were dispersed throughout the poem/s. I found instances in which the body was cut apart and objectified through the use of medical discourse: “bandage applied in V-shaped crossings, about a spine,” “a joint cannot articulate,” “from a cyst pours.” These passages were prescriptive and didactic, but I am describing them as narrative because they gave some sense of event or “plot” development, while also seeming to involve or implicate the reader. I also found certain instances where a discrete character or self appeared: “she places herself in the third person,” “somewhere I have jumped without breasts.” It was surprising to see “I” and “she,” but not in a jarring way. I thought that the passages in which an “I” or “she” figure appeared were handled very well because there was such close attention to the vowel sounds (“finding her memory chewy”). These passages cast the more medically-oriented passages in a different light: did the spine belong to “she”? Or “I”? Should I be worried about “she”/“I”? Finally, there were also multiple instances in which properties of character were conveyed upon body parts: “the oocyte finds itself enthralled.”
I found that the dispersal of narrative elements was a very effective way of talking about discourses; medical, poetic, and even fictional. It was very striking to find the objective treatment of body parts (esp. “through a slit made in the mid-line / of the back, the skin of the pupil / is left floating”) alongside the treatment of body parts as individuated characters. I also thought that using different narrative conventions was a very effective way to get the reader thinking about discourse and language: narrative is so easy on the reader, it was great to see how you manipulated its conventions to encourage a different form of inquiry.
I was also very interested in the way Exuviae allowed words to mean tonally as opposed to connotative/denotatively: “from the wrest comes wrist et cetera desunt,” “what is it like to share a spoon and undo the milliene ootid’s shags,” “I cannot hello the azido & furthermore, what do you do if you find yourself ….” I felt that because syntactic structures remained, for the most part, intact, there was no need for me to dig out the latin/medical dictionaries. I could enjoy the tonal qualities of the words and infer meaning from their placement within the sentences, which was really freeing.
One question I have for you relates to structure: I’m interested in the way you’ve drawn up each part of Exuviae. So, what makes a part a part? Although each part is quite different structurally, they are all very unified (I think this comes across most through the vowel sounds). How did you go about organizing them? Was there a particular process used?
I realize that this is getting quite long, so here’s my experiment: I translated part 1 into French, and an interesting thing happened. It was almost exclusively feminine (all words in French are m/f, with a few neutral ones, they verbs need to be conjugated according to the gender of the nouns). There was also some interesting being/having play (relating to the particulars of French grammar – much too tedious to discuss right now, but very interesting that it came up in direct translation). I made up quite a few words in translating it, and expanded certain others when I wasn’t sure which meaning was best. But here it is:
Aiment: ce qui est intendu, ce qu’on veut dire par un tu tombes séverrement proche. Mal a l’aise en capitals; viens portant des braques et l’anise. Je est l’axe, suis un groupe de triolets métaliques – ma petite antipasti. La petitude d’une mémoire, bien une bénédiction souscrite. Connue comme tel dû a resemblance, comme avec des voyelles attachés a un autre. Effarouchée, un fil connectant: glissement de la langue. Toute inflorescence monte des larmes: une pétale par placenta, bandage appliqué en croissant le V autour de l’épine.
Another interesting thing here is that your “glide of the tongue” takes on the alternate meaning “the sliding of language” ….

Sarah Dowling
Dr. J. Osman
ENG 790
11 November 2004
Second Experiment for Divya Victor
Hi Divya. I really liked this section of Exuviae. I felt right from the first line that the section had kind of a sad, apologetic tone, which seems appropriate to a list of corrigenda. You’ll never guess who else uses the idea of corrigenda or errata (unless you already know) …. Joan Retallack. I’ve attached an excerpt from her book Errata 5uite. It’s a very different project than yours, but there are certain commonalities that I thought you might find interesting.
I was very struck by all the delicate, tender imagery in this section, especially the parts about plants: “skirl: frond of thrush notes,” “the pudge of hibiscus,” “apply sepals on your groin,” “sulk of lawn,” etc. It was exciting to see these phrases juxtaposed against images of the inside of the body and against religious language. I especially liked the way that the language about plants (and also the language about birds) modified the technical terms, especially those from biology and religion: I view “duodenum” completely differently when I am thinking of “fronds” and “thrush notes,” for example. Oddly enough, words that represent things I “have” (nares, gums, jejunum, etc.) are made more intimate/emotive for me when they are placed near dotterels or turtle doves (which I don’t have, clearly).
For my experiment, I decided to do a variant reading of my own, keeping in mind that “when given both,” there is a need to choose, as you suggested. I wanted to give you kind of a representation of the activity I was doing in reading your work. Here are some of my choices:
Septum sunder sahib, what remains must gurgle without
Split and privilege
A chara, oxter, and puctuate our throats
The smell and the mark, the hole, the cutting
Sew a trachea, on seam muster ossein
Bind the throat, bring the collagen of bones
Skirl: frond of thrush notes et cum jejunum
The music and the entrails, the plant and the bird
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes
And man is made
The delicious fish, the snow in the south
Follow.
The small island put apart, the nostrils split
Sepals, dotterels,
Lord have mercy
The lawn divides our fences.
There were are few threads of images that I was trying to follow in this experiment, particularly ones that I felt spoke about division. I also included the nursery rhyme from p. 2 because I liked the way that it functioned as a commonly repeated pattern in the same way as the mass. It’s intimate and communal. I’m very excited about this work, Divya.
Sarah Dowling
Jena Osman
ENG 790
7 October 2004
Experiment for Karen Hannah
Karen, one of the most striking things in your poetry, for me, was the use of space. At first glance, what you were doing seemed very simple: although things were spread out a little more than what we might find in the left-aligned poem, what I saw were straight lines adhering to definite, although not necessarily “traditional,” structural patterns. Upon further reading, I revised this opinion. I noticed that you often left spaces not only between stanzas and between words, but you had also structured many stanzas in such a way that there were “holes” left in them. I noticed this on the last page in particular, but having noticed it there, I read the spacing on the first, third and fourth pages differently. This structure really alerted me to the different sound patterns that were coming up in your work, and to the sounds of the forest. It was as if the physical spaces gave me the chance to listen for those sounds, or to see how the words might suggest them.
I also felt that there was something very sad in this poem (“Have I missed the placing?” “The locusts arrive today, I forgot” “The phone call my father explaining” “skin split from skin” “body shudder / Close(d) eyes within seconds”), although I did not know what. I wasn’t sure whether this was something I needed to know or not, but I realize that these 5 pp. are part of something longer, and so the answers that your reader might want/need may be somewhere else. The spaces gave me a place to wonder about why the poem might seem sad, but I don’t know if what I was wondering about was actually that closely related to the poem, or if I was using the poem as a cue to think about other, possibly unrelated things.
For my experiment I took the last stanza of the first page and played with the way I felt that the body was manifested in the natural elements:

Three trees, nun trees together
none trees eyes, two stare a head
of a treetorso, bright, the trunk curves,
the back curves, the back is long.
Dark toward the base of a nun
we act. Her roomy heart mush
with the dark fur and spores.
Cut everywhere on her talk,
split lips, eyelids converse.

Doing this experiment felt more like a translation than anything else, only my agenda in changing the words was much more clear. I was trying to stay close to the syntax that you were using, but that really only came through in the punctuation. What I learned from doing this experiment, though, was to look more closely at the type of sentences that you are using: “Three trees clusteredcloistered. To stare straight ahead at illuminated segments, long curving trunks. A darkening downward their bases react. Black hearty mushrooms molded overnight. Incisions everywhere on the bark tiny mouthsopening.” They are all fragmentary, but not just in the grammatical sense. They also offer only fragmentary glimpses at specific parts of the trees: “divert glance left to catch,” as you say

Sarah Dowling
J. Osman
ENG 790
14 October 2004
Experiment for Liberty Heise
Hi Liberty. Let me begin by telling you that I enjoyed reading your poems. Your descriptions of Texas reminded me of Saskatchewan. I especially enjoyed the poem that ran from the third to the fourth page of your packet. I felt that the patterns of repeated images made this poem very successful, and allowed for a description of the car accident that was graphic without being sensational (difficult to do). I noticed in particular the repetition of fabric images (wrap, flaps, wore, worn, flapping, fabric, etc.), and water images (wetted, a flood aflood, water isn’t welcome, whirlpool, shallow, etc.), and I felt that these repetitions allowed you to tell the stories in a way that was somewhat roundabout. There was no clear split between the story about Gilbert, about the allergic children, about harvesting the crops, cooking, but all of these were linked up by the repeated images.
For my experiment, I wanted to see what would happen if some of the repeated images were removed. I decided to take the first lines of each stanza and make a poem out of them. I still found repeated water images in these lines, but there weren’t really any of the other types of repeated images. Here’s what happened:
Palouse – a county
(there was little by way of blood
in the Palouse, embedded we – put to
Gilbert’s funeral – a flood, aflood
this incision or incisions
there’s no tiny way to tell
gravity was worn mourned on a weeping wheat wall

in the summer, water isn’t welcome
lentil does not hold its shimmer
which reminds me of whose monologue
(at this point we don’t know Gilbert
but there is always a tear

Although it is interesting that it is really only the Gilbert story that comes through in this experiment, I was not really satisfied with the result. What interested me about your poem was not one story or another, but the way that the images of wrapping and wearing held the story about the child with allergies to the Gilbert story.

Sarah Dowling
J. Osman
ENG 790
14 October 2004
Experiment for Brennen Lukas
Hi Brennen. I found your Guide to Poetry very playful. It is rich in allusions, irreverent, funny … but I’d better cease and desist before any of my comments get worked into the second stanza on the third page. One thing that I particularly enjoyed was the way in which different images or ideas cropped up repeatedly throughout the packet, for example, the writer falling down in the parking lot on pp. 1, 3, and 5. What particularly interested me about this repetition was that on p. 1, it was “your favorite writer,” which suggested that the reader had some sort of connection to “her.” Then on p. 3, the reference was much more general “The writer fell down in the parking lot because ….” Finally on p. 5, the writer was the speaker: “I fall down in the parking lot.” It interested me that the writer was “she,” “I,” and a general, almost abstract figure. I noticed similar types of repetition happening throughout, with reference to mugging (p. 3, p. 5), quarters (p. 1, 3, 5), and various domestic images.
For my experiment I decided to take some of the more intimate, domestic images and juxtapose them against the more violent ones:
Look at me with the leaves silhouetted against my bedroom wall at 5:55 am Tuesday. The blaze of New York in the thrall of night. The leaves on the wall begin.

I deny the accident. You could always drive away, forgetting. He starts laughing when I hug him. If the gas mask won’t protect me then I’m afraid to protest. Or why at high speed the wheels of a car appear to spin backwards.

I bought my wife flowers at Sunoco and she kissed me. It can be dangerous to wear a thong to bed. The accident is denial. In 1992 the phones were ripped out of the walls. You say it hurts and I hold your hand. We’re in the mean streets now.

I think this leaves out a lot of what you were doing with “the commerce of ideas,” which is unfortunate, but it did help me to notice the interplay of violence and tenderness that was already operating in your work. It’s funny how one moment the speaker seems to direct this tenderness one way (toward the wife?), and then to abruptly redirect it (toward the reader?). I guess my question is, then, what role do you envision the reader taking in this work? How closely invested (to go along with the “commerce of ideas”) are you asking them to be? I was really intrigued by this aspect of your work.

Sarah Dowling
Dr. J. Osman
ENG 790
18 November 2004
Second Experiment for Liberty Heise
Hi Liberty. Reading your work this week was quite a change from a lot of what I have been reading this semester, and that was really nice. I think it can be very interesting to think about traditional forms and the types of possibilities that they offer. I also had to give myself a little refresher course in what villanelles are, which goes to show that a poem doesn’t necessarily need to experiment with vocabularies and linguistic structures to ask the reader to do a little research.
I was most interested in “Brooklyn Sestina” and “Hill Country Villanelle” because I liked the ways in which the repeated lines were altered as they appeared next to different lines or words. This happens most dramatically in “Brooklyn Sestina.” For example, the word border often describes something quite concrete: the edge of the bridge, “On the bridge, / at the border;” or the lines in a parking lot “parked / across a white line border.” It also describes intangibles like the city’s seemingly all-encompassing character, “A city of squares and formulas which border / on everything;” or some concept about time “Holes punched on the flapping border / a long wind has taken time / that alone cried a river.” I thought that it was interesting that in order to encompass all of these different meanings, the word had to function as a noun and as a verb. None of the other repeated words seemed to shift meanings as much as “border,” but who the driver is changes (“you are the driver. / If you are the driver”), and I felt that that was functioning in a similar way. In this sense, the repeated words’ definitions were, to a certain extent, provisional, and I found it interesting that they were being constantly revised.
For my experiment I decided to focus on “Hill Country Villanelle.” I noticed that there were a lot of small sound patterns repeated in this poem, which I felt worked nicely with the repeated lines. I decided to take out the repeated lines and to focus on the way sound was working in the other lines, although I needed to include a few words from the repeated lines here and there to make the experiment worthwhile. I then picked out the words with repeating sounds and put them together:
March the Harley crank blue bells
tidings saved this tiny sojourn into grass
watermelon zeppelin*
Hank and Willie Harley
a pair of pork chops
dashboard driving down
a tank sized highway
and random dancing
If the shoe fits it
Wranglers strangle
Riding riding

In doing this experiment I thought that it might be interesting to see these patterns brought out even more, or more closely tied into the repeated lines. The first line is pretty closely tied into the sound repetition as it is, but the second repeating line only shows up in my experiment once (down).
I liked your poems, Liberty. I thought that a lot of them were very funny.

*(I don’t know if this line still has sound repetition in your accent. In mine the repeated sound is “lin.”)
Sarah Dowling

Jena Osman

ENG 790

16 September 2004

Experiment for Natacha Leonard: Pulse Points from “I am Not There”

Carotid:

I am not there I am not five when she grabs my arm so tightly I still carry the marks of her fingers so, I can only suspect the left side’s suffering from poor circulation, an indentation of the memory machine

Brachial:

I am not there I nay not five years when it seizes my own so much narrowly which I always carry the marks of her fingers’ traffic, I can suspect only the suffering left side’s of weak circulation (beat), an impression of the machine of memory

Femoral:

I am not there am to me any five when it seizes my arm (weapon) so much so much my cerements still the signs of its fingers carry, a can of the links suspect me only of suffering drum (sinister) with the turn, notches of the machine of memory

Radial:

I am not there I am myself none five when cerement apprehends in such a way my weapon (arm) in such a way still the signals of its fingers takes me (snare), I can only by a link’s suspect make it unfit to the return, interrelatedness of the memory’s drone hum

Tibial:

I am not me even I am not there five beats, so cerements in such a manner my arm in such a manner includes/understands still only which takes the signals of its fingers to me, to me the box of links drum suspects bad indisposed to the return, will interrelate the apparel (skin) of memory.

(Cerements: the cloths the dead are wrapped in. Suggested to me by the French “serrer”, to grab or hold tightly.)

Sarah Dowling
Jena Osman
ENG 790
21 October 2004
Second Experiments for Natacha Leonard
Hi Natacha. I found reading your poetry this week very interesting, especially in the context of our discussion of politics and poetry. The different forms you’ve used in this packet brought up many questions about politics: how are forms political? What are the connotations of different forms? How are they gendered? What politics do forms impose upon the poem? I felt these questions most pressingly in the first three poems, but then asked them of the final four as an effect of proximity or juxtaposition. The last four poems didn’t demand that I wonder about the politics of form, but I did so anyway through association with the first three poems.
I actually did two experiments for you because I was interested in how an exchange of forms between “Mexico Circa 1939, Dear Frida” and “The New Violence” would operate. In some ways this might be considered a “bad” experiment: form is not an outside thing that we choose randomly and impose upon some independent and pure content. I know. But I was very struck by the juxtaposition between these two poems, not just in terms of form. I found “Mexico …” very feminine, as the speaker is female, is speaking to a female, and is doing so in an historically feminine form (the epistolary). “The New Violence,” by contrast, suggested that ultimate patriarchal document, the government memo, through the use of repetitious language, the specificity of the terminology (not just guns but AK-47s, not just a margin of error, but a 3% margin of error), and the censored section. I wanted to see what omissions would need to made, what mutations would have to occur, and ultimately whether “Mexico …” could become a government document or “The New Violence” could become a letter.
In changing “The New Violence” into “Dear New,” I was careful to use as much of your language as possible. Although “new” and “violence” both appear in my experiment, the first phrase not to occur is in fact “the new violence.” The others that do not appear are “MT Kalashnikov,” “Internet, TV,” “3%,” “Federal Government,” “AK-47s,” “NASDAQ,” and “American.” Interestingly, this list represents all of the specific language that you had employed.
I also tried to put “Mexico …” into some type of official format, but quickly realized that I would not be able to put it into a memo or make it as repetitious and specific as “The New Violence” without removing to the subjectivity of the speaker, and quite possibly that of the addressee as well. This might have been interesting to try anyway, but I really didn’t want to write a Report on Communist Artists in Mexico or anything. Instead, I decided to put the language into faux-scientific categories in a table entitled “Table one: (get) Hurt (themselves): People.” The categories I used were ones that I felt were already present in your poem: “Most is swallowed down,” which is about the body; “not everything is about you/revolution,” which is about more abstract ideas (like revolution, complete inevitability), as well as “you;” and “that all things denied,” which is about denial. One thing I really liked was the new ways of reading that the columns opened up: “overwhelming / imagine rolling / knows me / so well / wrong” or “in my womb each month / imagine rolling / knows me / this time / with a pill.” It’s a quite a dramatic difference. I couldn’t work in “you,” “I,” or “Diego” to a very great extent, and in that sense, specificity disappeared in this experiment too. The first stanza also vanished, and “eventually turn to the female in solidarity,” only turned up as “solid” in the denial column.
I think it’s amazing to compare the different ways in which the experiments and the poems operate politically. Without the specific terminology relating to war, can the experiment based on “The New Violence” still function in that direct political way? Has its politics changed along with the change in its political operation/articulation? Similarly, how is hurt differently articulated in a table than it is in a letter? Is it still articulated? What discourses does it now operate in? How are they political? If you are interested in investigating the possibilities of the epistolary form, I have attached an excerpt from Erica Hunt’s book Local History. This section is entitled “Correspondence Theory.” You might also check out Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker.

Dear New,

I’ve always checked the first efficiency – hurricanes, denial - seriously. Beautiful things, conscience and testing. The tone of possibilities with a cool “that was never the intent.” I still don’t know what to do with passive resistance. Answers never solve anything.

Two birds can reach anyone at any time. Voting rights a drop. They too see prisoners, a margin, and like will not be able to help us. The good name of my weapon prefers to lurk, strongly resembles the equal status, salt and pepper. And expand on dreams.

The old shakers are like heavy love. By doing good things, all dogs maintain excerpts. Yoo-hoo! The latest polls take kitsch quite seriously, and report to see how it is doing. A stone faced with the possibility of its own annihilation. I just don’t understand what’s so darn funny.

Who doesn’t classify flags, radio or newspaper? Recently error wanted to improve, but a business called violence will not be able to help us.

Sarah Dowling
Dr. J. Osman
ENG 790
23 November 2004
Second Experiment for Nicole Miceli
Hi Nicole. It was quite interesting to see how your project on clouds has transformed since I presented your work all those weeks ago (doesn’t sound as long ago as it feels). One thing that struck me about this packet of work was your use of the imperative voice and of declarative statements. In some ways the certainty that these voices would seem to imply was undercut by lines like “You are so. You are not” (declarative nonetheless), or the “Forget it” section (imperative), but the statements that seemed to detract from that certainty were few and far between. I noticed that there were statements in the imperative voice or declarative statements (usually several) on every page except 27 and 30, although they occurred most frequently on the first two pages. I decided to examine these statements in my experiment. What would happen if they were rendered provisional?
I decided to transform the lines that I felt were declarative or that employed the imperative voice to render them more provisional. I wanted to see what would change in the poem if a degree of doubt was added. I began half way down the first page:
Are you so. Are you not.
Who did give up. Did give presence.

To refuse. Options.
O pine, worst choices.
For lucky stars thank lucky stars.

Are we. The bounds. The proximity. The closure.
Is silent this space.

Is reserved.
Static.

If this be that hate this. That. This be.
So bland. Is the sky. Without clouds.

Without shifters signifying everything.

I felt that in performing this experiment, I had made the space of your poem (or at least this part of it) more provisional and questioning. Maybe this is not at all what you are going for, but I found it interesting to see how the certainty that some forms of address necessarily express might be transformed in order to alter the tone of the piece. If this were extended, it would probably recast the power dynamics (flag image, masturbation/asphyxiation?). I wondered how the image of clouds would resonate differently if expressed in a less definite or definitive manner. Because clouds are fleeting structures, it might be interesting to play around with the grammatical voices in the poem and experiment with the possibility enacting that provisionality. I did feel that this was happening in certain places (“Blue sheets. / Seen as white.”), but I wanted to feel more lost in the piece, and to be less definitively informed.

Sarah Dowling
Jena Osman
ENG 790
23 September 2004
Experiment for Sarah Morrison
Morrison, I focused on the first three poems in your packet because I was very interested in the relationship between sound and form in these works, particularly in “washspace” and “on the eve of crisis.” These two poems have a kind of sonic circularity arising from the use of “soft,” fricative sounds in the titles and closing lines: “washspace” to “entering the self from without from: / sponges negotiate filling and spilling.” I like how the s and sh sounds return in 3., complimented by f, th and soft j. Similarly, in “the eve of crisis” you’ve loaded up on the s sounds in the title, and then they’re brought back (with f sound) in the final two lines “too many a circular ladder / laughter suffocating laughter.” If I remember my History of the English Language class correctly, f is the soft version of v, so “eve” would be very closely related to “laughter suffocating laughter” too. What I found especially effective about the return to the soft consonants in the final few lines of these two poems was that in all the lines preceding you used many hard consonants (t, d, p, b, etc.), so the return to the soft sounds gave a sense of closure without pressing the reader into some all-encompassing “realization.”
I did my experiment on “on the eve of crisis.” It was initially very difficult to come up with an experiment for this poem since the repetition and sound patterns are so tight, but I really liked the image that it was evoking in my mind – one of an uncomfortable enclosure, with the speaker being caught on this “hornetical” thing somehow. (Is that word a combination of horn and hermetical? I’m getting the image of being caught and sealed at once.) For my experiment I looked up many of the words in “on the eve of crisis” to find longer, more intentionally laborious ways of expressing the same idea. I wanted to see what would happen to a poem about enclosure or caught-ness if it were expanded. My hypothesis was that it would not be very effective, but I leave that for you to judge:
a fabric barricade on high
shut admission to light and air
to catch in or as if in
and in or to a lower place the catchy
something resembling a net in reticulation
(as of lines, fibres or figures)
no swing no sliding barrier
allows a swell or jutting
circuitous step rungs, numerous
the cause of mirth want of air with an explosive sound

Evidently the rhythmic and sonic things you had done in the poem weren’t preserved here, but I think it’s interesting to look at how similar ideas might (and indeed might not) come across. I think what this experiment really made me wonder about was this patterning that you have in “washspace”, “hermit’s sleeve” and “on the eve of crisis”: could it translate to a longer work? How would that happen? How stringent would you need to be about sonic relationships between the words? I’m not trying to suggest that these poems ought to be longer, quite the opposite, I’m wondering about the extent to which the techniques you’re using could be applied to other kinds of works. I could see the kind of circularity of repetition as analogous to Stein, for example, but what about the saturation of consonantal sounds?

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