Personal
Mythology of Organic Poetry Workshop,
Saturday, October 23,
2010 (The Writer’s Workshoppe, Port
- read
As for Poets (Gary Snyder)
- Outline,
expectations, definition, needs.
In
1912, in the introduction to the 4th edition of his book Symbols of Transformation, Carl Jung
asked: What is the myth you are living? Personal Mythology[1]
is the name of that myth and you have one, whether you are conscious of it, or
not. I can’t tell you what it is, but you can discover your own and, if you don’t
like it, you can change it. What is the theme of your life? What patterns
inform your activities? This course will help you discover a process of getting
deeper into your own consciousness, perhaps to the level of personal myth.
(In
my essay What is Consciousness, you
can see where I put this in a model of how consciousness manifests.
OrganicPoetry.org)
Questions to ponder: What writing project do people associate
with you? Is there a subject on which you’d seek to do a saturation[2]
job? Do you carry a small notebook in which you can jot down short poems or
notes for poems?
- Brief
explanation of Organic Poetry:
A poem that writes itself, but is the product of balance, so one of the
most difficult ways to write well, because it is, as Philip Whalen described
it, a picture or graph of the mind
moving. A nerve movie.
A use of speech at its least careless
and least logical
(Charles Olson.) If you have not read Projective Verse, I can send you a link.
- Introductions:
Name, Where you’re from, Level of poetry skill & why you took the
class.
- Sound: AG on 1st
Thought/Best Thought or MM on Projective Verse
- License
Plate Exercise:
Go outside for 7 minutes, work alone, in silence, look at three parked
cars and make short descriptions of what the three letters stand for.
Ignore the numbers. For example, a car with license plates YHM might stand
for:
- (Upon return: Is your work visual? What is the sound component? Is your syntax
regular or just prose chopped into lines? Any smells in the poem? Tastes?)
- Exquisite Corpse exercise using
license plate material if stuck.
- Exercise: I Remember
- Mind
Writing Slogans:
(Have group read these, two or three each.)
- Exercise: Cover poem of Ed Dorn Tribe. 7
minutes.
- Sound: Allen Ginsberg on Whitman:
- Sound: Eileen Myles cuts:
1.
Untitled
(Matthew Shepard)
2.
On
Proprioception
3.
On
Working Class Speech
4.
Milk
5.
On
Milk
- Exercise:
American Sentences.
(Audio – of A. Waldman & A. Schelling, Handout)
LUNCH
BREAK: Come Back with Two American Sentences
- George
Bowering:
I
do not compose poetry to show you what I have seen, but rather because I
have seen…this poet’s job is not to tell you what it is like, but to make a
poem…Not trying to use your poems to prove a point, or address an argument. Not
to try to control what they’re (the poems) are doing…but rather to be a kind of
audience listening to where the poem is going to go…the practice of outside…Try to forget your own voice…and listen
hard for what the language is saying… you yourself are the audience, hearing
a voice you’ve trained your ear to receive (emphasis added)… (Bowering 6)
§
Exercise: How I Got Here.
- Exercise: Anne Waldman Sketching/Interview
Jack Spicer's poetics.
- …Prose invents - poetry discloses…
A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer…
…Muses
do exist, but now I know that they are not afraid to dirty their hands with
explication – that they are patient with truth and commentary as long as it
doesn’t get into the poem…
…The
trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us – not to
search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along
its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined)
within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was
right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing
as good or bad poetry. There is – but not in relation to the single poem. There
is really no single poem…
…Poems
should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They
cannot live alone any more than we can…
- Sound: McClure – Dolphin Skull.
- Exercise:
Duo Corpse
exercise.
- Sound: Rothenberg on Duende.
- Read Nate Mackey – Sigh of the Moor
- Ashberry
Title Exercise
- Play Video of Allen Ginsberg – Father Death Blues.
- Exercise:
Grandfather Poem.
- Homework
– Flesh out Gary
Snyder’s As For Poets. You can add another category (the Port Townsend
poet, the Wooden Boat poet, the Rain Poet), or add to one of Snyder’s
categories.