Exercises

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Found Poem Exercises 1) Read the Washington Post or the New York Times until you find an article that shocks you, outrages you, makes you laugh or drives you to write to the editor. Using only the words, phrases, fragments of sentences and sentences you find in the article, write a poem that captures the most striking, to you, image, idea or narrative in the article. Write two or three sentences about the difference between your poem and the article. Please include the article (or relevant parts thereof) with your poem. 2) Sit in the Johnson Center, an airport lounge, a café (or foodcourt) in a busy mall or a classroom when the teacher has not yet arrived (or during a break in a class). Take a 'bus ride or a Metro ride or go to a coffee house or bar where people hang out and talk. Listen to what people are saying to each other. Write down the snatches of conversation you overhear for at least twenty minutes or half an hour. Turn your overheard lines and stories into a poem. Only use the overheard words. 3) Assemble four or five very different books. For example, you might choose a science textbook or medical dictionary, a cookery book, a religious book, a book of fiction or poetry you love and a book you borrow from a room mate or a friend. Browse through these books, reading pages at random. Whenever you find a phrase, or a word, or a definition, or a sentence that appeals to you (as beautiful, bizarre, unbelievable, etc.) write it down. Write a poem from your chosen elements. Include with your poem your booklist. (Writers' manuals also work well as part of this exercise, as do paperback romance novels and self-help books, plus, of course, academic books on obscure subjects and formal business letters.) If you find constructing a poem hard, present your results as prose. The same rules apply, though: you may only use language you have found. 1) Choose an everyday word like 'fear' or 'half-caste' in the readings today, which we think we understand. Following either the philosophical tone adopted by Kapuscinski, or the amusing (but still biting and utterly serious) tone of Agard, make your chosen word brand new for us in poetry or prose. Imagination is more important here than perfected expression. Write and write, and then revise what you have written later. 2) Write a poem or a piece of prose in the shape of its subject, or in a shape that complements its subject, its speed, its ideas or its trajectory. Write two or three sentences on what you as a writer, and your audience as readers, might gain from this visual approach to language. 3) Look at a book's table of contents, or its index. Look at the instructions for operating a video, or a piece of software, or at a recipe for cooking a meal, or at the repair manual for your car. Write a poem that looks and sounds like one of these functional pieces of writing we encounter every week. Write the first page of the instruction manual for falling in love. Or the recipe for passing English 101. You have an idea for a novel: write the index first. Or write the index to the non-existent instruction manual for falling in love....or the table of contents for your life thus far....or a shopping list... Think about the ways words are spaced on the page in each of these functional forms. Look at the way headings, and sub-headings, and indentations are used. Copy. Experiment. 4) Write a poem or piece of prose that uses the whole page in front of you (and need your page be the regular 8" by 11"? could it be a posterboard? could it be a miniature page, 4" by 5.5"?). Some words could touch the left margin and others the right. Maybe the main alignment of the poem should be to the right, not to the left? Play with the words you have on the page. How does the moving of words from one place to another change the meaning of your words and work? Take a risk.

Exercise Sheet #3 1) Recall a place or event critically important to you. Don't try to describe it or explain what it is. Instead, jot down as quickly as you can all the sounds, colors, images, smells, textures and tastes that you associate with this event. Work fast. Don't stop to think or judge. Now write down the words, phrases, names, lines of song or rhyme, and written texts (or fragments thereof) you associate with this place/event. Now use this material, and only this material, to chart your emotional response to this place/event. At this stage, resist the temptation to amplify or complete. Just use the material you have collected. 2) Cries and Whispers. Write in either prose or poetry a short first-person narrative. Choose material you want or need to write about. Think of the material you have written as being in your 'normal' voice. Now copy out your piece leaving three spaces between each line. On the line above the 'normal' line imagine that you are crying out as loudly as you can the same story. Transcribe those cries. On the line below the 'normal' line, imagine you are whispering under your breath what you really wanted to say in your story but didn't dare to articulate. Transcribe those subversive whispers. Choose the language that scares you most from each set of lines and combine it into one text. Make sure you represent all three voices. 3) Write an autobiographical poem or short piece of prose, but write it from the point of view of all the other people (or objects) present at the time. The use of 'I' is forbidden. 4) Create a collage using both visual and verbal material. Work online, or with scissors and paste, or in three-D, or...... Remember that the fragments collaged together should retain sufficient of their original identity to ensure recognition but should also create new meaning in each juxtaposition with other fragments and as a collected whole. 5) Go back the the found poetry technique of collecting language from several different sources. Develop this by including several additional styles of language. Select the most powerful snippets (or those that appeal to you most). Now link them together into a continuous passage which makes syntactical and logical sense. No one except you should be able to work out that you have used many different sources. 6) Choose a piece you have already written. Use a short but critical extract if you are working with a long piece. Let another voice comment on or respond to what has been said in in your text. The voice could be another participant in your story/poem/whatever, or a voice external to it. The voice could belong to a dead person, or a person not yet born... Try this exercise with two or three different voices in the commentator role. #1 is based on an exercise suggested by Carolyn Forché; #3 is a collage of exercises suggested by Carolyn Forché and Susan Tichy; #5 & 6 are based on exercises by Susan Tichy

"Words are the only clues we have. What if they fail us?" Susan Howe             "Description is an element, like air or water."   Wallace Stevens                   "The image reveals itself between the past and the present, between appearance and memory..." Valerio Adami

Exercise sheet #4 Both exercises are compulsory. You should photocopy the results if you have good handwriting, or type them out, if your handwriting is not very legible, so that you can discuss them with your colleagues in next week's small group workshops. Bring two copies, one for your group and one for me. 1) Choose a journal entry you like or a subject you want to write about. Write an eight-line poem in which every line is end-stopped (a period, colon, semi-colon or comma). Using the same material (although you may well have to change some of the lines), turn your piece into an eight-line poem with only one end-stopped line. Choose the position of that end-stopped line carefully. Will it begin your poem? End it? Draw attention to your most important idea or emotion? Make even this simple choice of line length and punctuation work hard for you within your piece of work. Now read both poems, first silently, then aloud. If you have a tape-recorder, record both poems and listen to them. Write two paragraphs in which you compare the poems, paying particular attention to the differences in word choice, in rhythm, in the speed at which the poem moves to its conclusion, in the strength of emotion it conveys, and in its ability to reach a satisfying conclusion. 2) Choose a new subject, drawn either from your journal or from that mental list of 'things you might write about.' You are now about to write THREE versions of the same poem, each in a specific form. You must use at least ONE of the forms I discussed in class, and ONE of the forms listed below. The third form you may choose from either group. If you choose haiku, write a group of three, which may, or may not, be related. As a reminder, the forms I discussed in class were:- the ballad/hymnal stanza the sonnet (English (after Shakespeare) and Italian (after Petrarch), here exemplified by John Keats) terza rima (Example: Derek Walcott's Omeros) Additional forms   The Rhyming Couplet Two lines of regular and equal length, which rhyme, and which may be end-stopped or not, as the writer wishes. Here is an example from "My Last Duchess" by the nineteenth century British poet, Robert Browning. Note how often the lines run on, distracting the reader from the regular rhyming which provides an elegant aural base for the poem. That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will't please you sit and look at her? I said "Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and passion of its earnest glance But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)... and so on. Notice, too, the relatively regular number of beats in the lines. **** The Villanelle The villanelle, a poem with six verses, the first five of three lines, and the final verse of four, works particularly well for writers who compose strong lines, as it involves the repetition of two key lines at regular intervals. In the example below, a villanelle called "One Art" by the mid-twentieth century American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, note how the first and the third lines of the first stanza become the closing lines for the other stanzas. Line one closes verses two and four, line three (with minor variations) closes verses three and five. Lines one and three then become the closing couplet in verse six. Your two repeated lines should highlight the central themes of your poem and work together to create its closure. You might want to think of your repeated lines as refrains, like those one finds in song and ritual. Lines one and three should rhyme, and Bishop also uses the very traditional pattern of pulling all the central lines together with a single rhyme (intent, meant, spent, etc.). (The latter is not compulsory.) Note, however, that each of the three-line stanzas follows the pattern of stanza one: the first line rhymes with the third line.   The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.   Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.   Then practice losing farther, losing faster; places and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.   I lost my mother's watch. And look, my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master.   I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.   Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master thought it may look like (Write it) like disaster. **** Syllabic Forms Some forms depend on counting syllables, such as the haiku which we used as the basis of a renga. The haiku contains five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. I enclose below a couple of twentieth century haiku written by the late twentieth century poet, Etheridge Knight, based on his prison experiences. Eastern guard tower glints in sunset; convicts rest like lizards on rocks.   *   To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves. You may want to make up your own syllabic pattern: every line has five syllables, or the first line has five, the second has seven, the third nine, and the fourth five, or.... Let you word choice and imagination work for you.

"One must have lived ten years to write a poem." Mina Loy

Exercise #5 As I have the journals this week, I offer a single exercise (compulsory). Write a poem (at least twenty lines) in which you use anaphora to provide an association with ritual or incantation, to provide a place of rest, re-itertion or safety for your reader, or for a purpose which you invent for yourself.

Exercise #6 Intensive Writing Week 1) Write three pages every day. Your writing should be directly related to your creative work. You should not maintain an "I did this, I did that journal." But you can use your everyday experiences as springboards into creative discovery. 2) Concentrate on generating new material. You may use themes, characters, ideas etc. from pieces you are already writing, but the writing should itself should be new. 3) Use an exercise if you find the first words difficult. Use another exercise if you 'run out' of inspiration. Try transcribing exactly what you are thinking for fifteen minutes. Most of us carry multiple trains of thought at the same time. Transcribe everything you become conscious of, however fleetingly. 4) Some suggestions. Tim O'Brien once said that writing allows us to experience our unlived lives, the alternative lives we might have had. Investigate your unlived lives. Mina Loy wrote, "One must have lived ten years to write a poem." Work on the poem, play, or short story that distills your most intense ten years. Cyril Connolly believed, "The vocabulary of a writer is his currency, but it is a paper currency, and its value depends on the reserves of heart and mind which back it. The perfect use of language is that in which every word carries the meaning it is intended to, no less and no more." Seek that perfection in language for a single page. Compose pen portraits of places you love or cannot forget. Use precise, intense, charged language. Compose postcards from your present self to one of your past selves, or from a succession of those past selves to your present self. Combine the mundane (the weather?) with the revealing, the fragmentary sentence with the extended riff, just as we do on those 'wish you were here' vacation postcards.

Exercise # 7 Compulsory Exercise (You should work on this exercise over the spring break.) Part One 1) Invent a character, someone with whom you want to spend some time. If you are having problems with a short story or play, pull your character out of that piece of work. Write your character's resumé. Go into as much detail as you can - imagine prizes won in high school, first job, volunteer interests. We've all written resumés - we know what they entail. Remember to include that self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses, and career goals (whatever they might be). 2) Now describe your invented person, conveying her/his character through observation of clothes, body language, facial expression, and context. Be precise: if the black shoe has a 2.5 inch heel and white laces, say so. Your character does not speak and we are not privy to his/her thoughts. All we glean about this person's character comes from the accuracy of your description. 3) Place your character is a situation that is typical, utterly aberrational, dangerous, romantic, etc. Choose a situation in which at least one other person is involved and where a conflict exists between your character and the new arrival. Your character begins a conversation with that person, who reveals him/herself only through her/his words. We, as the reader, know nothing about this person, except perhaps a name. Write your conversation as play dialogue. Try to reveal your character's attitude to the new person through words and through actions (no movie-type voice-overs, or described flashbacks, no bad dialogue recapitulating your characters' lives from birth as parodied in The Real Inspector Hound.). Don't feel you have to reach a resolution. When you have written as much as you can (aim for about three pages) note down quickly what you have learned about both the character you originally invented, and the new person you added, from the dialogues Part Two Props (adapted from Richard Bausch in What If by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter (New York 1995), pp. 68 - 70. 1) You have on your stage a hospital bed, a night stand bearing a water glass, a pitcher, a paperback novel and a vase of tired-looking flowers. To the left stands a television and a VCR on a metal cart: behind the bed, a picture window opens our onto a sunlit garden. Place your invented character in this room with one other person. What do they say to each other? 2) You have on your stage a Turkish carpet, deep red and covering almost the whole area of the stage. A leather sofa sits stage right. An oversized armchair lurks stage left. The soundtrack to the movie Romeo and Juliet is playing quite loudly on a Bose stereo. Your character enters stage right and speaks to an unseen other (out of sight? in an adjacent room? dead?). Record her/his speech.

For 25 March, 1998     "...Time takes life away and gives us memory, gold with flame, black with embers." Adam Zagajewski

Compulsory Exercises Drama is intensely physical: you have bodies (living, breathing) to move around in three dimensions and also through time. These exercises center on the physical in drama. 1) Your character is carrying out a definable activity - painting a room, mending a motorbike or car, cooking a meal, working at a computer, etc. Choose the emotional situation in which your character finds him/herself. Using only the actor's body, the precise activity and the stage set you have created, show the audience the emotion your character is feeling. No dialogue allowed, and you should write at least a page, packed with as much precise, physical detail as you can develop. First describe the set and the props available, then put your character to work. Use precise words: don't say 'walk' if your character really 'scurries' or 'strides' or 'paces' or 'strolls' or 'wheels' or 'boogies' or ..... Does your character tap the computer keys, or strike them, or run fingers across them or slam them in bursts of frenetic activity or punch them or peck them or.... Each precise word directing the actor adds to the emotion you are trying to convey. 2) Choose another physical activity for your character. The body must be involved in every stage of the activity. You can include another character ie two people mending a car, one person cutting another person's hair, two people playing one computer game, two kids pushing their bikes home from school, a father and son riding bikes in the country, or digging in the garden, or... Now create the dialogue between them, but remain always conscious of what their bodies are doing. Often in situations like this, two conversations run in tandem. The first comprises comments relating to the activity, the second involves revelation (or development) of character, plot and theme. Try to create a dramatic relationship between these two conversations. 3) Dialogue often has a sub-text: the words have a literal meaning but also a figurative meaning. The person I share an office with comes in and asks if I will be using the computer for long, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice. I hear the question but I also hear that he's anxious about writing something and probably has a deadline to meet but doesn't want to sound too pushy (you've got to give me the computer or I'm dead in the water) in the interests of amicable office relations. But I too have a deadline, so I say that I'm really sorry but I think it will be another hour or so and that I'm really up against it. He hears the words but also hears (I hope) that I am genuinely sorry, that in an ideal world I would of course let him use the computer but that I'm just as trapped by the deadline system as he is, that, in effect, it's not my choice not to give up the keyboard. You can use this for dramatic or comic purposes. A good example of the latter is the scene in Annie Hall where the Allen character and Annie share their first drink on her balcony. We hear the dialogue, but Allen prints the subtext as subtitles on the screen. Pull the movie out of the video rental store if you want a good illustration of how well this technique can work. Write two short dialogues involving your character, noting the subtextual dialogue in italics underneath the regular dialogue.

Compulsory Exercises for 8 April, 1998 (Adapted with grateful thanks from Becky Crane) Read the stories by Toni Cade Bambera and Neil Bissoondath. Now carry out the following exercises to identify exactly how the stories are structured. This is not literary criticism but a much more basic investigation into the mechanics of fiction's structure. So, don't critique the story but dismember it into its constituent parts. You should bring your responses to the exercises to class on Wednesday. 1) What does the main character want? What obstacles impede him/her? Where is the conflict? Are the obstacles internal or external? How do you learn of the conflict in the story? How would you describe this method of revelation? Describe the main character's development over the story? How is the conflict resolved? Does the main character achieve her/his aim? If not, what happens instead? 2) What is the plot? What is the story? Is it linear? Does it proceed on the basis of revealing information to you that the characters already hold? Or does it proceed by revealing information to you at the same time as the characters learn it? Why do you think the author decides to tell events in that particular way? How does the way the plot unfolds affect the meaning of the story? 3) What is/are the theme(s) of the story? How do they appear in the story? How does the author develop them? To what extent does the author use symbols or metaphors to clarify/highlight these themes? 4) How do you feel at the end of the story? How does the ending function in order to resolve plot, illuminate themes, develop character,..? How satisfying is the ending to you? 5) What is your favorite moment in either story? Why? 6) How is each story narrated (first-person, unseen narrator, unseen narrator locked into the point of view of one character, all-seeing, all-knowing narrator)? What is the strength of the style of narration.

Exercises (Compulsory) for 15 April, 1998 1. Take a prose piece you have written (or steal a section from one of the stories in the packets) which includes two or three characters. Choose a section and identify its narrative strategy. Now rewrite it, making sure that by the end of the exercise, you have at least four version: a first-person narration, a limited third-person narration, an omniscient narration and a disjunctive narration of some kind, mixing POVs, including authorial intrusion, etc. Your chosen section should be rich and fluid enough to allow you to conduct this exercise. A limited choice will minimize the value of the exercise. Type each out, and include a short paragraph assessing the strength or weakness of each approach to the structure of the story - the conflict, the crisis, the epiphanic moment, the resolution. Bring the exercise to class and we shall use it as the basis for small group workshops next week.   2. Note down three or four story ideas you now have. Give the characters, and briefly sketch the conflict(s), the crisis, the epiphanic moment and the resolution you have in mind now. Again, type each one out (they do not need to be on separate sheets) and bring to class next week.

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