| January 2011 Workshop Moderator: Barbara Test |
Dodge Festival of Poetry | List of all workshops |
Barbara Test attended the Dodge Festival of Poetry in New Jersey and brought back information from several poets who offered presentations. I have included here some of the most pertinent information from some of those poets, along with poems that support their insights and advice.
Offerings from Barbara:
Marie Ponsot:
Ponsot is a poet and translator of fairy tales, folk stories and fables. She has written poetry for 84 years. Following are some of her insights and advice. Ponsot suggests we write 10 minutes every day and see if there is a kernel of a poem. This exercise begins the momentum toward expressing the “humming” that takes us deeper into the spirit of the self.
She says the subject in a poem doesn’t matter; “the fund of language builds it; you need the investment of the language, not pinned down, but felt. Syntax and sense is your flavor; your body sense—that matrix of language catches the subject and brings it home.”
Example Poem: “One Grimm Brother to the Other” from Easy
I’ve never lived inside the gingerbread house,
have you? I don’t say I’ve never visited.
But never lived. I know I couldn’t like to.
It’s cramped and it stinks of being afraid.
Of what. Which am I. Who is she. Afraid
I’d hate to eat her & she’d make me sick.
Afraid she’d eat me last. First. Afraid
no sweet-tooth brat would fatten and be sweet
to roast & baste & eat. Afraid that once
I’d cooked them (& started a soup for stock—
Full of oniongrass—I’d boil their bones too)
no more soft children would climb my candy fence
& nibble up the path to my cookie tree,
My door of chocolate (whose inside fear is
inside the fear inside),
afraid I’d catch my breath
& hear the swarm of mice squeak, “Eat or die,”
and then I’d have to eat and I would die afraid.
Mark Strand—poet laureate, 1990:
Strand said he started writing by imitating other poets and by diagramming sentences. His advice is to learn rhyme and meter first, so you can break away and get your ear trained, and use scanning to see how poems work.
“Why you are the way you are makes you write the way you are.” Start with an urge to write; then rely on whatever images, experiences, etc. drift in. Writing is finding out what it is you want to say, not pre-planned. Write when you’ve distanced out of being excited and overly emotional.
A line break can hold the reader in suspension for a split second—comes from the feel of the poem—variable and changeable. “A poet can reach inside you, find something you didn’t know was there and give it a shake.”
Example poem: “Keeping Things Whole”
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Dorianne Laux:
Laux says she feels she can write about anyone who has more power than she, but needs to ask permission from those with less power.
Example Poem: “Small Gods” from What We Carry
I thought my father was a god,
like all the other fathers down the block, floating
home in their gleaming cars filled with food
and thunder, manna and a terrible noise.
And the mothers were lesser gods, fragile
in their thin robes, their hair
so many multicolored clouds.
And we were small, barely human, huddled
half-naked like puppies on a rug, bathed
in the blue TV light, trying to be good.
We watched them from the corners of our eyes
as they swayed through the house on huge
fearless legs, or sat down slowly
with some large idea and a book.
I could not imagine the immense thoughts
they carried in their heads, their hearts
pumping like heavy machinery.
And maybe this was how it had to be, their silence
a rigid religion, a state of eternal grace
we could never know.
And of the animals I tended through those years,
skinny white mice and shivering birds, dogs
with their browbeaten eyes, the cat
who stared back at me with the glazed green irises
of an idiot savant. What did I know
of their terrors, their souls? Like the child I was,
I simply gave them names and fed them.
Day after day, I watched them grow.
Kay Ryan—16th poet laureate:
Ryan buries rhythm, and rhyming is near to funny, especially on the end of lines.
She says, “Defend the space in your own brain—give yourself brain mind—leave the brain empty.”
“Find metaphors that carry your deep thoughts—metaphors demand being explored.
Language has the power to make us better than we are.”
Example Poem: Age from Elephant Rocks
As some people age
they kinden.
The apertures
of their eyes widen.
I do not think they weaken;
I think something weak strengthens
until they are more and more it,
like letting in heaven.
But other people are
mussels or clams, frightened.
Steam or knife blades mean open.
They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken.