Since April finds me exhausted, sick, and busy thus far, I'm taking the month off from a formal assignment. No worries...I'll still produce a piece. I'm just not going to hold myself strictly to a form or assignment. So, I guess the assignment is to write whatever you want.

I recently received a comment on this site that I decided warranted an entire post. Below, you can read the original comment from reader Cathy:

"Well, well, well...I have finally signed myself up for a creative writing class [...], and I was super-excited about it, until yesterday: bad workshop. And I don't say that because no one seemed to like my poem and I am an over-sensitive pansy, but because I really felt like something else was happening. I suddenly felt old and out of shape (perhaps because I am the only grad student in the bunch). I became very aware that these students have been in classes and workshops before, and that there are some "rules" of the writing prcess that have been drilled into them that I heard again and again that made little sense to me (eg- "Don't end-stop your stanzas. It's ruining the poem").

"I am by no means claiming that I know more than these students, and I am the first to admit that I have been out of the workshop scene for two years now. But I also want to point out that since being out of the workshop loop, I feel I've had more success as a "poet" than ever before.

"So I guess my point is that although workshops are helpful, sometimes you can learn more about your own poetics and your own poetic process by simply doing and writing...

or maybe I am just trying to make myself feel better."

Thanks, Cathy, for sharing your thoughts.

Oh the workshop. A glorious place for exapnding one's ideas of what a poem should be, but Cathy has pointed out a major flaw in the entire process: the fact that its paticipants have all somehow already come to a group comclusion about what is acceptable in a poem and what is not. Though it's expected that individual opinions will be voiced in workshop discussions, there is a certain aesthetic that seems to be already agreed-upon by many of the participants. Whether it be the avoidance of end-stopping stanzas, the use of rhyme or punctuation, or the adherence to systematic line lengths and structures, it seems that any formalized workshop has an unwritten set of rules that everyone seems to understand result in a good poem.

What is unclear about this phemonmenon is how these criteria are determined. Perhaps it is the subject of the workshop: for example, a workshop course on form would certainly ahere to the rules that dictate poetic forms, and your readers would most likely read your poems with this in mind. Sometimes its simply personal aesthetic: each individual has a different opinion on how to construct a poem. Perhaps ome indidivual is more vocal than others in expressing how they believe a poem should be constructed and thus a style is agreed upon.

What I believe happens more often than not is that impressionable young writers who are learning how to craft poems look to their leaders to show them what is good, and then they cling to these rules as if they are the gospel truth of poetry-writing. I mean, if your professor (who is probably published AND grading you) or a visiting poet (who your professors all build up into greatness) say that doing away with punctuation is a really good idea for all your poetry, it's something you're likely to do...or at least dabble in.

I'm not saying that it's wrong to take someone else's ideas about writing and incorporate them in your work. But, to simply adopt a practice and not see how it organically functions, changes, and flows with your own methods and writing is a bad idea. And to force that on others is too.

But then again, how do you prevent this groupthink problem in a workshop? Is it possible? With young writers, I think it's difficult. Especially if you have instructors who do enjoy an ego trip from dictating the rules of writing to these impressionable students. And every workshop will be different and have different rules based on the instructor's preferences (which is what Cathy seems to be running into).

This seems like a great opportunity for meaningful discussion on the workshop in general, so please feel free to chime in. Why are these unwritten rules present in workshops? Is this a symptom of university-centered writing groups or all groups? Is the workshop an effective tool for producing, critiquing, and revising poetry, or is it simply an assembly-line process that homogenizes work?

Since there are only a few days left in March, and I still want to get a poem in for this month, I'm going to assign myself something a little simpler than February's crazy crossways poem of doom.

A while back, I read a post about homophonic translations on one of my favorite weblogs, languagehat.com. A homophonic translation begins with a poem in a foreign language, preferably one which you cannot read but can pronounce. Listen to yourself read the poem (or even better, record yourself reading the poem, then listen to it), and write down the sounds you hear in the English. For example, if you're translating a French text, the word "blanc" would probably translate to "blank" in English. (Go here for the original post I read for more examples an explanation...the comments are especially aweseome).

Then, at a conference I recently attended, Davis Schneiderman brought up homophonic translations. The Gods seemed to be conspiring to get me to write a homophonic translation. So, I'm going to for March.

I have a few ideas in mind for particular poems or poets I could work from, but I'll be doing some more research tomorrow. Feel free to post any non-English poems in the comments for others to use and translate.

I know. March is almost over, and there hasn't been a word posted by me since early February. I apologize.

I knew that in starting this project that it would be a challange. Continuing to write and think about any long-term project can be difficult to start, and in particular, the twelve months that I've chosen will include some of the most time-consuming and important events of my life thus far: I am in the process of purchasing a house and finding a job in a new state, and in September, I'll be getting married. This month, you caught me on vacation in Vegas, taking a rest before the big sprint through the rest of this year. I won't promise that there won't be more, but I've made a committment to keep up this project, to keep up this pace of writing, and I intend to follow through on it.

That said, back to the poetry. The Quilt Poem proved to be a ridiculously difficult piece to put together, and despite the fact that I don't feel like I completely achieved the effect I was going for with this piece, it was incredibly satisfying to work on. The best way I found to work on that piece was to write as many separate and linked haiku on a similar theme that I could. From there, I could pick and choose the sixteen that I thought fit the best together in order to fashion the poem. I printed out those sixteen haiku (and others, so I could substitute and play around), but them out, so that each haiku was its own piece.

At first, I just threw the pieces down, scrambled them up, and set them in a random arrangement to see how the separate pieces hung together to create a whole. The initial effect was pretty cool on first read, but as I moved thorugh the piece, I could see spaces where the first stanza would work better in the middle, where a particular line could use tweaking, and where an entirely new stanza would work better.

Getting the poem to read well from all angles was a different matter. Front to back was fine, but up, down, across, and over were pretty difficult, and I still don't feel like it's a complete success. Though, that could just be due to the fact that I've read the poem from every angle to the point where I'm sick of it. And that's the biggest problem with this form: I worked so hard on it that I just had to say it was done, rather than actually feeling like it was done. I'm sure I'll be able to come back to it and refine things later, which works for me.

Let's call February a success.

Oh dears. Please bear with me.

At the end of January, I ran into some difficulty with my internet connection, which prevented me from posting. Then, my service provider decided to block my computer from accessing any connection, telling me that I needed to get online in order to fix this problem. Hmm. I couldn't quite figure out how that one worked, so I finally just lugged the computer in to work with me, where I have done virus scans and chatted with the bored folks over at my provider all day in an effort to have internet access by this weekend. I will tell you this: it's looking bleak.

So, I'm doing something I'm not 100% sure is legal, and I'm posting from work. Hello.

Despite this sad, little internet setback, I've been good about keeping up with my work. I wrote an ode for January. It was called, "An Evening Ode," and it's not half bad. With some work, it could be half good. If any of you wrote odes and would like to trade them for some virtual workshopping, I'd be way into that. Just e-mail me at the address listed on this page.

For February, I wanted to try my hand at an idea I've been kicking around for a while. My friend WM and I traded some work a while ago, and he included this intriguing little piece that was set up in haiku-like blocks of text that stretched across for four "stanzas," then looped back to the left and moved across another four "stanzas." The result on the page was a perfect square of text, composed of sixteen separate "blocks." When I first sat down with the piece, I wasn't sure how to read it: standard left to right and then down; down the leftmost row, then moving right as I read; left to right down the first row, then right to left down the second. I had no idea.

Turns out, the standard reading was the "correct" one, but I became fascinated with the idea of writing a poem that was composed of haiku-like blocks arranged in a square that could be read in any order. At about the same time, I became interested in learning how to quilt, which similarly works with smaller blocks of fabric patchworked together in order to make a cohesive whole.

So, for February, I'm writing a quilt poem. I really enjoy working in very tiny structures, and I think this will be a fun way to do a little something different with them. In addition, it'll give me some work to do in blending detail and abstraction, as it'll have to make sense no matter what order you read the blocks. I'm very excited.

So, there's a short update while I try to get my home computer up and running. I haven't meant to neglect you all. If I can get the company to let me use the internet this weekend, I'll post some examples of my favorite linked haikus and some other sources of inspiration for the February project.

It’s been a little while since I sat down with the intent to write a poem. I’ve continued to collect blurbs and quotes and thoughts and ideas, because that part has always been very easy. But sitting down and making those little pieces of fluff into actual poems has just not happened. Sure, I could cite a lot of complicated reasons having to do with general philosophies and institutions, but what it boils down to is the fact that I’ve been extraordinarily lazy. And uninspired. And a little bit terrified.

Somewhere, I know that the key to being a good writer of any type is to do it consistently, so that you eventually get to the point where you stop listening to yourself edit as you go. Just like exercise, I know I need to do it every day to enjoy its benefits. But it sucks to sit here and consider the fact that when I do sit down to write, it could turn out to be absolute shit, that I’m a complete idiot for even trying because I am not a Writer, and that I need to just give up trying to write poems, because, let’s face it, I’ll never be any good.

Yep, it’s the completely unoriginal, shitty, boring little monologue that almost every writer goes through each time they sit down, knowing that they are going to try and make art. And yet, it still feels so true every time I go through it. And it probably always will. And I just need to get over this already.

So…let’s start with a little assignment. I know I started off this whole project a little late into the first month, so I don’t have the luscious expanse of time I will with the later pieces. The best way I’ve found to get myself moving is to make the whole thing seem smaller by defining my terms. So this month, I’m going to write an ode.

I’ve been dying to write something a little on the dramatic side to just get that all out of the way, so an ode is the perfect way to satisfy my craving for a little over-the-topness without going too far.

My favorite place to start with odes is with the Romantics, because dudes, to them, almost every poem was an ode. These folks were pretty much in love with everything (well…everything except the loss of The Gleam, getting older and forgetting their infant wisdom, conventional religious ideas, picking on monsters, etc.), and they weren’t afraid to say it. Let’s check out the beginning of Wordsworth’s “Ode” from “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (I swear my poem’s title will be better than that.):

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Whoa. Pretty intense. I’m down for dramatic, but Wordsworth dramatic, I don’t know.

And since we checked out the beginning of one, let’s check out the end of Howard Nemerov’s ode “The Blue Swallows”:

O swallows, swallows, poems are not
The point. Finding again the world,
That is the point, where loveliness
Adorns intelligible things
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

Nice. Any of you all have favorite odes?

In my first poetry class, I remember being terrified by the things we read. Each week, we'd receive a generic assignment: write a place poem; write a haiku; write a sonnet. Then, we'd read example poems that the professor thought "captured appropriately the ephemeral heart of the assignment." In plain terms, this meant that we were reading staggeringly beautiful poems, then were turned loose to create our own little awkward masterpieces. And when I was finished, no matter how good I thought my efforts were, it always felt like I was plunking down a 20 year old lawn chair with several of the nylon seat strips missing next to an ornately carved chair made of one piece of wood: my poems were just white trash versions of the greats I had read as examples.

It seems to me that this was a backwards way to teach. Of course, I think it's important to read, be inspired by, and then attempt to match the stunning poems that made you love the art in the first place. And identifying what makes a poem work is a worthwhile endeavor. But if a poem is really incredible, I think there's always going to be an element of magic to it, something that you won't be able to identify and that is very hard to replicate without years of practice and hard work.

I always thought that if I taught a poetry class, the first thing I’d have my students do would be to bring in the worst poem they could find. We’d read poems culled from college literary magazines, Jewel’s book of poems, the worst poems of some of the best poets. And then we’d talk about why they were bad. Because it’s a lot easier to see how a poem is bad than to explain why it’s good. Maybe we’d even write bad poems and get the awkwardness of trashing each others’ poems out of the way before it became embarrassing. Maybe if we pointed out what exactly was shitty about shitty poems, people would write fewer of them.

Some of my favorite literature and poetry was created by people who made a very simple decision about what their work would not be. Simply removing practices that were taken for granted helped certain writers become giants of their time. Removing what was already there didn’t inhibit them, but it showed them what else they could do. They were required to imagine, an act that I think has disappeared from much of the contemporary poetry I read.

The following poem is by David Wright, a Midwestern poet who I saw read a few years ago. This poem stuck out to me, and I think it fits in well with the whole theory that we should establish what a poem should not be before we make major decisions on what it should be. I think it’s a relevant poem in a time when poetry seems to be primarily for greeting cards or academic publication, and when most other poetry being produced seems all to be the same: pseudo-Bohemian, yet completely confused about its sincerity.

I’m not sure what poetry should look like or what it should say, but I think this poem pretty much captures what it a lot of it does look like today.

Poems Should Not Be

About protest marches,
about newspaper photographs,

(even if the man shielding his son from bullets has a name,
and looks eternal, even if the blood dipped hands, spread wide
at the window, look eternal)

about elections, about television screens,
about fathers, especially, dead ones,

about domestic tasks, about vices,
about children, about God, about paintings,

(enough with the mystery and art, divinity tucked into words,
mucked onto canvas, enough with epiphanies in museums
or churches, on roads and old barstools)

about drinking hard, about getting hard,
about getting lucky, about waking up unexpectedly calm,

(already seen that man’s round, unwieldy stomach, this woman’s
delicate breast, already known the sweat and wine scent of
bodies in the morning)

about worry, about worry, about worry,
about flowers, about, especially, roses,

about what will be missed by the living,
about what will be missed by the dead,

(too many anecdotes, devoid of music, devoid of rhythm,
devoid, too many parables, disguised as music, disguised as
rhythm, disguised)

about poetry, about language,
about reading, about poetry.

Poems should not be about.

________________________

(This is the part where you guys tell me what you think.)

Welcome to Twelve months | Twelve poems. The basic idea behind this project is simple: I write twelve poems in twelve months. They don't have to be good. They don't have to be moving. They don't have to mean anything at all. In fact, they can suck more than a hooker with the cheapest blow job rates in town, so long as they're written.

But if this were all about just writing poems on a timeline, what do I need a website for? Because I'm sure as shit not going to post those finished poems. No, sir. I have a Blogger site, not a Livejournal.

The great, big, awesome purpose for this site was the idea that it could become some sort of a virtual workshop. And not just a 'here I'll post a poem and you can all dissect the lines and tell me how awesome and moving and blah blah blah it is except for that one anonymous poster who keeps telling me that my poetry is crap and it makes him want to dropkick the English language' virtual workshop. No.

The idea is that I do some writing about writing (I know, this could unravel pretty easily), and you all chip in and tell me what you think. I'm hoping that each month I have at least some sort of idea of what I want to write about, or how I want to write, or some sort of glimmer of how to start. But I want to know what you think; I want to know what ideas you have, what sorts of devices you use to get yourself going, what things are standing out to you. I want to know what phrases have made you stop dead in your tracks in the last few weeks, and I want to know what you think poetry even is.

Sure, it's a selfish endeavor when it comes down to it. I want to write at least twelve good poems this year. I want feedback on how to do it (think of this as sort of a backwards workshop...we talk about how the poem is constructed before it's even written, rather than beating it to death afterwards), what you think, and to just have a space to talk about poetry without it being uncomfortable or silly or pretentious.

But, I think it could also be a pretty neat experiment in how to communicate about and create poetry without a formalized institution (because let's face it, without a class and a deadline, it's flipping hard to get yourself to write a poem; and, if you're not inside of it, the academic system is a completely self-sustaining entity that doesn't really allow for amateurs or hobby writers or people who just truly enjoy the art but don't want to teach other people how to write).

From your end of things, I encourage you to use this site how you like. If you want to join in and participate with me, that's awesome. Please continue to share, and I'll share right back. If you just want to watch what happens, that's cool too, but I will ask that you occasionally chime in, because it's kind of dull if I'm the only one saying anything.

So, welcome to Twelve poems | Twelve months. I hope you enjoy your stay.