Hello Everyone!

Thank you for a wonderful workshop. We’ll be meeting with Diane Suess this coming Sunday and I’m looking forward to hearing her read some poems from Frank:Sonnets, and I’ll prepare some questions for her, and open it up for you to ask some as well. We can see what happens.

Please revisit her poems in the packet, or the book if you have it!

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We don’t always have time to discuss all the nuances and bits of the previous articles we’d read, but I hope they are giving you ideas and thoughts.

Please email me, or the whole class, with any thoughts you’re having. I would like to build our discussion around some things you’re thinking of with Poetry & Consciousness, of course.

Someone shared this WD Snodgrass essay with me and I found it interesting–especially the ending pages. I’m also adding some poems here. If we have time this weekend we’ll look at one or two of them, and if you had one you found jumped out at you, let me know!

1.  WD Snodgrass_Tact & the Poet’s Force

2. Natalieshapero (poems)

3. ana bozicevic (poems)

4. Wanda Coleman, Sonnet 91 

5. Terrance Hayes, American Sonnet for my Past & Future Assassin

6. Terrance Hayes

Check out this Gertrude Stein essay on poetry and grammar

Also, as promised, the Martin Buber.  I find this one fascinating to read, but also like you’re going insane a little. In a good way?

Both text require a much different mindset than most essay does.

Surrender to the text, and get curious.

Also, this morning I was totally struck by these Rilke poems, translation by Steven Mitchell.

rilke

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Next Sunday will be a workshop day, so please upload poems.

Loose assignment was to write a poem with some defiance towards your usual grammar, or rather, punctuation, thinking about the ways we saw Diane Seuss wielding it in FRANK: SONNETS. See how you can USE it to your advantage–or not use it, as the case may be.

But really just have fun writing a poem. I look forward to workshop.

Dear Class,

Week 3! This Sunday we will be discussion Diane Seuss’s Frank:Sonnets, and focusing too a on some excerpts from last weeks’ Adam Phillips’s essay.

We will also take time to do some in-class writing. I encourage you to each be actively thinking and composing while you read all these things.

Keep a journal composing your thoughts and ideas, as well as writing poems.

Diane Seuss <–packet

If you’re all caught up, check out this Zapruder excerpt from Why Poetry: zapruder

Adding a Wallace Stevens poem: https://poets.org/poem/tea-palaz-hoon

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Also, in terms of commenting on poems: since we’re a small class and not workshopping each week, its not too much work to send one another comments on the poems we workshopped. You can do track-changes in Word, or print the poems and write on them by hand, scan them in and send. You could also simply write an email! Just do what you can–it’s totally up to you to do this extra step for one another.

So, emails:

Homework is this one reading from Adam Phillips’ book, Side Effects:

Adam Phillips Not Making it Up

And next weekend we will be doing our first workshop!

Prompt is: write a poem using, as a starting, ending or middle point, a dream.

You have all week to wait for a dream–even if the barest fragment–to use–

but the idea is not to SAY what’s a dream and what isn’t in the poem. Just use your unconscious material to your own pleasure, however you wish.

And you really can use the dream as a launching point, not the whole poem by any means.

Also, Time?

Upload your poems in the “student uploads” section, there you will see a folder for week 2.

Week One: Sunday April 3rd

Reading:

Ed Hirsch

Harold Bloom

No More Cake Here, Natalie Diaz

Archaic Torso of Apollo , Rainer Maria Rilke

Entry of an Unknown Hand, Franz Wright 

Diane Suess