POETRY, WEEK 5, WINTER '04, DUE 2/12

In the midst of midterm next week, the Poetry Workshop continues as usual, meeting on Thursday afternoon. Last week you worked on a dream-poem, which fell, with the earlier sensation poem assignments, under the large heading of Flow of Consciousness. This week the assignment, no surprise, is to finalize Flow of Consciousness poem. I hasten to reiterate that you are faced again with a very wide field of play: it seems to me that most poems involve some sort of consciousness flow, even if it's a simple shamanistic switch from one consciousness to another, or through multiple consciousnesses, and seem to do so effortlessly. One loose constraint is to make the poem relate in some way to the other work you've produced for your intergrative midterm project, but given the breadth of the menu, from pure alertness to furious introspection to daydream to visualization, math computations to phone conversations to standing awestruck near the waterfall, there should be something for everyone. Bring a copy of your poem to Workshop next week.

Another topic ripe for discussion is poetry volumes, as opposed to individual, isolated poems. I know that most of you haven't read widely in the carnival world of poetry, and by and large, the thrust of this course has been to give you a smattering of choice poems to read, and to encourage the practice of writing. Getting hooked on some interesting, hand picked poems is as good a way as any to pique your interest, and to give you an idea of the remarkable variety of voices and styles thriving in the poetry greenhouse right now. And as you know, there are resources on reserve in the library, under our program name, for those who want to dig deeper in any given direction; or you can ask me for suggestions.

But I'm interested in the question of what happens when you begin to group poems together? Art galleries pay curators and symphonies pay music directors to put together groupings of paintings, sculptures, or music in way designed to produce a desired effect. It has always seemed to me that something similar goes on in compiling a volume of poetry. I've done it twice, and I can tell you it was more daunting than finishing any single poem. One presumes that three poems, read in a certain sequence, will create a slightly different effect than the same poems read in a different sequence, that the arrangement of groups or themes of peoms in the volume will produce a certain resonance between the elemnts, that the poems you begin and end with should be strong enough to rivet the reader and be memorable.

Continuing students read David Kirby's House of Blue Light last quarter; it's a headlong, neon-flashing, stream-of-hilarious-consciousness trip. This quarter, we're reading Jane Hirschfield's Lives of the Heart and it's a very different animal, much more homespun, serious, subtle. By next week, read at least the first half of Hirschfield (through p.54, at a minimum.) And come prepared to talk about what you like or don't like about her style, why'd you think she's so popular in the establishment-poetry-world today, and what you notice about reading page after page of poems by the same author; is it a difference from what you noticed in Kirby? Are you surprised (in any way) by what you notice?