Personal Mythology of Organic Poetry Workshop,

Tuesday, April 7, 2009: Week One

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Week One (with links!)
Week Two
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6

 

• read As to Poets (Gary Snyder)

 

• Outline, expectations, definition, needs: I hope that, barring illness or emergency, that you’ll plan to attend each week, arrive a little before seven and be ready to go. You should plan on having a notebook in which to collect all that you write in the next six weeks, including work outside of class. You should do some writing outside of class. I’d be happy to meet with you one-on-one during the next six weeks (or beyond). I am good at returning email, usually within 48 hours.

 

In 1912, in the introduction to the 4^th edition of his book Symbols of Transformation, Carl Jung asked: What is the myth you are living? Personal Mythology[1] is the name of this concept and you have a personal mythology, whether you are conscious of it, or not. I can’t tell you what it is, but you can discover your own and, if you don’t like it, you can change it. What is the theme of your life? What patterns inform your activities? This course will help you discover a process of getting deeper into your own consciousness, perhaps to the level of personal myth. (In my essay What is Consciousness, you can see where I put this in a model of how consciousness manifests. OrganicPoetry.org) Questions to ponder, What writing project do people associate with you? Is there a subject on which you’d seek to do a saturation job? Do you carry a small notebook in which you can jot down short poems or notes for poems?

 

• Brief explanation of Organic Poetry: A poem that writes itself, but is the product of balance.

 

1)     Balance comes from joining practicality with vision, or we could say, joining skill with spontaneity. (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche).

2)     A use of speech at its least careless and least logical (Charles Olson.) If you have not read Projective Verse, that’s your first assignment before next week and I can give you a copy, or send you a link to the text.

 

• Introductions

 

• AG on 1^st Thought/Best Thought

 

• Questionnaire

 

• License Plate Exercise: Go outside for 7 minutes, work alone, in silence, look at three parked cars and make short descriptions of what the three letters stand for. Ignore the numbers. For example, a car with license plates YHM might stand for: Yuma Hates Moccasins, Your Hideous Mustache or Yellow Horse Meat. Start now. (Upon return: Is your work visual? What is the sound component? Is your syntax regular? Prose chopped into lines? Any smells in the poem? Tastes?)

 

• Exquisite Corpse exercise using license plate material if stuck.

 

• Cover poem of Ed Dorn Tribe. 7 minutes.

 

3)     Mind Writing Slogans (I) (Have group read these, two or three each.)

4)     Ed Sanders – Planning & Mapping (from Creativity & the Fully Developed Bard.)

 

• Play Duncan – Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

 

• Write 16 words that correspond to your notion of sight. Things you like to look at, or that represent your past, present and future; your good side as well as your shadow side. These are concrete words that you think sound good. You like saying these words.

 

• Reaparicion Exercise: Take 10 minutes to write a poem of four stanzas, four to six lines each, either writing based on going to a place you have note been for a long time, or imagining that return as if it happened. Perhaps a war experience, a relationship, an old city you once lived in. Use Kozer’s poem as a jumping-off point and be concrete like in the example of the Kozer poem.

 

 

Assignment: Flesh out one of Snyder’s poet categories, or add at least three more in a poem using his as a guide (linebreaks, syntax, language, tone, etc.) Come with questions on the Projective Verse essay.