Global Voices Radio Spoken Word Lab American Sentences
American Sentences
Organic Poetry
Personal Mythology in OP, Week 2

Personal Mythology of Organic Poetry Workshop

Tuesday, April 14, 2009: Week Two

(Sound & Body)

Back to description.

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

 

 

§                   Read Nate Mackey - Song of the Andoumbolou: 11

 

§                   Discussion of previous week. Personal Myth grid pointers. Any questions? Questions on Projective Verse?

 

§                   Play Eileen Myles cuts:

 

1.               Untitled (Matthew Shepard)

2.               On Proprioception

3.               On Working Class Speech

4.               Milk

5.               On Milk

 

§                   Duo Corpse Exercise.

 

§                   Hand out Questionnaire

 

§                   Wanda Coleman:

 

Read American Sonnets, play her reading #12. Emphasize the notion of a PROJECT. Do American Sonnets exercise, with handout, using a line or image from the end of the Duo Corpse poem as a starting point. Try to get something quintessentially U.S. American in it.

 

§                   George Bowering:

 

I do not compose poetry to show you what I have seen, but rather because I have seen…this poet’s job is not to tell you what it is like, but to make a poem…Not trying to use your poems to prove a point, or address an argument. Not to try to control what they’re (the poems) are doing…but rather to be a kind of audience listening to where the poem is going to go…the practice of outside…Try to forget your own voice…and listen hard for what the language is saying… you yourself are the audience, hearing a voice you’ve trained your ear to receive (emphasis added)… (Bowering 6)

 

§                 Play McClure – Ghost Tantras, have class read some tantras.

 

§                 Write 16 words that correspond to your notion of sound. Things you like to hear, 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 and hearing these words.

 

§                   Another American Sonnet: Pick up from the last image or line from your American Sonnet and write a poem of 14-16 more lines.

 

Assignment: Complete questionnaire; write two additional American Sonnets and have them printed out for next week. Finish SOUND words if not done already and come next week with questions/comments on Eileen Myles’ The End of New England essay.