March 3, 2010

Trying on Essays for Size

What’s the difference between a blog posting and a personal essay? As I review a series of essays for my creative non-fiction class at UBC, this question comes to mind. I review the points provided in our course pack by our ever-thorough (and enthusiastic) instructor Andreas Schroeder and one line about essays stands out: “it is mostly exploratory, giving itself time to peruse, analyze, speculate or marvel.” This sentence spring-boards into a theory.

Essays take up time whereas blog postings take up (cyber)space. This is a simple bifurcation but valid. How many people gaze up from computer screens with pensive expressions? While surfing the web you move from place to place, from text to video, and time is usually measured in the seconds you wait for something to load. In essays there is time to slowly and sensuously wrap your head around a thought. Time is of the essence.

I also consider how a personal essay is Socratic in its questioning approach whereas a blog posting is more declarative. Usually, people are getting some grief off their chest or promulgating some position or stance. There are a dizzying number of great blogs but on the other end of the spectrum you have people shouting: look at me! At the end of the day, it’s easier to shout a sentence than a question. (Try to imagine a crowd chanting a thoughtful question.)

I file my fingers through all the readings that Andreas has given up. One of the best essays in this superb collection in front of me is Cristina Nehring’s Our Essays, Ourselves, a piece of writing that shimmers in its rhythms of insight. What I also enjoy is the succinct analysis of the history and import of essays. We are taken from Seneca, the founder of the essay form, to Lee Gutkind, a contemporary proselyte of creative nonfiction and founder of the literary journal Creative Non-Fiction (which currently is running a competition on essays about animals with a deadline of April 2nd).

If this were an essay I’d wrap all this up with some insight into UBC’s remarkable MFA program, a reference to a cat I met yesterday on my walk home and the view I have as I type this on my iPhone as I look up through the diamond shaped UBC library window and wince at a fissure of brightness breaking through the clouds in the sky.

But this is just a blog posting and you have other places to go.

December 11, 2009

Prompted off the Page

I got up this morning and finished the teaching outline for the AMS mini-school application at UBC. They contacted me yesterday after a two month wait with the news that I’d been short-listed and now they were interested in seeing a syllabus I’d use for the class. This morning I wrote about each week, exploring the idea of using each of the senses as a locus for different genres. Apart from the week by week structure, each class will begin with a writing prompt and this morning I thought of my first prompt to use in the class: the etymology of the word prompt itself, the history of the word, the ideas or words that trail behind it through history. So I went online to the OED and found this:

[< classical Latin promptus action of making available or accessible < prompt-, past participial stem of pr{omac}mere (see PROMPT adj.) + -tus, suffix forming verbal nouns. In in prompt after classical Latin in prompt{umac} within easy reach.]

Readiness, preparedness. Only in in prompt: in readiness, at one’s disposal.

And I was completely uninspired. It was only under the second definition that thoughts started to stir:

1. An act of instigation or incitement. Obs. rare.

1597 J. PAYNE Royall Exch. 27 Common dronckards and carnall lyvers..esteme themeselves as honest and as truly religiouse as the best, and bothe by a subtill prompt of the divill.

I love that phrase: “a subtill prompt of the divill” and so here goes my ten minutes of free writing:

He felt something stirring in his body but it might have been the beans at that overpriced taco stand. She’d insisted on stopping in spite of the absence of any parking for blocks and blocks. “There.” “There.” Everything just right and too small in their differences of opinion. When he finally pulled into a parking meter spot, a rummaging through his pockets touched on nothing but lint and ticket stubs to the previous night’s concert. She was already in the rear-view mirror walking towards tacos. “Hey, mamacita!” he opened the window and yelled. “Got some change?” “I’ll be right back with your taco,” she shouted back. He haped she wasn’t getting him a taco. Four dollars for one taco. A fancy, free-range, organic, local taco that came out of some local farm from cows that were lulled to sleep by Sarah Mclachlin. He thought about the fight they’d had at the concert and then the sexy blond at the bar who seemed to be perched on his girl-friend’s shoulder. He’d kept pretending to think, resting his gaze on her shoulder. They bickered about the number of drinks he’d already had and then the band took the stage and drowned out any hopes a full blown argument. As he sat in the car waiting for her to return, he noticed that his ears were still ringing. He pressed a finger onto the inner flap of his ear. The ringing came into focus and filled his body. He turned his head to look up the street for a meter man or maid. Nobody. After about ten minutes she got back into the car and handed him a taco. Seeing the yellow jacket of a metermaid in his sideview mirror, he quickly ate it and then pulled out. Christ, he hated beans. What did she get him one with beans? He hadn’t even wanted one. More trouble to rumble about in the body.

Okay there’s something from ten minutes of freedom. Nothing great but a good start to the day, an exploration of a fictitious fight and the unconscious promptings of the body. An exploration of a prompt. An exercise I hopefully will get to use next year in my own little creative writing night class at UBC. In the class itself I’ll hand out the fuller list of definitions for “prompt” and see what kind of poetry or prose it sparks in students.

November 13, 2009

Generating Rip-roaring Art Daily

While there are tons of benefits to grad school, the downside is not having time for extras. Dear reader, you are certainly more than an extra, but what I’m saying is that I’ve been inundated with writing, reading, marking, blah, blah, etc. All the balls juggled in my new life are right now up in the air, however, and I’ve got some time to type up some thoughts regarding poetry.
I was reading an interview about a month back on the poet Joshua Trotter, who said that he rarely worked on projects per se because they just “morph into new projects, which morph again.” As I read this line in the interview, I felt complete kinship with this peripatetic aesthetic. (Even now I’m fighting the urge to digress into my imagination towards a Fringe play about a gangsta rappin’ Aristotle. In one of the performances, so the tangential story goes in my head, there is an actual shooting…) But indeed, I do digress.

Over the past year, my twitter poems have been the place where I’ve been able to unleash this literary wanderlust. I’ve moved from the overarching concept of a twitter epic, to dirty limericks, to quick-sketched impressions of the world outside my window and today I wrote up some acrostics. The trend over the past week, has been to incorporate some poetic form into my 140 words. A sestina on Tuesday (first stanza 123456, next stanza 615243 and on an on into further permutations with each number representing a word) then a pantoum on Wednesday (entire lines repeated). Not that I wrote these out in 140 characters, but I tried to incorporate the idea of these obsessive forms into my own poem. Today I worked on a far simple form, the acrostic. My acrostic begins by spelling out the word itself: Acrostics Crawl Rectangular On Strange Typose In Casements Stilted. In this line I’m imagining an awkwardly framed window, which is shattered in the second and final line: I elbow smash a sash of the window to breathe in the wandering wind. A simple form that I had some fun with.

The elements of prosody – meter, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, metaphor, etc – seem to be the engines (or fuel) for poetry. This might be best understood in the preponderance of rhyme in hip-hop. Once a word ends a line and there’s an expectation for the next to rhyme, the brain hurries towards a certain subset of words to find the most appropriate. Free-style rapping turns this process into a habit of mind, a familiar challenge that drives the verses forward. Even in the absence of a theme, topic or story, this habit towards rhyme maintains the flow of words. I suspect the same principle is at work (in varying degrees of urgency) with other elements of prosody. An ear attuned to assonance, consonance or alliteration, will also set up expectations, which the language part of the brain will attempt to fulfill. In simple terms, we might say that prosody is the setting up of expectations that are fulfilled, unfulfilled or surprised in satisfying or unsatisfying ways.

Some thoughts alongside the tangents twittered out on a limb.

new style acrostic?

October 8, 2009

One of the Perks of Grad School

So a couple weeks into poetry 510 and I learn from a classmate that she has a collection of poems entitled Sumac’s Red Arms. I ask her for a copy and the next week, I’m holding a lovely book in my hands. The poems are the fruition of ten years working on the white page and over eighteen years working in the cold, white north of Canada where Karen Shklanka practiced rural and emergency medicine. Sumac’s Red Arms sutures the experience of living in various degrees of remoteness and intimacy with a straightforward lyricism that resuscitates poetry out of prose. For anyone dissatisfied with the always cursory news coverage of the latest tragedy in some rural community, here’s an opportunity to understand some corner of a small town from a more personal perspective. What’s even more intriguing about Sumac’s Red Arms is that we’re taken from the isolation of the North to the warmth of the Mediterranean along with several other stops in between.

So, yes, I feel pretty lucky to be in poetry 510.

I’m looking forward to finding out more about my other classmates’ and the poetry they’ve also put into the world.

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