Peggy Shumaker
Rules of the road to start with: anyone, especially class members, is welcome to post, as comments, pieces of writing in response to the prompts or homework assignments given for the next two weeks. Your comments will take a little while to appear, as I have to approve them–but that’s mostly a guard against spam posts.
Today was mostly introductory. Peggy Shumaker started out by getting us to meet each other and introduce the person next to us.
David Crouse
David Crouse satisfied himself with a group exercise that involved no writing and no homework today–but I don’t expect that to last! He had us think about who we were writing for–to answer the question, “what would ________ think of this? and invite us to develop critics, based on people we had known, in our heads. Then we discussed the qualities of our perceived audience. (I wish all of us could have the audience we wound up describing!)
Jeanne Clark
Jeanne Clark did have us writing in class–twice. She recommended word lists as prompts, and our homework for today is to start our own word lists. For today she read us a poem–A Blessing, by James Wright, and asked to write down interesting words from that poem. Then we had to add more words of our own, and pick at least five from the combined list. Finally we were to write a short piece, poetry or prose, giving images on a journey familiar to the writer and using all five words in some form.
The normal schedule will be Peggy, David and Jeanne (in that order) in the morning, with varying activities in the afternoon, but for this first day, Peggy took the first hour of the afternoon. She gave us a website to investigate: http://www.newpages.org. Then she talked about compression, using Ted Kooser as an example. Finally, she passed out postcards (large ones, thank goodness) and asked us to write something that would fit on them–again, prose or poetry. This writing assignment was to be based on an image which was combined with something totally unlike that image. Copies of this assignment from some of the students will be passed on to one of the painting classes as possible inspirations for their paintings.
Finally all three of our guest writers talked about revision. Jeanne gave us a prompt to revise something we had written earlier in the day–write the opposite of what you have written. She also had us take our lines out of order. Several short poems written earlier in the day actually benefitted from this treatment.
Since this was the first day, I’ll give the afternoon schedules for the rest of the week here:
Tuesday we visit the UA Museum, touring the galleries on our own, gathering ideas and writing.
Wednesday we will have Theresa Bakker as a guest writer.
Thursday we have no afternoon class session, but our three faculty members will be giving a free reading at the Museum Education Center from 5:30-7:30 pm.
Friday volunteers read for Tom Nixon’s painting class and possibly bring back paintings to inspire us. We also have a visit scheduled to the Georgeson Botanical Gardens–if the weather permits. (For what it’s worth, the current forecast is mostly cloudy with chance of showers, high near 70.
I’ll post my responses to the prompts as comments. Hope more of you do the same!
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Response to Jeanne’s initial prompt:
Words chosen from poem: ripple, bounce, blossom, light, loneliness, spring; added word wind.
Alaska Journey
The low, rosy light of winter noon
Ripples over the snow and bounces among the trees.
The short day fades into twilight
Until only the high, lonely moon lights my path,
And the falling wind brings more blossoms of snow.
How many miles to spring?
and the reversal: (season and time of day reversed.)
Alaskan Journey II
The low, red light of midnight
Flows over squash and beans.
The twilight ripens into dawn, sun circling to noon
Until the light burns my eyes
And heat hazes wild iris and fireweed.
How many miles to fall?
This one’s in response to Peggy’s prompt–but I didn’t really get the “something totally unlike the image”–which was inspired by looking out the window.
The sun dots the trees
With coins of brightness
Silver against the darkness of leaves.
Fairy gold, perhaps?
For it exists only
While the sun shines.
And a second try at Peggy’s prompt:
Beyond clouds heavy with rain,
Beyond the blue we call the sky
What galaxies! What nebulae!
What other worlds
Where clouds may float,
Heavy with rain.
Response to jEANNE’S PROMPT OF WORDS TAKEN FROM James Wright’s, “A Blessing”:
list of words: twilight, barbed, happiness, tufts, nuzzled, wild, flotsom.
SOLITUDE
A cow moose nuzzled her calf on our deck last night, her wild eyes now calm.
Tufts of hair clung like flotsom on her back and belly.
Barely visible in the dim twilight, the calf twitched in nervous happiness, crowding close to his mother.
Distant from barbed wire, we are at home.
Prompt: Create an image and pair with an unlike image
Postcard Image: ON THE BUS TO MIDINAPUR — March 7, 1968 Sunny 36*C
“Gently bouncing in an overfilled small wooden bus, seated on a wooden bench gazing out the window on a warm Bengal afternoon, like buns on a rack, jumbled together on the bake sheet, waiting for delivery.
All slide forward as the driver slams on the brakes to avoid a stray cow. Nothing edible is lost, only pushed together. Sweet flower smells waft through to soften the stench of sweat and chicken droppings. Potholes make us undulate to dips our journey takes as we roll on to Midinapur village from Panskura.”
Response to Peggy’s remark about pairing Furniture and Relion:
Hence… A Shaker Cair
A Puritan Bench
A Roman Catholic Captain’s Chair
A Unitarian Chaise Lounge
Why Not?
The Unitarian chaise longue for me, that’s for sure!
What about
A Protestant Rocker
A Buddhist Coffee Table
A Zen Bureau
?
Jeanne’s ‘5 Words’ prompt: words: twilight, darken, ripple, break, bounds, blossom, young, loneliness. (Whoops! apparently I can’t count!)
Red Road, Kapoho
At the nineteenth latitude, twilight darkens
abruptly. The dirt road ripples, an ocean bed of
ruts. Berms break its banks, bound it
with downed palm fronds and hibiscus, upheaving
the pungency of night blossoms. Light is
expunged, sounds muffle
and dwindle: the night anxieties
of a young land still birthing itself curl into
the sulphur scent of its loneliness.
Postcard poem – Horsetails
The riddle of our union bristles like our land with horsetails
that bore their forms inexorably to surface,
piercing through blankets of typar, manure, tarpaulin.
After snow’s recess, they’re resurgent
like grievances, so keen because held against a loved one,
that were missing for a season.
The soil of ‘us’ will thrust up these horsetails
until the blanket is riddled like gunshot kelp.
Let’s throw away the blanket and learn to nurture our dirt.
And ‘the opposite’ – Winning horsetails
Horsetails, berthed impossibly deep in earth,
are matted, tangled and tunneled in a place of no color.
They bore their forms inexorably to surface,
each seeker of the day a lowly scout, expendable.
The deeper entity spreads, impregnable.
Their thrust surpasses all attempted suppression:
only snow’s blanket impervious to their riddling –
it freezes all contests but there’s no defeat,
simply suspension of time.