Today, June 6 th

1. Today, June 6th 9:30-11:00: Creative Writing (Me) 11:00: Morning Workshop 11:30-12:30: Lunch 12:30-2:00: Literary Studies: (Davin) 2:00-3:30: Composition & Rhetoric (Steve) 3:30-4:30-ish: Afternoon Workshop (Jade) In Creative Writing today… We’ll share and talk about our favorite quotations from Skittish Libations. We’ll dive into the whole enterprise of Creative Writing with questions and no answers. If you actually think you have answers, I hope to set you straight.

2. Let’s sort of start by just yapping a bit about the whole creative enterprise.What quotation did you select in Skittish Libations, and why? What, for you, is “art”? What is “creative writing”? What is the process one goes through on the way to creating fabulous poetry and fiction?

3. A confrontation with reality; facing reality Note that some types, such as satire, mock or interrogate reality The invention of reality Formalist Creative Writing The improvement of reality (art as a hammer An escape from reality; a sedative or distraction Formalist Defiance of reality; reality as it ought to be A magnification of reality Formalist

4. Process… Something produced solely for others; a means of pleasing an audience A mysterious inborn talent Formalist A commodity Expression that is shaped and crafted The honoring of tradition A pile of crap; a hoax; excuse for not having a REAL job Creative Writing Art Formalist A learnable skill Emotional or psychological therapy The subversion of tradition Expression that is wide-open and free Self-expression; solely for self ; exploration of one’s unique vision Formalist …Product…

5. Maybe writing’s a constant NEGOTIATION of binaries SELF OTHER Artist Audience Past Present

6. Speaking of Past and Present, here are a couple of competing claims: • Creative Writing (Literature) is the art of language in the present moment. The live, unstable, mysterious evolution that is happening continually and right under our noses. Brand new poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, script-writing, and genres we don’t yet know how to name. • Creative Writing (Literature) is the art of language as an ancient activity. Something we’ve been doing since we first opened our mouths to speak, write on cave walls, and sing around a fire. Some theorists say that the impulse to create poetry is at the root of the human impulse to communicate, period.

7. Ok. So nobody knows how to define it. Or there’s no final definition. Then how do we learn it? How does it get taught? Should I, as a teacher, emphasize process or product? Craft or free exploration? The work of antiquity or the work of the future? How is it distinguished from any other kind of writing and so what’s it’s place in the schools at any level? In other words…

8. What is “Creative Writing” with a capital C and W? = the branch of English Studies that involves teaching and learning how to write creatively, right? Yeah, but…

9. Isn’t all writing “creative”? Why call it Creative Writing? Can it really be taught? Isn’t it about talent and a mysterious ability to summon the muse? What’s it doing in a university? How do you evaluate it? How does it relate to Rhetoric and Composition, Literary Studies, Linguistics, Technical Writing? Isn’t writing in these fields creative also? What’s more important: the writing of literature or the study of it? Isn’t all language creative, really? Why even have a distinct field called Creative Writing? Can’t business reports, department memos, shopping lists, Facebook status updates, even check-writing all be “creative”?

10. Did you know… In some of its earliest appearances in higher ed, Creative Writing was offered to help students understand literature better. I.e., it was in the service of literature studies. The idea was that by writing some fiction, poetry, or drama themselves, students would better understand the masterpieces of literature.

11. But also… a bunch of teachers who were also writers wanted to get together with other writers and blab about their work— in a college setting. (Couldn’t hang out in the bistros of Paris or Gertrude Stein’s salon anymore, so had to get together somewhere…)

12. It’s always been a bit of an outlaw… Not scholarly like other disciplines. The MFA is a studio degree. Very different criteria. Not really “academic.” Considered to be even a “spiritual” discipline. A “soft” subject. Workshop approach is considered by some to be whimpy: writers who want to talk with other writers sit in a circle and read/discuss their stuff, while a teacher/published writer chimes in.

13. Since the 80s, though, It has been influenced by postmodern theory, composition studies, and English education. The way it is taught is changing here and there… You can now study “the teaching of Creative Writing” as a subject itself. Or “Creative Writing Studies” which examines: Creative writing pedagogy The culture of creative writing/creative writing in the culture The history of creative writing in the university. You can get an MA and PhD in “Creative Writing Studies.”

14. Me? What in the heck do I do as a teacher of the stuff? When I go into the creative writing classroom…

15. I teach genres. Poetry, fiction. Creative nonfiction. Some script writing. • I encourage wide-open, glorious self-expression. Go for it. • I encourage self-denial and disciplined attention to the needs of audience. Craft. • I encourage demented new ways of thinking about the world. • I encourage thoughtful appreciation of very old traditions. • I try to do everything. • That’s why I’m burning out. • That’s why I’m insane. • Don’t tell my boss.

16. ok

17. make poems because that’s what we’re here to do ok because creative writing workshops are about writing Well, and making stories and scripts, and plays and creative nonfiction and memoirs and other things too. Sure, we read, we blab, we do exercises, we read some more, we go to public readings, we perform public readings, we blab and read and blab some more. . . but it’s all for the purpose of making poems

18. 1. Follow in-class instructions to encounter a raisin. 2. Then write a few paragraphs in which you describe the raisin and/or your experience of the raisin. Be VERY specific, concrete, sensory. 3. Now write a POEM about the raisin and/or your experience of the raisin.

19. I mean, how do you describe a SMELL? Really describe it? There’s no way to avoid… FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE The smell is like… something else. The smell IS… something else. This is just a peculiar feature of language. Possibilities • Include yourself in the poem. • Exclude yourself from the poem. No “I.” Just the raisin. • Focus on just one aspect of the raisin. • Focus on the entire raisin; raisin-as-world. • Be the raisin. • Talk to the raisin. • Look at the raisin from the point of view of an extra-terrestrial who has never been to earth before. • Include your classmates and teacher in the poem as well as the room. • Exclude the environment and anyone in it. • Write the poem from the point of view/in the voice of a grape. • Kinds of language which HELP, which you really cannot AVOID, which you have probably done without thinking : _____________.

20. What’s figurative language? You’ll notice that it’s pretty hard to describe something like a smell without resorting to a special kind of language called _____. How do you say that someone is drunk? How many animal metaphors do we use everyday? Where did most worn-out metaphors come from, and how do we keep the language alive? Look at Lorrie Moore…

21. Worst High School Metaphors 1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master. 2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free. 3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. 4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef. 5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up. 6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

22. 7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree. 8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine. 9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t. 10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup. 11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.  12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

23. 13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease. 14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph. 15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth. 16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. 17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River. 18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut. 19. Shots rang out, as shots are want to do.

24. 20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work. 21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while. 22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something. 23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant. 24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools. 25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

25. Reading and Blabbing and Reading Some More Elizabeth Bishop’s Visions’ Kenneth Koch’s Classroom Experiments with Poetry and Young Children Charles Simic’s Defamiliarizations

26. Sometimes it helps to take a really unusual perspective…say, that of an animal. Once a student wrote a piece from the point of view of a deer. It described a hunter’s gun as “a branch that barks.”

27. Writing Assignment #3 Drawing on our morning discussion, take another look at your raisin poem. Revise it as you like, and/or write another one. The idea here is to make poems. Just make some poems. Maybe you start again with the raisin, but wind up writing about something else. That’s ok.

28. Why Do We Make This Stuff? Poetry: Multiple Roots and Forking Paths

29. One way of “coming at” poetry is to consider the several distinct types of poets that have evolved over millennia. These types are not always mutually exclusive (one poet may write in several modes and be both a “moaner” and a “mad seer,” for instance), but it’s useful to break them down this way in order to understand the many distinctimpulses which give rise to poetry. The Moaner The Maker The Community Bard The Mad Seer Poetic categories are broken down in different ways and with different terminology, depending on what handbook or scholarly tradition you consult. The above terms represent some of the most important types of poets and are convenient terms we will use for the sake of this course.

30. A confrontation with reality; facing reality A clear mirror on reality (possibly mocking or interrogating?) Formalist The invention of reality Or how about the revelation of reality? A way to question all realities The discovery of reality Poetry Formalist A way to change reality (art as a hammer) An escape from reality; a sedative or distraction A magnification of reality; you become more alive An interpretation of reality

31. – Octavio Paz The Visionary Tradition ". . . I do not believe that poetry is simply an ability. . .Ancient medicine – and ancient philosophy, too, beginning with Plato – attributed the poetic faculty to a psychic disorder.  A mania, in other words, a sacred fury, an enthusiasm, a transport.”

32. The visionary impulse produces work which… • concerns itself with the unknown as opposed to the known; • may be prophetic; • may access or stimulate ways of knowing which are not rational; • articulates the ineffable (or attempts to); • springs from the unconscious; • reveals what ordinary sight or understanding cannot grasp.

33. One of the “Mad Seer” Sub-Traditions: Surrealism

34. Surrealism Surrealism

35. 1924: Andre Breton: The Surrealist Manifesto “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a sur-reality.”

36. “The idea of surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory” (Breton).

37. Between WWI and WWII Surrealism: the principles, ideals, or practice of producing fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art, literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural juxtapositions and combinations. An attempt, through these random, irrational juxtapositions and combinations, to make make a new reality or a new whole.

38. Instead of: I saw the rabbit, as soft as cotton, his eyes bright, munching the grass. you get: I saw the rabbit, ripe as a hammer, his eyes boiled, baptizing the grass. (random words from carpentry, religion, cooking) or: I saw the rabbit, as Monday as Van Gogh’s ear, eyes in search of Harvard, document the grass. (random words from stuff on my desk)

39. Early Surrealists Valued: The names of Aztec gods were on one page, serotonin uptake inhibitors on the other. • random CHANCE and the seizing of accident; • “convulsive beauty,” the marvelous, the uncanny, the disruptive, and the unexpected; • strange and unexpected juxtapositions; • defamiliarizing the everyday so that it once again appears strange and new; • liberation of mind from bourgeois modes of thinking; • the oblivion ha-ha silly brain brillo stain Here, you said: another baby avocado tree. You threw your shoe. I broke the refrigerator and the fossil fish. I broke my shoulder blade. I tried to make jambalaya. To relax the organism, the cookbook said, pound with a mallet on the head or shell. I love you. This remarkable statementhas appeared on earth to substantiate the clams. Here's your fire extinguisher, welcome to the glacier. Don't think I wasn't shocked when you were a traffic signal and I a woodpecker. I can't make it any clearer than that and stay drunk.

40. Writing Assignment #4 Drawing on our discussion of surrealism, revise your raisin poem YET AGAIN, and/or write a new poem.

41. STOP ! ! Are you being dull? Are you being predictable? Are you thinking too much? Are you making sense? Try a thesaurus…

42. Spoken Word Poetry The Oral Tradition (the Bard)

43. Hey, Daddy-o This stuff is really old… • Homer 800 BC • Old English poetry 400 AD • Native American 8000 BC to present • The Beats 1950s • Slam Poetry 1980s to present

44. The Beats (1950s,60s) • Getting poetry out of the classroom • Poetry read to jazz accompaniment

49. Ferlinghetti: http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MiscPoemsFerlinghetti.htm Ginsberg: http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MiscpoemsGinsbergHowl.htm

50. Rap and Hip Hop • Came of age alongside the poetry slam phenom. • Hyperbolic, gymnastic, inventive • Heavily end-rhyme based; rhymes often funny, clever, silly • Distinct prosody