Workshop

We had a workshop last night in which we focused on the poetic line. It was interesting studying poems with long lines, like Ginsberg's poem "At a Supermarket in California" and concrete and graphic poems, as well as poems that used lining to create meaning (almost anything by Heather McHugh, but we looked at "A Man in the Street"). Then we did a kitchen sink sort of exercise where students used longer or shorter lines than usual and had to mention a particular song or movie, a kitchen appliance, a person they hadn't seen in years, a town they had never lived in, and had to use 3 of the following words: spinach, mucus, wrinkle, sprawling. We all had fun trying to pack all of this in there; I don't think anyone,including me, was able to use mucus successfully. I tried, as you would expect, having the character in the poem microwave spinach to "a pool of mucus" (visualize pond scum), but it just wasn't happening. Actually, I think these perameters lend themselves more to a short story than a poem. That was the feeling of most of the resulting stuff.
Tomorrow we meet for our field trip at the arboratum. I'll let you know how it goes.