Sunday, May 23, 2010

How to Write a How to Poem

So I taught a workshop for the Writers' Collective today that was largely driven by my favorite exercize, the how-to poem. I snuck in a first-line exercize and a situational exercize but mostly, we played with articles such as...

...How to Eat Roadkill. How to Survive High School. How to Deal with Foot Cramps.

I'd written my lesson plan so that the workshop was more on firing up the engine to generate new poems than an examination of the machine's parts...

Which presented a bit of a problem, given the range of experience of the workshop participants.

Some of them wanted to discuss the value of editing or what made a poem a poem instead of a piece of prose, while others just wanted to get down to writing poems.

I think part of the issue might have been in the title: How to Write a Poem.

Maybe the next time I deliver this workshop, I'll just call it How to Rip a Phone Book in Half and leave it at that...

In the meantime, it was great fun to share poems by Tracy Hamon & Lori Cayer in pursuit of the how-to poem (In the Absence of Conversation II & How to Stay Alive in the Woods, respectively...).

I'm also thinking ahead to my workshop June 20th at Fort Whyte which will focus on nature poetry. I'm going to share some of Don McKay's bird poems but am also hoping to use poems by Brenda Schmidt and Barbara Klar.

Oh the joys of curriculum development...

7 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

I see my name! And in such lovely company! Yay!

Ariel Gordon said...

Wouldn't be a nature poetry workshop without you...now I just gotta figure out which poem! (Suggest yer favourite...)

tracy said...

Yay! More workshops!

Go A go!

Ariel Gordon said...

Hey T, my favourite part of the discussion around your poem was what how-to title would we give it, if it was our poem...

We settled on something like How to Start a Conversation on a Dinner-Date, Post-Theatre.

tracy said...

Heh (cool)!

m said...

I wished we lived in the same town. I'd love to chat workshops/classes/etc with you over tea or wine (or tea and then wine!).

Ariel Gordon said...

Well, m, we could separately and together make tea and then call each other...but I agree, not the same as a kitchen table and kids just in the other room. Squabbling. (The kids.)