Here's an invitation for you, or for a fellow poet (please pass this on):
This fall, I am conducting a poetry writing workshop at Lexington Community Education with optional exercises focusing on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. The exercises, which are voluntary writing prompts (feel free to bring in whatever you are working on), include
1) The Invitation Exercise: Learning from “Invitation To Miss Marianne Moore”
from the exercise: Your invitation might be witty, tragic, plaintive, ironic, pleading or imperative. The invitation could be in your voice or the voice of your mother or father or lover, or the voice of a neighbor, a historical figure, a prospective employer, a mythical figure, a future child yet unborn. You could take the Bishop poem or another invitation poem and use its form as your template, either in satire or serious tone.
2) Writing a richly detailed account of a journey on a bus, train, or plane: Learning from “The Moose”
from the exercise: Bishop employs the geographical generalities of the landscape of the beginning of her bus trip through small villages along the Cobequid Bay of Nova Scotia (bay and river moving to meet each other in a dance created by tides); she also uses color deftly to arrange the visuals of her trip. In three stanzas, she employs the harsh, brazen red of sunset, the softer “lavender” of the tidal mud, (the color “lavender,” which is associated with a pretty, powdery scent and a soft, pale pastel is a startling and unusual modifier for “mud”); the “red” of gravelly roads; the white of churches (“bleached, ridged as clamshells”—the matte white of a clamshell left to dry in the sun comes to mind here); and “silver birches.” As the sunset fades and the light goes dimmer, the brilliant red turns to “flashing pink” off the windshield of the bus and onto either another part of the bus or another vehicle, where it is lost in the darker blue color: “brushing the dented flank / of blue, beat-up enamel” . . .
3) Writing about a childhood revelation: Learning from “In the Waiting Room”
from the exercise:One might have a revelation that springs from a close, if amateurish, study of natural phenomenon. Did you and a brother stand in a driveway or alley and each claim that the daytime moon hung directly over your particular head, and couldn’t possibly be over the other’s head? Did an encounter with poisoned, spotted mice in the basement make you realize that mice weren’t the cute little grey or brown creatures populating your family’s (or the library’s) children’s books? Did you suddenly decide that you actually liked battle scenes and war stories, even though your pacifist parents had raised you to abjure and abhor them?
4) Writing about something that is won, considered, and then relinquished: Learning from “The Fish”
from the exercise:The poem’s great appeal lies, for this reader, in the marvelous, sometimes creepy, sometimes comical description of the fish. When Bishop says “He hung a grunting weight, / battered and venerable / and homely," we receive the image of something at once gross and worthy of respect. The phrase “hung a grunting weight” gives the fish the appearance of a creature pendulous and annoyed. The sonic echo of the “un” sound, coming so closely between “hung” and “grunt” (amplified obliquely by the “ing” sound), reinforces the animality, the physicality of the fish at the same time he is being presented as “venerable.” The words “hung” and “grunting” (although this was probably not a conscious intention of Bishop) are almost at the level of the pornographic and the scatological.
In a manner that is typical of Bishop, a simile is arrived using an almost ridiculously absurd juxtaposition between the old battered fish and old wallpaper. Somehow, the absurdity is washed away by the precision of the extended analogy:
Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
One’s mind leaves the nautical scene almost completely and is inside the home of an ancient relative.
There will be three more exercises in a similar vein.
Here are the details of the workshop:
Poetry writing workshop at Lexington Community Education led by Tom Daley
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. – Audre Lourde
Poetry writing, largely, is a solitary endeavor. This workshop will provide the opportunity for poets, both beginning and practiced, to share their work with other poets in a collegial and supportive environment. We will concentrate on sharpening the impact of your poems through careful consideration of their strengths and their limitations. Optional, take-home writing exercises will give you the opportunity to explore the myriad forms poetry can take.
Eight Wednesdays 6:15-8:15 pm
Starts Wednesday, October 12. Dates October 12, 19, 26; November 2, 9, 16, and 30; December 7
Cost: $150/$115 seniors
workshop held at Lexington High School, 251 Waltham Street, Lexington, MA
To register call 781-862-8043 or go online http://lexingtoncommunityed.org
You can also mail in your registration, but you might get closed out if you do it that way. If you want to take the chance, you can find the form to mail in at http://lexingtoncommunityed.org/.
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