Toni Hanner's Blog

I have found that one of the most difficult things to write about is my own body. We have such an incredibly complex relationship with our body, loving it, hating it, being proud or ashamed of it. Our culture, our parents, our lovers add their two or three cents to how we feel and think about our body. For this exercise, make a list of your body's parts and free-associate images to accompany those parts.
For example:
legs -- oak trees, fence post with ivy growing on itteeth -- gate at the mouth of a cave
and so on.
Try to come up with at least a couple of images for each body part. Don't worry if they don't make sense or seem negative. 

Then write your poems using these images. Things you might try: 
1) syllable OR word-count lines, 2) a pantoum or a villanelle 3) direct address 4) a poem about someone else's body, someone you know intimately or someone you don't know at all but can use your imagination
Some poems about the body: When the Body by Linda Hogan, My Mother's Body by Marge Piercy, almost everything Sharon Olds ever wrote.
Here's an untitled first draft of my poem I wrote from this exercise.....
My body hosts torturers and train cars, a cardboard box full of rivers, a satin-lined casket. There is a collection of bric-a-brac I never ordered, and a great many pieces of broken glass.
A cardboard box full of rivers, a satin-lined casket, I can make handcuffs from my hair and a great many pieces of broken glass. My body exists to carry these hands.
I can make rope from my hairto tie to the rafters, to lift up the boat. My body exists to carry these hands, these makers, these touchers, these ten-eyed.
I tie to the rafters and lift up the boat and wonder at all this body can give me, these makers, these ten-eyed touchers. After this body is gone there’s nothing.
I wonder at all this body gives me,the bric-a-brac scattered in the satin-lined casket.After this body is gone there’s nothing, just a cardboard box full of rivers, handcuffs made of hair.

The places we've lived exert a terrific pull on us, whether our memories of them are pleasant or not. Make a list of every place you can remember having lived: houses, apartments, hotels, trailers, cars. Name the street and town if you can, and the approximate dates you lived there.

Pick two of the places and write down thoughts and impressions that come to mind when you think of them. Write in images: "orange tree in back yard," "empty swimming pool," "mean German Shepherd next door," etc. Make your image list as long as possible.

Now see if you can write a poem that travels back and forth between these two places (and times). Who lived there with you, or were you alone? Were there animals? What colors come to mind? If the poem you write is effective, you won't need to tell us how you "felt" -- the images will speak for you.

Up the ante: Pick another two places and write the image lists for them. Now write your poem in form: sestina, pantoum, villanelle, etc.

Image Lists -- To give us a starting point today, write at the top of your page, or however it works on your laptop, each of the five senses.
Under each sense, write a list of concrete images for that sense. Make most of them things you like but throw in a few you don't like. These images will be your vocabulary for the poems you'll write today. Idea stolen from Joe Millar, who has a new book: http://www.josephmillar.org/books.html
The Poem(s) --
 Poem #1
·      write in four line stanzas. Be sure to refer often to your image lists and use      them.·      Line 1 contains a place name and two of the images from your lists.·      Line 2 contains an animal, not a dog or cat and three of the images.·      Line 3 repeats at least one noun or verb from your first line and uses at least one new image.·      Line 4 has two colors in it and three of the images from your lists.
·      Line 5 has someone riding a bicycle in it, with two list images.·      Line 6 repeats line 2, with variations.·      Line 7 contains a memory from long ago, with one or more list images.·      Line 8 needs a woman in a rain-hat and three list images.
·      Line 9 pretend this is a sonnet and give us a turn, use one list image that is one you don't much like.·      Line 10 if you haven't yet used the pronoun "I", use it here. If you haven't used the pronoun "you", use it here, and 4 listed images.·      Line 11 you're on your own.·      Line 12 repeats, with variations, line 1.                 
Poem #2 and any others -- you get the picture of what we're doing here, so make up your own hurdles or opportunities and keep writing! You might try using anaphora (begin each line with the same word or phrase, such as Because, or I remember the time....)

At today's Jump Start workshop, we worked again with Joe Millar's image lists: take a piece of paper and write across the top Taste, Sound, Touch, Sight, Smell. Fill each sense's column with as many concrete images as you can in, say, 15 minutes. Put down images that please you as well as a few that are not so pleasing. My list has things like "moss between bricks," "fresh laundry," "greasy old coins," and "the Mozart Requiem."

Then, using these images as your poem's vocabulary, write. Today we worked on the villanelle: five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the 1st and 3rd lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. There two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. Here's a schematic that might
help you visualize this--capital letters represent lines, numbers represent rhymes.

A 1
B 2
C 1

D 1
E 2
A 1

F 1
G 2
C 1

H 1
I 2
A 1

J 1
K 2
C 1

L 1
M 2
A 1
C 1

There is no shortage of great examples. Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. Elizabeth Bishop's The Art of Losing isn't Hard to Master. And this one, new to me: Mad Girl's Love Song, by Sylvia Plath. You will also find two excellent villanelles in Thomas Aslin's new book, Salvage, 2016 from Lost Horse Press. http://www.losthorsepress.org/catalog/salvage/

I've been doing visual art almost to the exclusion of writing lately. One thing I do to keep the writing going a little bit is to use torn slips of paper with writing on them and add them to a decorated background. They're all about postcard size. The first one below was written with intention, that is, I typed the words out on my old Royal portable to go with the painted piece.


In this next one, the words were selected without conscious intention and pasted on background collage papers torn from books, the inside of mailing envelopes, and other scrap paper.


In this last example, words and background work together. I kept it simple so the viewer could easily make the connections I saw.

Clothing can be very evocative — your mother’s gloves, a lover’s shoe, your father’s coat. Textures, smells, colors, and baggage. My father once threw a shoe at me — I can still see it flying, in slow motion, toward me. Clothes mark us as rich or poor, as someone (especially in high school) who fits in or who is “out of it.” Some clothes have pockets that can hold even more baggage — tobacco, coins, seeds you meant to plant but never did. I’ve had clothing made for me, stolen from me, clothing I’ve simply lost. I’ve had dreams about items of clothing.
Take a few minutes and list pieces of clothing that come up for you.
Now pick one of these pieces of clothing from your list, one that has a lot of heat around it, and write your poem.

Like it or not, our parents remain a fundamental and powerful part of our lives. Let’s make up new stories for them. Pretend you don’t know what they were like before they met. Pretend you don’t know anything about how they came to be married (if they did). Or pretend they never met. Pretend they married other people. (Don’t worry, you still exist—you’re an omniscient observer.)
Write about your parents in new ways — remember this is poetry — it will be trueeven if it’s completely fictional. 
Include the following:
a famous person a specific kind and color of flower one or more specific places a form of transportation an occupation weather a fragrance a stink something the color of lemons music — be specific danger
If you finish, do it again. Change everything. Of change a single key element that everything else depends upon.
Just an idea — someone in your life is or was the linchpin. Someone else is or was the lodestar. Write using these two concepts (but not those words). These people do not necessarily have to be your parents, but they could be.

We love working with word lists. You can find them anywhere. 

make them up out of your dreams or what you see looking out the windowopen a book of poetry and grab words from the poems -- a big "collected poems" works bestgo to www.visualthesaurus.com and look through their "Featured Word Lists" or use their "Vocabgrabber" to create your own lists using copied and pasted texts The possibilities are limitless. We put word lists on small cards, like flash cards, and take them with us wherever we go. Tuck a couple into your notebook. 

You can use word lists in many ways--tell yourself you're going to write a poem using all the words on a (20 words or less) list. Use them in order, or reverse order. Alphabetical order!
Use them to end your lines. 

When you create a word list, remember to use the senses, throw in some action verbs, and a place name or two is nice. Maybe the name of a famous person--Martha Washington, Louis XIV.

Every year, CV2, a Canadian literary journal, sponsors the CV2 48-Hour Poem Contest. They provide a devilish ten word list that you must use in your poem. You have 48 hours to do it. We have entered several times and even won! Try it next spring. http://www.contemporaryverse2.ca/en/contests/2-day-poem-contest

 

We're back -- from 5 weeks in France and another month to get over jet lag and catch up a little. We're putting the link of the week first -- http://erasures.wavepoetry.com because the subject of this week's Galaxy is the erasure and this website provides text to use in an erasure and it enables you to actually make the erasure on-line.

You make an erasure by taking an existing source (newspaper column, poem, two pages of an old encyclopedia, a novel, pretty much any piece of writing) and erasing most of the words, leaving behind words and phrases that, when read, compose the poem. You can use the exposed language in order as it appears in the original text, or you can reorganize it.

Susan Whitney, a Red Sofa poet who also attends our weekly workshops, used the erasure technique to powerful effect by taking two completely different news articles and mixing up the "leftover" words. Her poem, 12 Laments for the Old City, won a first prize in the recent Oregon Poetry Association contest.

Wow, summer has galloped past, hasn't it? Here we are in the middle of August already. I think our garden has one more party in it before everything is too worn out. As for writing, it goes on! Here's a diabolical exercise I gave my workshop today. We only had a half hour for the whole thing -- I think you could easily spend that much time just on your list. Have fun!   ·      The First—Write a list of “firsts,” including:

the first house you remember living in your first romantic kiss your first serious illness the first important death you experienced (pet, loved one, famous person) your first apartment or house you lived in on your own the first person or people you lived with who were not relatives the first time you remember feeling ashamed the first time you slept outdoors your first car your first marriage your first divorce the first time you tried to swim the first time you remember being really good at something the first time you got drunk your first job your first journey on your own the first time you remember telling a lie
You get the picture — add your own firsts to this list, as many as possible. At any time during the listing you feel some heat from one or more of the firsts, go ahead and write your poem. Otherwise, when you finish your list, use at least 10 of the firsts in a poem.
Feel free to move back and forward in time. Stay in the present tense if possible.
End your poem with something about writing this poem. 
Link of the week: This may seem strange, but my link of the week is FacebookYes, it can be a gigantic time-suck, but I have read more poetry and heard about more poetry events, new books, etc. on Facebook than anywhere else. Every time I think about signing off for good because of the time I spend looking at cat videos, I remember all the great information about poets and poetry I find there.