I Know a Man by Robert Creeley - Using other people's words

I Know a Man

We moved on to the anxious, troubling, edgy recordings of I Know a Man. There are several on this page: writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley Page down a little to find them.

After we had several rounds of saying what we wanted in 2 minute timed session, I hit on the idea that the speaker might have been walking in the daytime, not driving at night.

He could have been about to step off the kerb into the path of a truck, bump into a baby's pram, slip over the edge of a dangerous cliff edge.

I am still completely wedded to the images of 2 people in the front seats of a car driving through the night, but now I am wedded to another scenario too.

Using other people's words

We tried cutting up the poem into individual words and took some time to make our own something new from them. I broke the rules and only used 16 words. All the rest were my own. I decided on a series of lines, each one starting with I or You alternately. The rest of each line included, you/your or I/my. This constraint surprised me. Now I need to do further drafts.

Doing our own work is less familiar to us than discussing someone else's poem. In which directions will our group go? Should we take turns to lead a writing time for the last 30 mins of our sessions? We are not used to writing instantly and have not given feedback to each other on what results from it.

Summer with Allen Ginsberg

We thought we were going to give Howl a second week, but now it seems as if we may be here all summer. The more we look, the more we see. We are getting used to reading it out section by section, we switch readers each time the line starts from the very left. I love hearing the others' voices reading on and on.

I misremembered Kaddish, but have just had a careful look at it. It is less shocking the more slowly I read it. It makes more sense.

Babies in the tomatoes I love this too, much shorter and easier.

Motherboard - Howl

Motherboard

T drove off to pick up speakers and an amp. He showed me the inside of the amp. It was so beautiful, sparkling clean and individual looking. Every mother bord I have ever seen is so artistically designed, I have seen quite a few since T started to be interested in electronics aged 6 or so.

I made happy noises, then told him to take some photos of it, he already had!

Howl

We are getting ever closer towards performance poetry now, which will mean watching videos on YouTube, but for the moment we are each still reading out the entirety of the pieces we study together. This will be the longest yet by far. I am typing here while I do the photocopying. Being a lax leader..normally I do all this straight after each Sunday evening session. I should be in the car already.

Bonfire after dark - Chatting - The Waste Land

Bonfire

H and T came out with me to light a bonfire. We had to go on a bit of a search to buy the marshmallows first.

H arranged the bricks and other things to make a fireplace. I added the firelighters, kindling and 2 logs.

We snapped off dry twigs from the surviving eucalyptus tree to roast the marshmallows with.

The builders have left their chairs in a circle around the garden table. We borrowed those, but carefully left the cardboard cushions they have made for themselves, one for each chair!

Chatting

T and I wound up laughing about Amazon o'clock, that moment when you decide to buy lovely books online. For me it is 11pm, for him it is on the train journeys back and forth to see his girlfriend. We did chuckle at our predictable weaknesses.

The Waste Land

How can anyone think of studying this in just 2 hours? Our poetry group did. We got half way through, then started talking about personal stuff, so that was the end of T S Eliot until our next meeting.

We had been reading sections out loud in turn, then had plenty of 2 minute sessions to speak without the other person interrupting.

I had the section about the Tarot cards and found it an amazing piece to read out, I was reading in an unearthly way with unexpected pacing. I appreciated that the most from this evening's work.

Lines 43 to 59 from the first section The Burial of the Dead. Text here.

Reading a text and sharing our own reaction to it

Josephine Corcoran has written about exactly this today on her blog: how-about-reading-workshops-as-well-as-writing-workshops

We are doing this on the closed 52 group to a certain extent: fiftytwopoetry

A ModPo colleague is going through the Pushcart collection using a small group of us as sources for her blog posts on the poems she chooses: playing-with-words

What can I suggest? Find a friend, a welcoming pub and a phone with a timer to ensure you each speak for the same length of time. Just get on with it and get to share what you want with whoever you want.

I think I will try this out on my parents when I am next in London. The introductory discussion will be interesting, trying to explain what I mean and then finding out what they would like to experiment with.

Given that my father used to read out Saki to us and we once had a series of Lent somethings sitting on their bed, they should be ok about it.

My monthly poetry discussion group at the Fleur has accelerated to once a week. That was this evening's decision. Wow. Apparently I'm about to be taken through The Wasteland.

We have started a fabulous poetry group

I can't quite believe that this has been so easy.

We met at my village pub. Sat down with a timer and copies of the poems. We each read the poem out loud. I got such pleasure out of hearing how the others read out the words and phrases in subtly different ways.

We each had 2 minutes to say anything we wanted to about the poem. The we got several more 2 minutes sessions. A co-counselling technique.

I forgot to make sure we share how we were before starting. We did that at the end, but it would have been better to do this first. Since we know each other so well, it is good to be able to offload freely.

It won't be a monthly event now, but a fortnightly one! I have been the good facilitator and printed off the next set of poems in advance.