This page is for participants in the Life as Rehearsal for the Poem workshop, Year 2, Quarter 2. (How this got its name, here.) Each week’s course materials will be posted on this page requiring you to scroll down each week. (Make sure to try to click on any image. They usually have links.)
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Workshops will happen from 4-6pm Sundays: March 6, 13, 20, 27 & April 3. Each week participants should review all course materials and come to the Sunday night discussion with questions, comments, impressions. (The Skyler Lovelace method is to take notes for your weekly check-in. It is madly efficient.) It is the aim of this course to aid participants in creating new work that is Projective, Organic, Serial, Impersonal, connected to place, the current moment and reflects their own personal mythology. A “saturation job” or “multi-decade research project” to quote past materials that have been shared. Previous course materials from this season (Oct 2021-to-now) are here and here.
Each week during the next five I encourage you to write & submit a poem based on a current event to Rattle’s Poet’s Respond. See: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/30232/poets-respond-online-only
WEEK ONE March 6, 2022
WATCH:
Thank you Adelia MacWilliam for finding this from a Cascadian Zen contributor:
Plasticnic from F T Lam on Vimeo.
LISTEN TO THE 24-FEB-2022 INTERVIEW with JOHN BREHM and click on the image for John’s website:
Photo by Paul E Nelson, 24-FEB-2022
LISTEN ALSO TO:
READ THE INTRO, Page 7 & 8 AT LEAST:
Probably best to buy a copy of the New Directions facsimile edition but you can also read it on the site liked on the cover image.
READ:
See CD Wright’s bio by clicking on the image.
Please also read this poem: https://cdwrightpoet.com/poetry/rising-falling-hovering-in-front-of-a-donut-shop
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/24/ukraine-colony-russia/
WRITE:
Time to start a new journal SPRING (& ALL) 2022. You could continue your 2022 journal if that is working for you. This week, time to hunt a SPRING poem. The hunting exercise works. Re-read that link and maybe this one then CREATE AN INTENTION to get a poem on or from a walk. (Your intention should include a deep connection to HERE, NOW, PERSONAL MYTH, YOUR SERIES and other things critical to you. Intention-setting works! Bring a notebook and take notes or even write the poem outside if you can. Try to notice specific things about spring where you are. What is quintessentially spring there? (The little things.) The now & here our are guides in times when much is uncertain, especially when there is the threat of world war in the air, as if we did not have enough on our plate already, eh? What local/historical issue calls to you? Are there parallels to what is happening in the world now. Start today. Don’t be that guy WCW warned us about:
The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?
Best to get a start on that project and don’t worry about sharing what you have written. Give it some breathing room. Let it evolve. You can read from it later, or not at all. You can comment on the course materials and try to come with one or two questions for the gathered. There is wisdom in the group that exceeds any one member. We will be adding new members for this session and then we have one last session before our annual break for the Poetry Postcard Fest.
FINALLY:
The Astrology Of March 2022 – Make A Wish
March 2022 is a spectacular month that many of us won’t forget for years or even decades to come. There’s just so much going on astrologically: a beneficial New Moon conjunct Jupiter, Venus conjunct Mars at 0° Aquarius, several Jupiter conjunctions and a fairytale-like stellium in Pisces. The best advice? Believe in miracles and just go with the flow!
March 2nd, 2022 – New Moon In Pisces
On March 2nd, 2022 we have a New Moon at 12° Pisces. This is a “make a wish” New Moon that is conjunct the ‘great benefic’ Jupiter.
Setting New Moon intentions is an ancient practice. And when the New Moon is also conjunct Jupiter – the planet of growth and abundance – you can bet that your intentions will be planted in a very fertile soil. Whatever you will initiate at this New Moon, it will grow exponentially.
Even if you’re not the type of person who sets intentions or ‘believes’ in manifestation techniques, give this a try this month. March is THE MONTH to set intentions for whatever you want to manifest in your life. READ MORE
Week Two MARCH 13, 2022
READ Pages 9 – 13 AT LEAST:
Each week during the next five I encourage you to write & submit a poem based on a current event to Rattle’s Poet’s Respond. See: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/30232/poets-respond-online-only
Lorine Niedecker, photo by Gail Raub
A 1970 Visit That Never Happened (Page 2)
About “Next Year or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous”
KEY ESSAY:
Joanne Kyger by George Bowering at Subud House/Spring Street Center, 2nd Cascadia Poetry Festival 2014
Joanne Kyger and “the Kook Strain” in Olson: A Reading
Photos of CPF2 here by guess who?
WATCH:
There is a moment of remarkable animal proprioception in this video. Not only is this entertaining, educational, fun for the whole family, but allows you to see a deep sense of a body that knows its position in space.
THE WAR EFFORT:
By Sergiy Maidukov (Click on image)
WRITE:
Please read this: Russian Poems & Ukraine War Exercise and try not to let this situation make you crazy. Turning your emotions into art is alchemy.
Week Three, March 20, 2022
The unfolding tragedy in Ukraine is the focus of this month’s SICA ZoomMuse Poems for Peace reading. We are inviting poets and lovers of poetry to read either a poem they have written as a response to the war in Ukraine or someone else’s poem that speaks to them about this awful event. The special ZoomMuse Poems for Ukraine reading is 11am PDT, Thursday, March 17. Anyone who feels to participate is asked to email Adelia MacWilliam at adelia.macwilliam@gmail.com by Sunday, March 13th. More information on Poems for Peace is here: https://sica-usa.org/zoomuse-poems-for-peace/
READ: Pages 14 – 40 AT LEAST by clicking on that image of Spring & All:
Also, each week during the next three I encourage you to write & submit a poem based on a current event to Rattle’s Poet’s Respond. See: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/30232/poets-respond-online-only
WATCH:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/opinion/london-oligarchs-sanctions-putin.html (You may have to copy & paste this link, as I am having issues getting it to work, but it’s worth it.)
WATCH/READ:
WATCH:
READ:
From Carlton:
“You’ve got to live somewhere you aren’t afraid to die.” Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry From Kharkiv
LISTEN:
Brenda Hillman by Robert Hass
https://d7.drunkenboat.com/db17/brenda-hillman.html
DID WE HAVE THIS YET?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2012/08/the-community-of-the-curriculum-of-the-soul
WRITE:
Take a phrase from this 8 minute video done by old friend of SPLAB! Kurt Hemmer and write a poem starting from it. You could incorporate several phrases if you are so moved. Extra Jack Kerouac points if you compose the poem in a pocket journal and use the journal’s size restraints to shape the poem.
https://vimeo.com/650594467/9bbd0e73b9
Week Four, March 27, 2022
READ: Pages 41 – 80 AT LEAST by clicking on that image of Spring & All:
Also, each week during the next three I encourage you to write & submit a poem based on a current event to Rattle’s Poet’s Respond. HAVE YOU DONE THIS?!?!?
See: https://rattle.submittable.com/submit/30232/poets-respond-online-only
WATCH:
(Background on the band here.)
READ:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2012/08/the-community-of-the-curriculum-of-the-soul
http://www.pilotlightjournal.org/4/12/0 Women Poet Documentarians
READ/WRITE:
Lorine Niedecker Calendar Poems – Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous
Read and respond to each of the poems in Lorine’s remarkable series. You can do a cover of each one, substituting your images or language for hers, you can use each of her poems as a line to launch poems, you can create a phrase acrostic using any of her poems, or invent a way of using her poems to inspire your own.
SUBMIT:
Susan Kay Anderson says: “If people want to submit to Lily Poetry Review or Quarterly West ( I volunteer as a poetry reader for these) here are the links. I might not get to read your submission but maybe I will!”
https://lilypoetryreview.submittable.com/submit
https://www.quarterlywest.com/submit
WEEK FIVE, April 3, 2022
READ the rest of Spring and All
ALSO READ:
Embracing the Halting, Neurotic, Defiant Ways We Talk
WATCH:
Three Artists in the NW (Some background on the producer here.)
LISTEN:
EXERCISE:
Read this on the Elegy form and also this, from one elegy practitioner and write an elegy. Winter’s over, there is war in Europe and more importantly the end of one country brutally attacking another may be meeting the realities of the Aquarian Age. As we have been studying Lorine Niedecker, don’t worry about whether this elegy comes out perfect without editing. Think about a subject that moves you, something that is ending, perhaps a loved-one you’ve not grieved enough for and write the poem. Read it and see if there can be words taken out, conjunctions, smaller words. Make it as aerodynamic as possible. Remember to try to have the words appear on the page as they would in your head, as this is the transcript of your song. Remember, you are never forced to read your work in the workshop, so feel free to let go.
WATCH:
Our next (& final) five week series, the last in Year Two of this ongoing workshop, happens on April 24, May 1, 8, 15 & 22, after which we’ll break for the summer and the Poetry Postcard Fest.
WORKSHOP REGISTRATION IS HERE.