Here are the links I promised yesterday. Professor Brown would love if we all read through these before class on Tuesday.
Bernadette Mayer’s “List of Experiments”
http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html
Interview with Paul Hoover, author of Sonnet 56:
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/iv-hoover-ivb-joritz-nakagawa.shtml
Resource, especially newly posted PoemTalk on Pound & Mac Low::
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/
Happy Reading!
Thanks for posting these, Torrie.
7:03; but really 7:01; watch is fast, like life.
QM6; on the LIE
reading for school
Looked up because the traffic was stopped.
The city twinkled in the ‘before sun-rising dawn’
Or is it just early morning?
I looked up and saw the Chrysler Building
Facets of shimmering glass?
Not sure… maybe just metal…
All I know is that it took my breath
Oh we were just waiting for the toll booth
Some unlucky driver couldn’t find his EZ-Pass.
There, we are moving again.
It’s hard to write in the tunnel
Kind of like strobe lights
Blinking furiously over my
pen as it skims across the page.
Thank you Dr. Brown for
opening my eyes to writing.
Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments was a fascinating read. At first I was taken aback by what seemed like just a list of things to do; and then when I began to think about each of her suggestions I started to put pen to paper and found myself writing ‘poems’ ‘verses’ that fell outside of the norm (at least for me). I realized that playing with styles, language, and positioning is something I never 1) would have thought of doing and 2) thought was acceptable. As I highlighted areas of her reading that for me were more interesting than others I came up with 10 pieces that I will probably never share with anyone but which have opened my eyes to the fact that there is a whole world of writing out there that I would never have explored before this assignment. (The prior post was my reflection based on Bernadette’s List of Journal Ideas for a bus ride. This represented the second day of writing while on the bus – a feat in itself!!)
I agree with you Kathleen. The list of ideas was an interesting way to think about writing and language. I may modify some of them and do some writing experiments with my composition students. I sometimes feel as an English major that I surprisingly don’t focus enough on the fun things words do on paper. We are trained to write in these stiff formal styles, but this reminds me that writing can be fun and exciting.