Mindfulness + Writing | Lesson No. 2: Outside World as Writing Prompt

*if you look around, you’ll be amazed at what you see.  There are muses everywhere.

Welcome back!

Last week we looked into the body and breath for inspiration and deep paying attention.  Out of this deep paying attention (practiced over and over again) we can create from a centered interesting place.

This week we will look outward at the world around us.

Remember that body scan we did?  This is about a world scan.  Really taking in what’s around us.  I feel this especially is important to consider in our day and age when in any settling 90% of the people seem to be plugged not into their surroundings, but their iPhones!  (we’ll talk about how to use our phones to plug into the actual world around us, vs. the virtual, later on)

It’s important to remember the tools we try in this workshop are presented as things to try….but then continue trying.  If something resonates with you, work with it over time, as a practice.  If you fall out of your practice, just hop back in when you’re ready.  In mindfulness and creating, it’s about PRACTICE not PERFECT.

(As yoga teacher and writer Sharon Gannon says:  “Through repetition the magic arises.”)

“…poetry is paying attention to life when all the world seems asleep to its beauties and truths…”

-John Geddes (and all writing! not just poetry)

“Pay attention. Be astonished. And tell about it. We’re soaked in distractions. The world didn’t have to be beautiful. We can and should think about that beauty and be grateful.”

-Mary Oliver

 

Watch this video by poet CA Conrad.  He’s been video-ing his surroundings, as poem prompts.  This is a great place to begin our exploration.

Notice:  were you able to simply watch?  Or where you thinking “why am I watching this?”  and analyzing the whole time?  No judgement either way, just interesting to see. More of his work.

Reading Assignments

Writing Assignment

Let’s try CA’s (Soma)tic meditation writing instruction, with the above film:

Watch the film above again.

Take notes as quickly as you can for 15 minutes after viewing.

Type all your notes into one document and print it out.

For the week, carry it wherever you go and use a highlighter pen to find the words to shape your poem.

Send the poem my way!

Optional Writing Assignment

Use your iPhone for the week (or any camera you have) to take photos of interesting things around you.  The idea is that by photographing, we can begin to train our minds to really notice and take in our surroundings.

At the end of the week, use one of the photos you’ve taken in your own environment as a writing prompt for a story, poem or essay (I can help you shape it later)

Buy or borrow a fashion magazine.  Find a photo that strikes you, and use the image as a writing prompt for a story, poem or essay.  In fashion, these spreads are called “stories” anyway, so it’s great to use them as visual inspiration for new written work!

Discussion Questions:

Are there certain places that are YOUR places?

Tell me about your environment.  What do you find inspirational, where you are, right now?

 

Sarah Herrington’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Writer’s Digest and she was named a Poet to Watch by Oprah Magazine. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Always Moving (Bowery Books, 2011) and several nonfiction books, including Om Schooled (Addriya Press, 2012), and Essential Yoga (Fair Winds Press, 2013). In addition to writing, she is an advocate for mindfulness and creativity and is the founder and lead facilitator of OM Schooled Teacher Trainings. Sarah is a graduate of New York University’s English and Creative Writing programs and holds an MFA in Creative Writing through Lesley University.  She is a grateful member of the Bowery Poetry Club community and has worked for Gotham Writers’ Workshop and Girls Write Now. She divides her time between New York and California.

Mindfulness + Writing | Lesson No. 3: Pedagogy of the Poetic Body

Hi Poets!

From aging to healing to wounding to growing, there is so much movement in the body, which mirrors that of the external world around us.  We’ll read some work below that looks at celebrating, questioning, raging against, accepting, the lived experience of CHANGE in the physical bodily form.  Then, I encourage you to write poems around this idea!  Feel free to also try your hand writing some prose (an essay, a short story) IN ADDITION to the poetry, thinking about change felt through the body.

(a side note on that:  I often find writing in other genres, such as essays, helps me to both step away from my poetry AND get closer to it by looking at my ideas and at language through another form.  Consider how you might write an essay/story and a poem about the same topic of change, and how they might read differently given the very different BODIES of the text…..looking at how textual bodies effect expression!)

 

Reading Assignment

Check out these poems, of the body, by the body.  Consider, also, how when we write we use our body.  Yes, poems come from the mind and emotions, but it takes the body (whether fingertips hit the keyboard or grip the pen) to express a poem.

Extra Reads
“I’ve Grown Very Hairy” by Yehuda Amichai
“Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou
“Poem to my Uterus” by Lucille Clifton
“Poem in Praise of Menstruation” by Lucille Clifton
Homage to my Hips” by Lucille Clifton
“Hair” by Gregory Corso
“Atlantis” by Mark Doty
“After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen For The Third Time Before Bed” by Rita Dove
“Cancer Winter” by Marilyn Hacker
“A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass
“A Hand” by Jane Hirshfield
“Anodyne” by Yusef Komunyakaa
“My Mammogram” by J. D. McClatchy
“Small Hands, Relinquish All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“My Mother’s Body” by Marge Piercy
“The Applicant” by Sylvia Plath
“Face Lift” by Sylvia Plath
“Heavy Women” by Sylvia Plath
“The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” by Sylvia Plath
“Epidermal Macabre” by Theodore Roethke
“Old Man Leaves Party” by Mark Strand
“Sketch for a Landscape” by May Swenson
Question” by May Swenson
Dance Russe” by William Carlos Williams 

 

REQUIRED READING:
Pedagogy of the Poetic Body
 
This is a look at Jaques Lecoq, a dance instructor, who employed a “via negativa” technique when teaching his dance students. This approach was essentially rooted in the idea that a student is not to do something “correctly” but that they must keep moving toward new ways of creating.

While he teaches dance, he firmly believes that body is a poetic medium (which you will read here) and that the laws of movement, dynamic rhythm, relationship with the space, emptiness and fullness, variation, scale and équilibre are key

As poets, I believe the same ideas can apply to our work. We can make a poem dance. There is no “right” but there are infinite modes of expression. I believe that balancing a poem on a page (with space, emptiness, fullness, variation, scale and équilibre) can make it spectacular. Of course this does not always equate, but thinking about writing poem AS A DANCE is a method of beginning to understand how to shape it. In this piece you’ll see that that he thinks of the body as it relates to natural things (fire and the sea, for example). I want you to think of your poems in these ways. What landscape are you creating? And how does movement (of the body, of nature) inform it? (See writing assignment below).

 

Writing Assignment

I want you to focus on writing three more poems, in addition to the ones you’ve written. 

1. After reading about Jacques Lecoq, I want you to feel your body move through a landscape (the sea? a fire? on a boat? sick, laying on the earth) and write a poem that utilizes exactly how your body would feel in this place. Use space, rhythem, language and movement (both musically and spatially) to tell this story. Inhabit yourself. When I say music, I do not mean rhyming.  There is a forum for this in Week 3.

2. As mentioned, above, write on the concept of CHANGE felt and lived in the body.  You can inhabit and translate CHANGE any way you wish. 🙂

3. Write a prose (block shaped) poem that uses little to no grammar (you may experiment with white space). You may set margins if you’d like. This is supposed to feel rigid. Perhaps your language will mimic this. Perhaps it will not. There is a forum for this in Week 3.

 

Discussion

I hope you’ll head to the forums to post your poems. If you need help, contact me. I urge you to LET THESE BE GUIDING INSTRUCTIONS, but never, ever to get caught up in formality. If the prompts inspire you, run with it, but let yourself guide yourself. I am not caging you in by instruction.

 

Research and Submission Resources

Duotrope: Submissions Tracking (This resource is excellent for finding journals and anthologies interested in dark speculative narratives. Your particular voice will determine whether your narratives will be more suited toward literary journals open to character-based speculative or speculative journals open to narratives on a more diverse spectrum of genres and aesthetics. Before submitting to any publisher, make sure to read the journal first. Read several issues. Visit the site. Familiarize yourself thoroughly with the guidelines. Never submit to a journal or anthology edited by an editor you do not know or read. Submit to journals smartly, journals that reflect your aesthetics as they are, not what you want them to eventually be. If you have a favorite journal but aren’t sure if your aesthetic suits the journal yet, give your narrative time to grow and develop until it meets the standard of your reading. Then begin looking at the submission process.)

Publisher’s Marketplace: Publisher and Agent Research (Excellent for long work research and submission information–i.e. novels, novellas, collections, etc.)

Lesson No. 2: Contemporary Poetry: Sensuality & Shape with Sarah Herrington

The Body of The Poem

Whenever I get stuck in my own writing (pretty much no matter what genre I’m working in), I turn toward reading poetry.  I have a well-worn Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry I love for its breadth of work and compact package, and I’ll open to any page and just begin reading, feeling, being with the bodies of other people’s poems.  So I share this with you……when you need kindling for your own poetic fire, reach toward the sparks of others who have written in the past.

I’m including a fun list of poem-kindling below.  Let’s feel the light and heat of poems!

As with last week, study the language of the excerpts. What do you like? What stands out to you? What don’t you like?  All of this is useful information.  Maybe even notice some ideas or words in the poems that can be used as writing prompts for your own work!

Mocking Bird Hotel by Valzhyna Mort 

Jean-Paul Belmond ” ”

Touch Gallery: Joan of Arc BY MARY SZYBIST

Honey/Manila Portfolio by FARNOOSH FATHI

Two Poems by Molly Gaudry

Thunderbride by Mark Bibbins

From Euphoria by Sina Queyras

From Mercury by Ariana Reines

My Diary by Stephanie Beger

Poems by Kristina Marie Darling

Poem by J. Michael Martinez

Verguenzaby Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Cunt Norton by Dodie Bellam


Critical Essays:  Read up on these, too!  Looking at poetry a different way, through exploration in essays.

Collected Body by Valzhyna Mort
Pornography & Literature, with Dodie Bellamy

 

Writing Assignment

This week, pick one of the following prompts and write a poem!  If you want, try both prompts and send work my way……

1)Your body is a sacred shape.

How does your body connect you to your understanding of any of the following words?

“the Divine”

“the Universe”

stars/astronomy/atomosphere

In this week’s writing, explore any moments you’ve felt of connection between your individual body and the larger world and/or your belief system.  Is the body a part of whole of the cosmos?  What can we learn about the larger world through looking at one’s individual shape?

2) Inside/Outside

Consider your body from both inhabiting it (inside) and how either you yourself view it or how others view it (outside).  Discuss what is destabilizing about the experience of being in a body that is also viewed from the outside.

 

Discussion

I hope you’ll head to the forums with ideas about these poems.

  • Which poems do you respond to the most, and why?
  • How do you think these poets encounter sex and body in their work?
  • Do you think form is as important as language?

 

Sarah Herrington, FacultySarah Herrington’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Writer’s Digest and she was named a Poet to Watch by Oprah Magazine. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Always Moving (Bowery Books, 2011) and several nonfiction books, including Om Schooled (Addriya Press, 2012), and Essential Yoga (Fair Winds Press, 2013). In addition to writing, she is an advocate for mindfulness and creativity and is the founder and lead facilitator of OM Schooled Teacher Trainings. Sarah is a graduate of New York University’s English and Creative Writing programs and holds an MFA in Creative Writing through Lesley University.  She is a grateful member of the Bowery Poetry Club community and has worked for Gotham Writers’ Workshop and Girls Write Now. She divides her time between New York and California.

 

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