English 220: Poetry Writing I

I was invited by the English faculty at the College of Charleston to attend the Pubsense summit on scholarship.  At the conference, I was introduced to a variety of professionals from both the writing and publishing communities from around the country.  The summit entailed a bunch of lectures and a few writing exercises contained within those lectures.  Such as in the opening lecture, we were asked to write a ten syllable poem called a deckaz.  The rules for that poem was that we had to state our purpose or what we expected to learn at the conference in just ten syllables.  This exercise really helped me condense what I wanted to say, both in poetry and in speaking to other people.

I also learned about the difference between Indie and Traditional Publishing, as well as the difference between a literary publisher and a literary agent.  This made me go back and review my work.  I had to ask myself a few questions:  What was my work, prose and poetry both, suited for?  Should I go Indie publishing, or Traditional?  These are not questions I’m fully ready to answer yet, but it was really awesome to be immersed within the field that I want to go into and see firsthand how things work.  All in all, I had a wonderful time and I would recommend anyone to go.

For my literary event, I attended the fiction reading of Charles Baxter. The reading took place on March 25th at Randolph Hall. There, he read from a handful of short stories, like those from his new book “There’s Something I Want You to Do.” I found the readings really emotionally charged – especially the one that was based on a true story, where Mr. Baxter got in an accident when in a limousine and rolled off of the highway. Additionally, I liked the idea that the book had recurring characters in it despite the short stories themselves being stand-alone in theme and plot so it could contain a sense of familiarity in each story for the reader, while also keeping tabs on particular characters in other points of view.

I’m also in the capstone fiction course, so Charles Baxter came to speak with us during class time. We asked him a lot of questions about writing, and it was a really enlightening session!

On March 26, 2015 I attended a reading by Charles Baxter, a very well respected author. Charles Baxter is the author of five different novels, a finalist for the National Book Award, has compiled five collections of short stories, three collections of poems, and two collections of essays on fiction. In total, Charles Baxter has 14 books.

In this event, Baxter revealed how he came up with some of his stories. He discussed how one day he discovered some of his old unfinished 35-year-old stories. He found inspiration in these stories and he ended up finishing some of them and publishing them.

Baxter ended up reading a section from one of his stories. He read a scene about the protagonists mom, yoga, cigarettes, and how the mom wanted grandchildren.

Baxter later recalled his personal story about how a limo driver got him into a bad accident and he explained how he turned this into a story.

Baxter then closed his event by answering some questions from the audience. This was a very interesting and entertaining event and I definitely need to check out some of Charles Baxter’s stories and novels!

Well I attended 2 but I am not entirely sure the first one counts, so I went to a more official one for credit.

Event 1: I am a DJ for Cistern Yard radio, and there was an event at Sneaker on King street called a cypher. This event included 12 artists who would essentially deliver spoken word over hip-hop beats. I am constantly arguing for the poesy of hip-hop music, especially when it comes to cyphers. Some of the artist were free styling, or delivering lines off the top of their heads, others came with pre-written verses. The event lasted for about 3 hours.

Event 2: English Day! There were posters and live readings of work that graduating seniors have done over the course of the year. I just enjoyed seeing the impressive works of some of my peers. It’s cool to know that we are capable of such things, when it feels like we have little authority in the world. There are definitely some potential authors that are at CofC right now!

Last Thursday night I, like a lot of the rest of the class, went to the launch of this year’s Miscellany at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Several students who were published this year read from the work that they had submitted to Miscellany, and all of them were a joy to hear. Because I read submissions for the magazine this year, none of what was read was new to me, and yet being reintroduced to the pieces, especially “Where Do Ants Go in Winter?” gave me a completely different perspective on the pieces than I had originally had. I especially loved Jozie’s story “This Week’s Down and Dirty” because I think the school newspaper structure worked so well at meshing together unlike narratives, and the humor of the story, mostly through the perfectly-characterized narrator, felt so natural. I liked “Jo” as well, by Madeline Barry, for it’s combination of cuteness, annoyance, and pity in the title character and the way it made the reader/listener both empathize and disagree with the main character. All in all the reading was fantastic; the atmosphere was so friendly and warm, and all the readers presented such great work, and the magazine itself looks beautiful and contains even more fantastic writing and artwork. (On the art size, I especially love Buns. Both because I liked the message it was communicating and because it simultaneously reminded me of Salvador Dali and Lady Gaga.)

Rappaport’s poem compares the speaker to a raindrop.  The speaker describes how she/he see’s him/herself in a little raindrop that is falling.  The speaker continues to explain how she/he feels she/he can be erasable and evaporated just like the raindrop/puddle.  The speaker is talking to someone, and the person whom she/he is talking to is “repellant” and “raging.”  The speaker desperately wants the person to embrace her/him.

Rappaport’s poem is truly captivating.  Clearly, metaphor is the primary poetic device used but readers can see the use of other poetic devices as well.  For instance, alliteration is used frequently throughout this prose poem.  Readers can see alliteration when the speaker states things like, “Eager and ethereal, then erasable, evaporated into…” and “Repellant, you are raging.”  The readers can also see a bit of repetition in words like “Embrace” and “falling”.  Next, there is a solid rhythm throughout this poem which can be hard to achieve in a prose poem.  Finally, I noticed there are a couple slant rhymes in here such as “embrace me, and not feel any need…” and “raging, and I am waiting,” I’m not sure if this was on purpose or not, but I like it!

I only have one suggestion to help make Rappaport’s poem even better.  As a reader, I want to know more about the person whom she/he is talking to.  The only information I receive is that this person is “repellant” and “raging.”  Is this person a parent?  A crush?  An ex lover? An ex best friend?  I want to know!  Overall, great job Alexandra!  This was a very enjoyable read.

I attended the Charles Baxter reading earlier this semester and really enjoyed hearing him read from his newest collection, There’s Something I Want You To Do. What I enjoyed the most was hearing him read a discarded section of his story “Charity.” As a writer of primarily fiction, I loved hearing him talk about why he eventually chose not to include the scene between Benny and his mother. His insight about the dangers of over-the-top comedy and writing that takes away from the consistent tone of the piece really opened my eyes to ways I can self-edit my own work and more carefully listen to the story that is being told, rather than trying to force my own agenda on the characters.

I really liked this prose poem about the confusion/apprehension the speaker feels at finding someone they feel comfortable and happy with, yet worrying about what could happen next. I liked that there is a contrast set up in the beginning–we how the speaker feels after nights spent with other men compared with how they feel with the subject. I also really enjoyed the imagery of hot vs cold. I liked that this could be read in a literal sense, with mentions of body heat and needing to be warmed up, but also in an emotional sense. The speaker feels cold towards the idea of love, but the subject makes them feel warm and stops the shivers and shakes. The inclusion of this abstract idea helped to really set this as a poem, rather than just a piece of short short fiction. We get a clear, concrete situation, but beneath the circumstances we see the speaker’s emotions and thoughts.

While I did enjoy the contrast in the beginning, I think it gave me a false first impression of what the poem was going to be about. I think the structure could be reworked a little to increase the cohesiveness of the poem. Maybe this idea of contrast could be expanded throughout the poem instead of just at the beginning. You could also explore ways to start the poem with the subject–“You’re not cold like the rest of them”–or something like that. Then we could understand that the poem is going to be focused on a specific relationship, and that the relationship looks a lot different than others the speaker has had. Thanks for your poem!

Emily

I had the privilege to attend and read at the Miscellany Launch Party this past week, along with many other fantastic readers including my good friends Courtney Carrick and Jozie Konczal, and the fantastic voices of Aaron Matthew, Amber Crausby, Madeline Barry, and Hannah Evans. There couldn’t have been a more perfect location for the party, as the gallery in Halsey was still filled to the brim with student work in the Young Contemporaries exhibit. The first reader, Aaron Matthews, read a spectacular piece of fiction titled “Where do Ants go in the Winter?” His piece had such a strong voice, characterized by the gentleness of the main character– a boy living in a dangerous world to him, he who is allergic to ants. One of the most striking scenes was at the end of his reading, where the boy dives his arms into an ant pile and turns up empty dirt. Jozie read a wonderfully hilarious fiction piece, also with the very well realized voice of a high school girl writing an article for her school’s newspaper in order to get out of summer school about a pot dealer who got busted, but who also had a drawer full of snakes. It was an incredible reading, and I can’t wait to see what kind of talent turns up next year.

McKayla’s prose poem combines two things that I’m always excited to see: long lines and a list construction. I find that list constructions give the reader so much to work with, and in good list constructions, as this one is, the way the objects intertwine is just as interesting as the individual objects themselves. Here, we a variety of ways a bowl can be filled, and we’re given the perfect amount of repetition and variation from the “bowls of… sentence structure. I encountered a lot of strength in the first and final sentence, both of which break away from the repetitive pattern and informing the reader just how to dip in and out of this poem. Giving herself the task of filling bowls within the poem is really so clever, and I found that it really opened up a lot of opportunities for poignant and upstanding images. The prose poem form really allows the ideas to flow into one another.

My suggestion is just that, not necessarily something the poem needs but rather I think would be interesting to see for a draft: I wanted to see a little more given way to narrative, perhaps. Obviously, I see some of the speaker in the scenes/information about haircutting, but I would like to see how the poem would change if for a sentence or two, the speaker broke away from the bowls and digressed a little more into her life so that we could gain just a little more insight before returning back to the striking bowls.

Jozie Konczal