I’m pretty excited about the books my students chose for the first round of reading assignments in the class.  It’s a nice mix of voices, and a few asked for books that surprised me.  I had read most of them, but had the opportunity to read Jane Hirshfield’s Come, Thief for the first time this morning.

• Yehuda Amachai, Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with With Fingers  
• Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
• Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
• Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
• Stephen Dobyns, Mystery, So Long
• Vievee Francis, Blue-Tail Fly
• Ross Gay, Against Which
• Jane Hirshfield, Come, Thief
• Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
• Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
• Ethna McKiernan, The One Who Swears You Can’t Start Over
• John Murillo, Up Jump the Boogie
• Aimee Nezhukumatathil, At the Drive-In Volcano
• Thomas Lux, The Street of Clocks
• Kay Ryan, Say Uncle
• Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard

My great disappointment this time was that someone asked for Rose McLarney’s The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, and I couldn’t assign it because it’s checked out of the library.

Some more thoughts on a flexible, achievement-oriented assessment system for an Intro to Poetry class.  For more context on this post, you may first wish to read:

• Rationale
• First Group of Assessments: The Basic Stuff

This post focuses on Bookshop, which is the term I’ve picked for short craft annotations on a book selected by the student in conjunction with the instructor.  Here are the details I have given in the syllabus.  I also usually provide a few samples of excellent bookshop entries from semesters past.

The Bookshop:  Reading Journals

A maturing poet can write all he or she wishes, but will never improve without a commitment to reading as much poetry as possible.  We’ll perform close readings of poems on a regular basis, so that we can exercise our critical faculties and explore the poems on several levels.

In addition to readings from An Introduction to Poetry, Thirteenth Edition, you will be assigned a book of poems every other week for the duration of this course.  Because you are each individual poets with different styles, preferences, and lessons to learn, the readings will not be uniform.

Five times during the course, you will be asked to submit a bookshop proposal. Each proposal will consist of five individual volumes of poetry that you would be interested in reading.  At the next class, I will assign you one of those five volumes, or perhaps another book that isn’t on your list but is well-suited to the kind of work you would like to be doing. In the proposal, include some reasons for your choices.

You’ll then work with that volume for the next two weeks.  As you read, I expect you to write one bookshop post per week in your personal forum in our Sakai course.  Each post will focus on a single poem, though students should make mention of how that poem relates to others in the volume. (Is this poem similar to most of the others? Does it make a surprising deviation from the rest? Does it signal a shift in the book’s subject matter, tone, or narrative arc?)

In some instances, I may ask you to perform a close reading of a specific poem as a part of your journal. When this occurs, you will need to examine one element of craft that we have discussed in the class and how the poet uses it to achieve or reinforce the intention of the poem.  Close readings will generally be equivalent to 3-4 pages, double-spaced, in a word processor.

In general, however, you’ll have freedom to write about whatever you please, so long as it is related to the volume at hand.  Posts must communicate that you have read and thought about the book you were assigned.  Some of the best entries from previous classes covered topics such as:

• How the tone shifts as the relationship dissolves in Kara Candito’s “He Was Only Half as Beautiful.”
• The role of stage directions in A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A.
• The effects of repeating “bye-bye” in Thomas Lux’s “Baby, Still Crying, Swallowed by a Snake.”
• An incomplete metaphor in Natasha Trethewey’s “After Your Death.”

Due dates for these posts are listed below.  Bookshop posts will be approved for credit if all of the following criteria are met:

• The post focuses on a single poem in the collection, but makes mention of how that poem relates to others in the volume.
• The post demonstrates that significant attention has been paid to the whole poem, rather than a section.
• The post traces the poet’s use of a single element of craft throughout the poem, citing specific lines.
• The post gives specific and detailed explanation of how the craft element is employed and what effect that has on the reader of the poem.
• The post focuses on how the poet achieves certain effects rather than explicating the meaning of the poem.
• The post is clear and well-written.
• The post is the student’s original work, and does not refer to critical work about the poem being discussed.  The goal of the bookshop is for you to have an individual relationship with these poems, not to build your understanding of poetry by reading other peoples’ criticism or analysis.  (We’ll do that in other areas of the course.)
• The student shows a clear and sophisticated understanding of the craft element selected, or undertakes sufficiently ambitious analysis of a difficult topic.
• The student includes a rationale for selecting the poem and element of craft studied, preferably noting a specific way in which the post relates to his/her own creative work.
• All cited lines are included in the appropriate citation format.

You will also have the chance to read your classmates’ reading journals during the week and make comment on at least two individual entries.  You may find yourself commenting on similar revelations in your own readings, observations on craft elements, or your experiences with the poet or text that your classmate is discussing.  You may make as many comments as you like, but a good rule of thumb is to aim to have two comments accepted for credit each week.  To encourage you to read and write, you can have only one comment accepted for credit each day, so if you want to get the commenting achievements, you will need to comment at least two days each week.  This encourages you to read broadly and think about poems often during the week.

Comments accepted for credit will:

• Demonstrate understanding of both the poem and the bookshop entry that analyzes it.
• Add significant new information to the analysis, either by highlighting points that the original post’s author or other commenters did not mention, or by tracing an element of craft that the initial author did not focus on.
• Include citations in the correct format.
• Be respectful at all times of the initial post’s author and of other commenters.

Starred posts or starred comments will meet each of the above criteria, but will also significantly increase your instructor’s understanding of a poem or element of craft.  Usually, I have my mind blown eight to ten times a semester by posts that bring me a whole new understanding.  I live for those.

My hope is that as you read your classmates’ journals, two things will happen:

1. You will become interested in poets and poems to which you’ve not yet been exposed, perhaps informing your choices on later bookshop proposals.
2. You will use your classmates’ observations on form, style, and craft to identify elements in your own work that can be sharpened.

I will make comments on some bookshop posts as well, but the primary reason for doing this assignment is to learn from your classmates and the poems that struck them as important.

One Request | 5 achievement points – Made one request for a bookshop title before titles were assigned.

Five Requests | 10 achievement points – Made all five title requests before titles were assigned.

One Post Accepted | 75 achievement points - Had one bookshop post accepted for credit.

Five Posts Accepted | 175 achievement points - Had five bookshop posts accepted for credit.

Bi-Weekly | 100 achievement points - Had at least one bookshop post accepted for credit on each of your five assigned titles.

Eight Posts Accepted | 750 achievement points - Had eight bookshop posts accepted for credit.

Ten Posts Accepted | 1,000 achievement points - Had all ten bookshop posts accepted for credit.

Star Post | 100 achievement points – Wrote at least one starred post.

Commenter | 25 achievement points - Had two comments accepted  on different days in the same week.

Halfway There! | 125 achievement points - Had two comments accepted on different days in five of the ten weeks of the bookshop.

Consistent Commenter | 125 achievement points- Had a comment accepted in each of the ten weeks of the bookshop.

Constant Commenter | 250 achievement points - Had two comments accepted on different days in each of the ten weeks of the bookshop.

Star Commentary | 25 achievement points - Made a starred comment at least once.

To make sense of this post detailing achievements for a student-centered or game-based Introduction to Poetry Writing course, you may want to first read the post which makes a case for a new system of assessment.

Before I jump into achievements, I’m going to refer a couple times to this term, which will be included in the syllabus:

Scheduled Poem Checkpoints

The goal of a creative writing class is to get you writing.  And write you shall!  In fact, you should carve out some time to write each day, whether you’re writing new drafts of poems, revising existing poems, writing craft papers about poems you really enjoy to better understand how they work, or journaling and taking notes which can be used in your poems later.

However, just writing a lot of poems in rapid succession does not ensure that you’ll get better as a writer.  Therefore, for the purposes of credit, you’ll only turn in <<a set number of>> poems during the semester.  To ensure that I can get you useful and timely feedback, there will be set due dates for receipt of poems, called scheduled poem checkpoints.  At each checkpoint, you may hand in one (and only one) poem.

The poems you hand in at each checkpoint a) become eligible to be workshopped during in-class discussion, and b) may be annotated by the author to be considered for other achievements.  For example, if your poem contains a metaphor, a heroic couplet, and a fair amount of consonance, you might ask for that poem to stand for the Metaphor Master, Heroic Couplet Hero, and Consonance Commander achievements.

You are not required to turn in poems at each scheduled poem checkpoint, but come on, you’re in this class to do some creative writing, so take advantage of all of these!

<<then I’ll list the dates of schedule poem checkpoints>>

I’ll also refer to an assignment called bookshop, which is a series of short craft papers that chart the use of a single element of craft throughout a poem or collection.  My students have to read a volume of poems and select a poem from that collection to write about.

–

This set of achievements is intended to be the gimmes: the easy stuff that students could use to start to build their scores early in the semester.  To avoid a flood of late-term, basic work, teachers may wish to set a cut-off date for submission of these artifacts, probably 2/3 through the course.  Most are designed to carry low achievement score values, and demonstrate student understanding of poetic terms through creation of original phrases.

This set of achievements may be earned in one of two ways:

1. A separate document which includes the student’s name, the achievement(s) sought, and examples.  Students who seek credit for these achievements in a separate document must complete the achievement by <<date 2/3 through the course>>.
2. Integrated into one of your poems handed in during the semester.  These may be handed in at any scheduled poem checkpoint.  However, remember that attempting all of these in a single poem may lead to a pretty bad poem.  Note which achievement(s) you seek as a footnote to the poem, including any additional notes required to earn the achievement.

If a Google search reveals that your example has been used before, you will not receive credit for the achievement.

Blank Verse Boss | 5 achievement points – Write at least three lines of blank verse.  Include marks of scansion.

Concrete Image Commander | 5 achievement points – Write at least three original concrete images.  Note what makes them concrete, rather than abstract.

Consonance Chief | 5 achievement points – Write five lines which use heavy consonance.  Change the consonant sound being used at least three times.

Dimeter Doctor | 5 achievement points – Write at least three lines of dimeter. Include marks of scansion.

End Rhyme Recognition | 5 achievement points – Write at least five lines of that utilize end rhyme.

Enjambment Expert | 5 achievement points – Enjamb four lines. Explain why enjambing these lines is more effective than end-stopping them.

Epigraph Appropriator | 5 achievement points – Write a poem which includes an epigraph from another poem or piece of prose, or provide an example from your bookshop reading.

Heroic Couplet Hero | 5 achievement points – Write an original heroic couplet.

Hyper-Hyperbole | 5 achievement points – Write something that’s extremely hyperbolic.

Mary Had a Little Iamb | 5 achievement points – Write at least ten lines of iambic verse.  Include marks of scansion.

Isn’t It Ironic? | 5 achievement points – Write something ironic, and then explain in a footnote how irony is being employed, including an example of how you could have pursued a non-ironic solution.

Metaphor Master | 10 achievement points – Write five original metaphors.

Metrical Maestro | 5 achievement points – Write at least three lines each of iambic, dactyllic, anapestic, and trochaic verse, and three lines which include at least one spondee.  Each line must contain at least three feet.  Include marks of scansion.

Metonymy Maven | 5 achievement points – Write three original examples of metonymy.

Mixed Metaphor | 5 achievement points – Write a badly mixed metaphor.

Onomatopoeia | 5 achievement points – Write at least three original examples of onomatopoeia.

Parallelism Pro | 5 achievement points – Write at least three lines or sentences which include heavy parallelism.

Pentameter Prima Donna | 5 achievement points – Write at least six lines of pentameter.  Include marks of scansion.

Run On! | 5 achievement points – Write a ridiculously long sentence which spans twenty or more lines of a poem.

Scan Me Up, Scotty | 5 achievement points – Scan a poem of twenty lines or more.

A-simile-ate | 10 achievement points – Write five original similes.

Synecdoche Swami | 5 achievement points – Write three original examples of synecdoche.

Tetrameter Tutor | 5 achievement points – Write at least six lines of tetrameter. Include marks of scansion.

Virtuoso of Vulgate | 5 achievement points – Write several lines that use vulgate diction.  Include, below the poem, alternate versions of those lines in elevated and colloquial diction.

Some other achievements I’ve already gotten to work on:

Conceit Captain | 10 achievement points – Find an example of a published poem in a bookshop assignment that uses a central conceit.  Hand in a copy of the poem (including the author’s name and the source of the poem), with a three-sentence description of the conceit of the poem.  If I can Google the title of the poem and the term “conceit” to find your example, you haven’t earned this achievement.

Dirty Limerick | 5 achievement points – Write a limerick.  It doesn’t have to be dirty.  Seriously.  Not all limericks are dirty.  This poem will not count toward scheduled poem checkpoints.

Elegaic Eye | 10 achievement points – Find an example of a published poem in a bookshop assignment that serves as an elegy.  Write a bookshop entry on elegy, or hand in a copy of the poem (including the author’s name and the source of the poem), with a three-sentence description of how you determined this is an elegy.  If I can Google the title of the poem and the term “elegy” to find your example, you haven’t earned this achievement.

Epigram: Shorter is Sweeter | 10 achievement points – Find three examples of epigrams that amuse you.  Then, write your own epigram.  This poem will not count toward scheduled poem checkpoints.

Erasure E as  e | 5 achievement points – Perform an erasure on a poem you wrote about for bookshop.  This poem will not count toward scheduled poem checkpoints.

Found Without Being Lost | 5 achievement points – Write a found poem.

Four-malist | 60 achievement points – Hand in poems written in established forms at four scheduled poem checkpoints.  Forms must be ten lines or longer, which excludes short forms like haiku and limerick.  These may include abecedarians, villanelles, sonnets, pantoums, sestinas, rondeaus, terza rima, or ghazals.

Inventor | 25 achievement points – Write a poem that invents a new form.  Include a description of that form which details the devices that must be used

Influential Inventor | 5 achievement points – Have a classmate use your invented form at a scheduled poem checkpoint.  The classmate will earn credit toward the Four-malist achievement.

I’ll probably create lower-value achievements for each individual form.

Personification In Action | 10 achievement points – Find an example of a published poem in a bookshop assignment where the poet uses personfication.  Write a bookshop entry on personification, or hand in a copy of the poem (including the author’s name and the source of the poem), with a three-sentence description of how you determined this was an example of personification.  If I can Google the title of the poem and the term “personification” to find your example, you haven’t earned this achievement.

Refrain from Smoking | 10 achievement points - Find an example of a published poem in a bookshop assignment where the poet uses a refrain.  Write a bookshop entry on refrain, or hand in a copy of the poem (including the author’s name and the source of the poem), with refrain lines highlighted and a short description of the effect of the refrain.  If I can Google the title of the poem and the term “refrain” to find your example, you haven’t earned this achievement.

–

Did I forget certain poetic devices that it would be easy to demonstrate some mastery of?  Let me know in the comments!  Any other kind of feedback would be welcome.

This spring, I’ll have the opportunity to teach two introductory poetry writing classes, one at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.  I’ve taught this course five times now, and every time I’ve loved it.  But one thing I have always struggled with is the idea that while the course purports to teach students to write poems, the assessments for the course haven’t really borne that idea out.  I’ve been wary of assigning a grade to creative work.  It’s never seemed fully right that the grade a student would make would be contingent upon their poems somehow appealing to my taste.

Of course, my grading system ends up being pretty darn subjective, regardless.  I’ve assigned grades to written papers about the work of published authors, and I’ve assigned grades to the quality and thoughtfulness (and perceived preparation) of comments in class discussions and workshops.  These are outrageously subjective measures.  There just isn’t a ton of objectivity in a truly great humanities classroom.

So I’ve been thinking: what if I could write an assessment system for a poetry course that would include plenty of subjective assessments, but instead of requiring students to meet the same subjective criteria, I could let them choose where they want to aim their efforts.  And better yet, what if I could recruit other working poets to help me do some evaluation?  What if I could make their commitment to the course feasible, a service that I might provide for them if they taught an intro poetry writing course?

Once I started thinking about a number of criteria and ample student choice over which paths to take, I started thinking about gamification.  And once I realized that there may be some power in distributing the assessment, I realized that at a minimum, I’d have to open-source the syllabus and assessment system, and if this thing really evolved, I might be looking at a MOOC. (I’m committed to the minimum.  The MOOC stuff still seems a looooong way off.)

On gamification:

Here’s one thing that bothers me about traditional assessment systems: they start with the assumption that everyone has a 100 and they lose points from there.  I don’t know of anyone who grades a paper, starting with the assumption that the student has zero points and is going to earn their way up to a 100 by meeting criteria.  If a rubric is provided at all (more rare than it should be, and I’ll admit to being a part of that problem), it generally shows the students how deficiencies will detract from the perfect score of 100.  It seems to me that if we have a set of course objectives, we should be able to assign points when those objectives are met, and those points should add up to 100 if they’re all achieved.

I want to try that.

But an introduction to poetry writing course hardly seems the place to aim for a 100.  The course has a particularly broad set of criteria for “excellence” at the introductory level.  Students should have working knowledge of a number of concepts (easy to assess) but the students’ ability to put those concepts together in meaningful ways will manifest itself in vastly different ways.  The student who learns to write truly accomplished metaphors but has zero proficiency with meter could be said to be ahead of the student who is competent at both but distinguished at neither.

So my aim in the coming weeks is to develop and weight a system that allows students multiple opportunities at multiple assessment options to demonstrate some fluency with the elements of poetic craft.  I aim to develop (or appropriate from friends and readers), then share, as comprehensive a list of fully fleshed-out assessment activities for the intro to poetry writing student.  My thinking is that if I can make these assessment opportunities available as flexibly as possible (with certain limitations imposed by my ability to keep up, which is admittedly a weakness in this system), students will have multiple paths to an A in the course, rather than the single path I’ve provided in the past (10% completion of new work, 20% revision, 15% exams, 15% participation, 40% craft papers).  Students will be able to set a lot of their own goals, and when they show mastery in an area, they can move on.  Student X and Student Y might both get an A in the class but might have only done one or two of the same assignments.

I expect that this sounds cooler to people who’ve already passed this level of their schooing careers than it will to many of my students.  I’ve found that students at the introductory level want clear paths to the A (particularly because so much of schooling is based on the assumption that they’ve started with one and lost points along the way).  I don’t think they’ll love having so much choice, especially because a third of the way through the course, they’ll look at their grade and probably won’t be a third of the way to where they need to be to get the A.  That will drive some students absolutely nuts.

I think I can live with that.  The world doesn’t assume that you started rich and lost your retirement dollars to your mortgage and power bill along the way.

What if we start with the idea that students show up with zero points in the class, and a list of 50-100 possible assessments that they can choose to pursue?  Each assessment has a point value attached: because I’m an Xbox junkie, let’s call this the student’s achievement score.  If you total all the possible achievement scores together, you might get 7,5000 or even 10,000 achievement points.  That would represent mastering a pretty advanced curriculum– a body of work that would be well beyond the expectations of the introductory level. At some arbitrary number that represents a significant body of work, let’s say 2,500 achievement points for now, a student would get an A.  At some lesser number, say 2,200, the student earns a B.  And there are thresholds below that.

Certain achievements should be easy to get, but as in games, those should be worth fewer points.  Write one poem (with no other criteria in place): 5 achievement points.  A student could have points after two minutes.  Provide an original example of metonymy: 10 achievement points.  A student could do a ton of these and still not reach 2,500 achievement points.  But doing a lot of these could start to add up, and reduce the student’s obligation to go for the big stuff.  Some students won’t care: put the big stuff in front of them, and they’ll go for it.

So, what’s the big stuff?  Write a poem that’s juried by a working poet (not the instructor) and assigned a five-star rating: 100 achievement points; or, a three-star poem: 25 points.  Be voted “most helpful commenter” by your peers in an instant run-off election: 100 achievement points; or, rank second or third in that voting: 25 achievement points.  Have twelve craft papers on individual poems by published authors approved: 800 achievement points; or have six papers accepted: 250 achievement points.

Admittedly, I’ve pulled these point figures out of the air; I provide them now as examples rather than as actual values I aim to use.  I expect that the point values will need to be carefully balanced when the array of options is available and there are reasonable criteria for evaluating each established.  So they may be constantly shifting.  I also expect that without some controls, students will hand in whole volumes on the last day and the all-too-human instructors won’t be able to keep up.  Or, the last minute stuff won’t be any good, because students haven’t had reasonable feedback loops all along, and students will be disappointed because they felt like they never had a reasonable shot.

So a sample syllabus that accompanies the assessment system will be a product.  (The sample will become my live syllabus for spring 2013, if I can get it done in time.)  Some assessments will be open to students at any point in the semester, others time out.  If a student attempts the craft papers, they can’t submit more than one per week.  If the student attempts the “wrote five different forms” assessment (50 achievement points), they have to do so incrementally, because I only accept one new poem every two weeks.  If I get someone to agree to jury the poems independently, students can only submit two.  If a student attempts the recitation assessment (25 achievement points), it would have to be done on certain days when class time was available for it, and only a certain number of slots are available (on a first-come, first-served basis) for attempts on each of those days.

But students could conceivably submit one product for multiple purposes.  I don’t see why a student couldn’t turn in a pantoum towards the “five different forms” assessment that also includes personification, or an imitation of a famous poet that also includes inverted syntax and an extended metaphor.

On sharing:

This seems like a lot of work to design.  This seems like a lot of work to implement.

I still want to try it.

I’ve been the recipient of an enormous amount of good advice, a lot of materials, and no shortage of excellent models in my short teaching career.  I’ve begged, borrowed, and built a class that’s a lunatic amount of work for both the students and for me.  I like it that way.  Not everyone will.

But seriously, most of the poets I know think that teaching poetry to students is the bee’s knees, and few of them are making it as easy on themselves as possible.  They’ve got skin in the game because they’re passionate readers and they really do want to help young and developing poets get good quickly because it will make the reading and grading so much more pleasurable.  I’m hopeful that a lot of people will drop by after finals are done and offer ideas for potential assessments, or criticisms of the syllabus, and that we can sharpen it together.  Maybe we end up with a few divergent products, and share the results. People may change the point values to reflect their priorities and student learning goals, which won’t necessarily be the same as mine. Maybe a few will share those learning goals, which could become part of the product.  Maybe a few will volunteer to jury a small set of poems for my students, and I’ll do the same for theirs.

I just think there’s a lot of potential benefit that we could realize– and perhaps out students could realize– from sharing.  And if no one wants to share, that’s cool, too.  I still want to try this, and I’m willing to do it in public.

So, in the next couple weeks, this blog will probably have a couple entries, sometimes half-baked, about this process and about the product itself.  The product may end up elsewhere, like a wiki.  But wherever it is, you’ll have access to it.  I promise.

A student asked me to look at an imitation of Walt Whitman for another class this morning, and I began composing thoughts about imitations in my response to her.  Here they are:

To my mind, an imitation can take a few forms.  The first is that you can adopt a voice similar to the poet, which allows you to show an understanding of the formal, stylistic, and content choices that a poet makes.  The upside to this is that you’re demonstrating deep understanding of the poet, the downside is that the poem doesn’t feel at all like yours.  You’re essentially addressing subjects that the poet might have addressed.  (The most common form of this kind of imitation is anachronism– you tackle a subject that didn’t exist in the poet’s day, but that he/she likely would have addressed if he/she were living today.)

Another is to emulate just the stylistic choices that a poet might make, but looking at a subject of your choosing.  This form asks the writer to read the source material widely and make extensive notes on the kinds of choices a poet would make at given times.  In the case of Whitman, you’d probably be looking at rhetoric, image and syntax most heavily.  Whitman tended toward long, long lines and sentences, with lots of parallelism and some stilted syntax.  He was heavily argumentative in his tactics, and a lot of scholars have noted that he tended to borrow from the Bible his rhetorical constructions, but generally reserved those constructions for non-Biblical subjects, lending them a new tension.  The images didn’t necessarily fit with the historical context of the rhetorical strategies.

The third kind of imitation, which I think is the one you have chosen, essentially serves as a word substitution.  Using a single poem as source material, the poet adopts the construction of the poem almost verbatim, substituting in his/her own words as needed.  If there’s a metaphor in line 5 of the source material, there will almost certainly be a metaphor in line 5 of the imitation.  This kind of imitation does not require that the imitator be deeply familiar with the source poet, only the source poem.  But to be successful there must be a pretty intimate study of the source poem.

It seems to me that for the purposes of classwork, any of these forms of imitation might be reasonable.  I doubt, however, that the first will be terribly successful for writers to undertake for any period of time; writing as someone else may generate some interesting ideas but will ultimately lend a certain inauthenticity to the work.  Likewise, the third may be successful once in a blue moon, particularly as a tongue-in-cheek response to a particular poem, but it is not a sustainable strategy for a life’s work.  The second, however, seems to me to be rich with possibilities, because it is the only one that seems capable of accommodating infinite variation. Like received forms, this kind of imitation seems not only worthy but an indispensable tool for learning the craft of poetry.

Another post about the Grind Daily Writing Series.  Here are others:

• The secret origin of the Grind
• Why We Grind, Part One

We Grind to push ourselves past what we knew we could do. Most people enter a month of the Grind ready and willing to do the work, and they generally have some ideas or notes that they think will carry them through the month. And occasionally, they do just that. Several chapbook-length products have come from a month of the Grind, and a few folks have finished large swaths of their novels during a month. But for most of us, those ideas and notes carry us through about five days, after which time we’re on our own, producing without an agenda. And I won’t lie: that aimlessness leads to a lot of bad drafts. A whole lot. But it also leads to restlessness followed by bouts of intense experimentation. It leads to self-imposed formal challenges. It leads to topics we wouldn’t have dared tackle if we’d had more time to think things over. It leads the eye to light on the unexpected. It leads to work so raw that it cuts, but sometimes that cutting is what survives into the second or eighth or final draft.

We Grind to be part of a community. The original Grind was just four of us, and I knew all the participants, so it didn’t occur to me that what was gestating in that first month was a community that would evolve into something unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The Grind requires a writer to be willing to be vulnerable for a group of folks, perhaps some friends but, more than likely, mostly strangers. The rules of the Grind ask a writer to finish something every day, but everyone involved knows that the products created in the Grind are seldom finished. They’re usually sloppy, unwieldy, awkward and ugly drafts. The kind of thing that you wouldn’t ever want to see the light of day. And then, because the Grind recognizes that every aspect of the creative process is a risk, you send it to that group that includes a bunch of people you’ve never met. And they don’t speak about that work. They don’t make comments, they don’t share it. It wouldn’t seem to be a great community-builder, but what happens over the course of the month is that the pieces themselves begin to speak to each other over the month. Writers borrow from each other. Writers study each others’ habits, structures, images, and obsessions. Writers’ come to know each others’ minds. When you put it that way, how could you not develop some community?

We Grind for inspiration. Watching another writer reach deep, watching another writer push through the dry spell or conjure the draft that has perhaps been waiting for them for some time… these moments are magnificent. The Grind gives us the opportunity not only to see the work but to see how it is created, to see it in its nascent stages.  I can’t tell you the number of times that I have seen writers circle an idea without knowing it, only to have the thought crystallize after a few days or even a few months, and a terrific draft is born.  I think anyone privy to that process feels privileged.  Watching your Grind-group succeed is confirmation that writing– however difficult, however tortured– is a process we cannot give up on.

We Grind to write every day.  When I was an undergraduate, my favorite professor’s syllabus included a plethora of quotes about writing regularly or even daily.  The one that stuck with me is the one that stuck with many of you, too; I see it in a lot of different places. “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair,” said Isak Denisen, and her advice was mostly sound.  But I’ve come to accept that both the hope and the despair are necessary conditions of the writing process, and if we wait for the days when we can acquit ourselves of either or both, we’ll never get much writing done at all.  If the Grind could modify what Denisen said to read, “Write something every day, despite hope, despite despair,” that’d be about right.

We Grind to be held accountable.  I will be the first to admit: I am lazy. My friend Jessica gave voice to a philosophy I never truly knew I had today on Twitter.  She said, “I believe whole-heartedly in procrastination when it doesn’t fuck anyone over.” And let’s face it– in a writer’s mind, there is no more victimless a crime than the crime of not writing.  But by its construction, the Grind removes that excuse, and all excuses for procrastinating.  When a group of writers is out there in cyberspace, toiling through difficult and sometimes hopeless drafts, and they’re faithfully sending them your way by midnight, how can you not reciprocate?  When they rely on your commitment to the process, is there any more of a dick move than not sending something, sending anything?

We Grind to fool our own minds. So maybe you already felt accountable to yourself, and you find yourself writing every day.  But you’re still not getting anything done.  Our minds are fickle things, but they are so easily swayed by new incentives. Entering the Grind, making the commitment to finish something every day and send it to a small group (which sometimes includes– gasp!– strangers) would scare the dickens out of most mortals, but for a few of us, it provides us with something we desperately needed: permission to fail.  Plenty of writers are writing every day but find themselves in ruts because they are unwilling to move on before the sentence is perfect, the stanza is polished, the dialog sparkles, and the image is immaculate.  But writing doesn’t work that way, people.  It’s an ugly process and it’s filled with missteps and mistakes that you have to be willing to make.  If your brain is telling you you’re no longer allowed to make mistakes, the Grind can be a godsend, because it not only gives you permission, the “finish something every day” dictum practically demands it.

We Grind to puncture the subconscious.  When you’re desperate to write something, anything, before midnight, you’ll unlock pieces of yourself you didn’t know were there.

It’s April now, which some people know as the cruelest month, and others know as National Poetry Month, and handful of others know as NaPoWriMo.  Back in maybe 2003– the very infancy of the Interwebs!– poet Maureen Thorson adapted National Novel Writing Month to be an exercise worthy of us poets.  Instead of taking a month to finish one thing, we had to finish one thing a day!

Inspired by our sublime dinner at an Atlanta-area Steak & Ale, poet Emma Bolden and I undertook our first NaPoWriMo in 2007 using the aliases Steak and Ale.  We used aliases so we could deny to anyone that the poems being thrown up on the blog were ours.  We took the poems down after a day or two, leaving just the titles and a couple of lines, because we didn’t want them to be considered previously published and figured that if Google’s bots didn’t have a chance to pick them up, we’d be in pretty good shape.

It was an exhilarating month.  Emma and I routinely wrote poems which answered a thought that had shown up in the other’s poem that day, or the day before, and we had one of the most productive creative exchanges I’d ever been part of.  We veered in surprising directions.  We had days where the poems flowed freely, and days where we each professed that the exercise had been akin to prying meat from the jaws of a wolverine.  We went multimedia, posting photos and silly links along with the day’s poem, and created in Steak and Ale a set of characters that were sloppily hedonistic famous poets.  Steak would write about visiting her chalet or being featured in the National Enquirer, Ale would write about writing poems in the sauna or receiving a $10,000 haircut.  The personae became as much fun as the poems themselves some days.

But the poems… wow. My initial recollection was that I didn’t get many decent poems out of the month.  But that was entirely wrong; when I reviewed the blog this week, I counted three that have been published and another three that I saw through to completion and began sending out eventually.

I tried the exercise again in June 2007 with Ruba Ahmed, only instead of posting the poems in a blog, we simply traded by e-mail.  And we didn’t do lavish explanations, we simply sent a poem a day, every day, for a month.  The idea was that we each wanted to feel accountable to the other to produce new work.  We didn’t make comments on the work, though at our July residency at Warren Wilson, we each picked a handful of poems and sat down and discussed them with each other.  But the point was to be relentless about producing something every day, and we did, and it felt good.

So in October 2007, I was ready to try it again, and this time, Ruba, Matthew Olzmann, Zena Cardman and I made a small group out of it.  Knowing from our previous experiences with the exercise how brutal it could feel at times, Ruba and I described it to Matthew and Zena as “a grind.”

On October 1, 2007, I sent an e-mail to that group, with short bios that I had written by Googling my friends, and here were the “rules” that I outlined then:

• Write one poem every day. No skipping a day and making it up later. Zena has called the one exemption — for her birthday on the 26th.
• Poems must be sent to all participants by midnight.
• No restrictions on form and no minimum line length. A one-line poem will suffice just as nicely as a 28-page masterpiece.
• Some days will be rotten, and so will some poems; no excuses. Write something– anything– every day or suffer the mockery, derision, and eternal scorn of the other three poets.
• Feedback isn’t part of the equation– if we get all self-congratulatory for good first drafts, the silence surrounding the bad stuff will start to sting. So, if you really love a poem, feel free to say something, but don’t feel like you need to (or should) comment on poems daily. We’re not sending to each other to congratulate, but to feel (and be) accountable to the process and try something we might not have otherwise tried.
• Poems about Desperate Housewives are strictly forbidden, unless written by Matthew. Otherwise, no content restrictions apply.

And we were off.  If writing with one other person was exhilarating, writing with three was an incredible shock to the system.  I’ve read about the Polar Bear Club, where people race into the frigid Atlantic waters at Coney Island on New Year’s Day, and how participants say that getting into ice-cold water makes you feel more alive than you have ever felt.  I suppose October 2007 was like my poetic Polar Bear Club.  I loved it. Imagine how delighted I was when Matthew announced he’d be doing it again in November with his wife, Vievee Francis, and we recruited Megan Levad, Carly Harschlip, and Rosalynde Vas Dias along for the ride.

The Grind Daily Writing Series has been running without interruption for four and a half years.  The “rules” have evolved a little bit, but they’re still basically the same: write a poem a day.   It’s expanded to include fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and even notes on craft and structure. The Grind has had over 200 participants (sometimes more than 40 at a time), has gone international, and poems drafted in the Grind have showed up in the best journals in the country, in books from amazing publishers, and in anthologies recognizing some of the best poetry in the country.  In June, we’ll publish Another and Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series, an anthology that captures the first two years of the Grind and showcases some of the best poems drafted using this process.

In the next few weeks– hopefully before NaPoWriMo is over– I’ll add a few more thoughts on the genesis of the Grind and where it’s taken us.

Comments welcome, especially from you Grinders.

My students had their midterm exams today, so I am anxious to see what sunk in and what still needs work.

We’ve just finished A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, though we’ll come back to it toward the end of class, when students begin thinking about how collections of poems work.  Response to the book was terrific… though a couple students were skeptical when they first finished it, I think most had come around by the time they’d written papers on it.  A couple listed it as the best thing they’ve read in class on their midterm evaluations.  (Brigit Pegeen Kelly showed up on that list a lot, as did Zbigniew Herbert and Mark Jarman.)

Reading list #4 came out today; here’s what’s on it.

Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place
Charles Simic, Charon’s Cosmology
Kara Candito, Taste of Cherry
Dan Albergotti, The Boatloads
Donald Hall, Without
Mary Oliver, American Primitive
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden
William Matthews, Time & Money
Nickole Brown, Sister
Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Donald Justice, The Sunset Maker
Ross Gay, Against Which
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Geri Doran, Resin
Thomas Lux, God Particles
William Matthews, Flood

My students continue to make really interesting and bold choices.  (They request five books they’re interested in; I assign one.) A couple of these books didn’t appear on request lists but will be really helpful to the students who got them, but most were directly requested by students.  I was really pleased to see Ross Gay’s name pop back up.  After reading one of his essays and his poem “Jet” in class, Tony Hoagland’s name was on many of the lists this time around.  Hey, UNC faculty member who has had all of Tony’s work checked out since the beginning of the semester and doesn’t have to return them until 2-23-10, get over yourself and return these books to the library so I can assign them! One student had to resort to saying, “I’ll buy the book if you’ll just assign it to me.”

So, my students are nearing the end of their first book, and have made their requests for a second book.  Some went directly for the books that they commented on in the first two weeks, some went back to the list they used for the first requests, and some went in new and surprising directions.  All three strategies seem like worthy ones to me!

Some of the old favorites have made it to the list this time.  It always seems to work out that I’m able to include one book that I have not yet read; this time, it was one by an author with whom I was pretty familiar.

Here’s the list:

Linda Pastan, The Last Uncle
Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son & Other Poems
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
Jennifer Grotz, Cusp
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River
Thomas Lux, God Particles
Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Vievee Francis, Blue-Tail Fly
Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived
Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
Donald Justice, Departures
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Update: I left one out!  Paul Otremba, The Currency

My first independent reading list is done for the semester.  I do six reading assignments throughout the semester (though this time they’ll all read the same book for the third assignment), and students are expected to write about the books they read four times. There were a couple of books I was hoping to assign but no one asked for them or asked for work that might have informed the choice.  Students asked for a much wider range of contemporary books this time than in previous classes, which is good; I think they’ll have ample opportunity in literature classes to discover work by poets like Frost, Hopkins, Stevens, Eliot.

Keeping true to my general rule, I assigned one book that I had not yet read, though I have finished reading it since the assignments went out and I think it will be very helpful to the student who requested it.

William Matthews, After All
Weldon Kees, The Fall of the Magicians
Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived
Robert Hass, Time and Materials
2 x Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard
Kay Ryan, Say Uncle
Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Lotus Flowers
2 x Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Richard Wilbur, Things of This World
Ross Gay, Against Which

So, if one looks at the list above, is it painfully obvious which books were directly requested and which I suggested to students who chose largely traditional books?  The first round is the hardest– I have not yet seen student work to inform the decision, so I was forced to go by their early comments in class (if they have made any) and the poem that they brought in as exemplary.  Really, the biggest determinant was the five books they requested.  Only three students did not get an author they requested; two students ended up with an author they requested but not one of the specific books on their list. The big surprise from the students: no one requested any beat poets.  I think that’s the first time that’s happened in the first round.

How many of my old favorites for this assignment didn’t make the cut this time?  (For example, when was the last time I did an independent reading assignment without Donald Justice?)  Some of them were requested but not available in the library, some weren’t sniffed at.  This will change.  By the time the second assignment rolls around, they’ll be making spectacular requests.  We just need more time together.

Though you hardly notice a difference, I’m now running a more advanced version of WordPress, which is pretty great on the back end.

In my Intro to Poetry class, we spent some time last week on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” giving it a close reading and looking for ways that the sonnet form provides some tension with the content of the poem.  I tend to be somewhat conservative when teaching my poetry classes, in that I tend to do close readings only of poems that I’m really, really comfortable with: poems that I’ve written about critically and therefore spent hours or days dissecting, or poems that I have read closely in other classes (sometimes classes taught by someone else) or long discussions.

“Ozymandias” was a last-minute choice.  I first encountered the poem in high school but never gave it a great deal of thought, and it’s been circling around the work I’ve done for a couple years now.  It’s made an appearance in the assigned reading in my other classes but I never looked at it with students during our class period together.  The context provided by our textbook always seemed sufficient for what I hoped students would gain from the poem.

But as I reviewed the assigned reading this time, I ditched my initial choice of a William Matthews poem for Shelley.  I spent a little time with it the night before class and then another chunk of time with it the day of.  But, of course, it wasn’t until I was in the classroom, in the middle of the conversation, that I was able to articulate the strategy that must have drawn me to the poem so keenly in the eleventh hour: the layering of voice.  Take a look:

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Look at the distance between the speaker and the spoken.  The speaker (1) meets a traveler (2), who says that an artist (3) built a statue that quotes Ozymandias (4 – it’s the only direct quote of the poem, but is attributable to both the artist and Ozymandias, which is another nice complexity).  Of note: the speaker does not put the traveler’s words in quotes, suggesting that the made-ness of the iambic pentameter belongs to the speaker (and, for two lines, the artist/Ozymandias tag-team).  It’s in this distance that the tension between form and content– the intense made-ness of the poem contrasted with the futility of making– is fully realized.

Sadly, I’ve since gone looking for this poem in places other than the textbook, and sometimes the traveler’s speech is put in quotes!  Well, that sure changes my infatuation with this poem.  Not much, but some.

I always feel a little silly writing discoveries like this in my blog.  Someone else has had them before and articulated them more eloquently.

One of the first poems I teach in my intro to poetry classes is William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say.”  It’s a short poem with an amazing amount going on, though at first glance, many students dismiss it as slight or unworthy of being a poem.

My favorite thing about teaching it is the inevitable flurry of “This is Just to Say”-related humor that follows.  Perhaps you remember this post.  This time around, I tweeted that I had taught the poem, and got this message on Facebook a couple days later from a friend:

This is Just to Say

I have stolen
the Manguso
that you
leant me

and which
I meant to return
on the drive
home

Forgive me
it’s wonderful
so smart
and so funny

Thirty seconds after receiving one acceptance, another came in.  I figure that if I blog this one, too, more will arrive before the end of the day.

I had cause to quote this poem today.  Dan Albergotti turned me on to it last weekend.  It is the first poem in Jack Gilbert’s first book.

In Dispraise Of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

–Jack Gilbert

When successful, a short poem immediately launches into its lyrical potential; any narrative grounding happens in service to the lyric. (I don’t think there’s such a thing as a successful short narrative, at least not one in less than ten average-sized lines or so. That’s just not enough to tell a complete story in verse.) The sound and shape of the words must immediately be keener in a short poem; a longer poem doesn’t require such lyric density because there is more potential for variation and rest in a longer poem.

An unsuccessful short poem, however, can do all of those things and still fail. Where I see many short poems go awry is that they describe but never illuminate; they represent a thing but do it no service; they present truth in entirely truthful terms. Where’s the fun in that? Why represent a thing exactly as we know it all to be? These short poems fail to take advantage of trope or figure, fail to imagine their subject in a subjective light, fail to make the objective truth more accessible through the tenacity and frailty of words, or fail to recognize their own flaws as representative descriptions. At their best, the Objectivists understood at least the difficulty of getting it right in a way that was doomed to be wrong: not the thing itself, but the thing captured for a moment on the page; not the thing itself but the essence of the thing communicated in words. Such poems, even when willfully obscuring the speaker, must reveal the speaker in the details chosen to describe the thing…

1. You feel guilty about the time you spent folding laundry even though you’re going to have to have something to wear tomorrow.
2. You start thinking that a poem about lo mein isn’t such a bad idea.
3. It’s Sunday night and you’re wearing the same shirt you woke up in Saturday morning.
4. You’re logged in to Instant Messenger, Gtalk, Twitter, and your e-mail account hoping that someone, even a spambot, will send you a message, the first three words of which will help you solve that difficult Mark Strand poem.
5. The ninth coffee didn’t give you the jitters, but it also didn’t give you the focus you were hoping for.
6. Being identified as a language poet wouldn’t bother you, because nothing you have accomplished in the last couple days makes a damn bit of sense.
7. You wonder what possessed you to commit to reading Lowell’s Collected Poems when you could have picked seventeen volumes no longer than Trethewey’s Native Guard.
8. Larkin doesn’t seem curmudgeonly at all any more. He was dead right about everything and everyone.
9. You avoid human contact. If your wife knocks on your door, you become furious that she had the audacity to interrupt to tell you she’s leaving you.
10. You feel a strange sense of bliss, because you know it won’t last forever.  You sort of wish it could.