Mike Jackman, Words & Music

Tag: teaching poetry

  • Generative Exercise: “Sasha’s Flight”

    LOL – this is not a poem I’m ever going to send out, I don’t think – so I’m sharing it with you. I promised to do a generative exercise along with my poetry students based on an assignment called “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” by Jim Simmerman in The Practice of Poetry. The exercise has 20 random instructions for constructing a poem, such as “9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic” and “14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.” You never know how weirdly letting-go the results will be. So…enjoy the strange! – mj

    Sasha’s Flight
    By Michael Jackman

    Our garden is a hamster stuffing
    weeds in his cheeks. The tomatoes
    dare the chickens in the run,
    frightening them by spitting
    seeds and tomato juice. Fat chickens
    shriek and huddle in the coop.
    Sasha, a Barred Rock hen, wishes
    she lived in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

    The tomatoes didn’t dare the hens,
    they were flirting, but dinosaurs
    have never understood this gesture.
    The huddled chickens lick each other’s
    tart feathers.

    When will the highway grow quiet?
    When will the neighbors silence
    their polluting porch lights?
    At night the light coats the collard greens
    like an endotoxin. The highway’s tritones
    curdle the corn and they try to cover their ears.
    The sound bites their sensitive silk and chews
    through a number of kernels.

    Breaking dawn makes politicians chew onions,
    grinding the teary skins all over God’s green acres,
    as onion skins are the diaphanous shawls 
    of rhetoric. Politicians mend fences with wire cutters.

    Sasha, the Barred Rock, discovers
    flight one day and beats her beak against
    the netted ceiling until she breaks free
    to join a flock of wild turkeys running uphill.
    Jackman never sees her again, though he will search
    the knobs of Floyd County, finding only splats
    of her particular green guano, and he will call,
    “Sasha! Sasha!” to the scolding of crows and coos
    of mourning doves. The situation will be derelectly
    novel, as he knows willows are the arbiters of hen
    grievances, and the forests call, “Sasha, cherie,
    fais comme chez toi    !” On cold winter nights,
    even the chert will light her fires, with one spark.
    The tomatoes spit, corn wails, lights ooze down
    the sides of collards.

  • Muriel Rukeyser on Why People Hate Poetry

    As a teacher of poetry, I often hear dislike of poetry expressed. When I hear it, I’m dismayed, and struggle to understand why. At least until I discovered Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry at a conference presentation. Seventy years ago, Muriel Rukeyser wrote these words explaining why people hate poetry that seem to me just as true today.

    Anyone dealing with poetry and the love of poetry must deal, then, with the hatred of poetry, and perhaps even more with the indifference which is driven toward the center. It comes through as boredom, as name-calling, as the traditional attitude of the last hundred years which has chalked in the portrait of the poet as he is known to this society, which as Herbert Read says, “does not challenge poetry in principle–it merely treats it with ignorance, indifference and unconscious cruelty.”

     -Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949)

    These days, you often hear a truism by poets and poetry faculty that turns Rukeyser slightly askew. It goes something like, “Everybody loves to write poetry, but nobody loves to read it.” Just as dismaying, but I think Rukeyser’s statement explains it just as well.

    Until we teach poetry in a way which raises the bar in understanding, enjoyment, and sophistication; until we properly offer this art in a way that is cross-cultural, multi-faceted, and inclusive, we won’t be able to get poetry the respect it deserves. I believe what poets and poetry teachers would want would be for people to find in poetry a way to explore what it means to be alive, to find comfort in difficult circumstances, to grow as an individual, and even to find a way to give praise for and to existence.

  • Poetry as Music: The Fundamental that Poets overlook

    Music is so important to poetry, that not developing it is equivalent to being tone deaf and trying to create a song. Remember, Sonnet means “Little Song” in Italian, and lyric poetry is so named for its musical qualities. Yet so many poets omit taking the time to train the ear.

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  • Finding the Words 2: The “Eight Words” Poetry Generative Exercise

    In FINDING THE WORDS 1: BLACKOUT/ERASURE POETRY I presented a lesson on how to get out of your word rut and discover new vocabulary through that form. In this lesson, you’ll discover new words by playing the “Eight Words Game.” The game also works as a poetry generative exercise.

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  • Finding the Words 1: Blackout/Erasure Poetry Generative Exercises

    Overview

    Writers default. That is, without quite realizing it, we write using preferred words, preferred sentence styles, preferred voices. This means a universe of possibilities is not occurring to us during composition. So we need ways to break out of our habits, to find new words. Here is the first of two poetry generative exercises for finding new words. 

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  • Imagery: The Foundation of Poetry

    This poetry lesson covers the key foundation of poetry: imagery.

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  • A Generative Poetry Exercise from Kenneth Koch

    Generative Exercises allow creative writers to think outside our normal default modes of creation. Often, the poems created during exercises are stronger than ones created with no prompt.

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Mike Jackman, Words & Music

Mike Jackman, Singer-Songwriter, Multi-instrumentalist, Writer