SOME IDEAS from a Poetry Workshop on Place
By Diane Kendig
When possible, I like to plan workshops that fit the moment, so while I have various presentations in sound, meaning, structure, received forms and types, I like to create challenges that fit the particular moment or the place I am presenting. So years ago, when the National Poetry Society asked me to lead a workshop at their national convention, and fresh from the long, difficult death of my sister, I created a workshop on how form helps us to hold our grief, the way, Adrienne Rich first noted, a potholder enables us to hold hot stuff. For the Malabar workshop, I wanted to use the idea and fact of place, an idea that was so central to Bromfield's writing-- Malabar India, where he once lived and set a novel in that became a movie; Paris where he first farmed; New York, where he had studied at Columbia; and too and most of all, Malabar Farm,
I began thinking about the workshop by looking for types of poems about place and found four types, close at hand in my own book and then among favorite poems. While not an exhaustive nor determinative list of categories, it seemed to me that poems used the place in at least four ways.
First, as significant description, as in Daniel Thompson's "Hiroshima Day in Cleveland 1995," or my "Ganaoque."
Second, the place name itself is significant in the poem, or the point of the poem, as in Adrienne Rich's "Calle Vision," or my "Ohio Rag" or "Moving into Minimum."
Third, the place in the poem is the setting, as in Seamus Heaney's series, "Clearances," on the death of his mother, and particularly the seventh of these quatorzains, where he places such an emphasis on the place without describing it except in stunning metaphor. In this category, I placed Sylvia Plath's "Suicide Off Egg Rock" and my poem "Mandela Appears in Montreal."
And the fourth included poems that juxtapose places. Here I suggested James Wright's "To a Cicada" (Italy and Ohio) and my "Unearthing a Path" (Findlay and Oberlin--both Ohio).
Looking now at my categories, they seem to overlap, especially the first and the third, but I think that difference that I was going for is (in the first) poems that contained a lot of description of the place and (in the third) poems that did not, that instead of description were setting for a scene. The notion isn't so fuzzy as my choice of examples, which I will be revising. And the types weren't so important as getting lots of ideas into my participants' heads.
The first day, I asked the poets to focus on ONE place, using ONE of the first three techniques. The second day, I asked them to use the fourth type, by juxtaposing their first draft place with a second or by creating a new poem that juxtaposed two places.
I also worked up a multi-level lesson on nesting rhyme, which I have been peddling for years although no one ever seemed much interested in picking up on. Based on an exercise by Susan Mitchell in Twitchell and Behn's The Practice of Poetry, I have both explored and expanded her suggestion to write 10 poems in the form. Cati Porter, that marvelous editor (poet, mother, organizer extraordinaire) published my explanation and two of them poems in her online journal Poemeleon.
In addition, before ever beginning, I brainstormed a list of phrases about places, and I looked up lots of quotes on place. Here's my list. Please add your own in Comments.
A FEW QUOTES/SAYINGS/PHRASES ON PLACE
“There were many words that you could
not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity…. Abstract
words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete
names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of
regiments and the dates.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“Whether we like it or not, we all come
from someplace. And at some point in our lives, we have to make peace with that
place.”
― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard
― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard
“Even places you know well can take on a
touch of the unknown when you arrive there from a different direction.”
― Kate Milford, Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader
― Kate Milford, Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader
“One does not love a place the less
because one has suffered in it.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
― Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
One
does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
“Words transmit the human essence of things… and we
need only to hear the word to imagine the kind of place which was given this
name.”
--Unamuno
And
as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 1845
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 1845
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
--Shakespeare, Midsummers night Dream V: 1
My friends, no one, not in my situation, can
appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the
kindness of these people, I owe everything.
--Abraham
Lincoln, Farewell address, Springfield, IL
The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places,
yea, I have a goodly heritage.
--Psalms 16:6
“You‘ll not find another place, you’ll not find
another sea.
This city is going to follow you.”
--Cafavy
In some cases, the name itself carries layers of
history and imagery more apt than any miage the writer could add….Names
themselves resonate with the history of the place.
--Judith
Barrington, Writing the Memoir
***And two quotes which are the epigraphs
of my book, The Places We Find Ourselves:
And we all knew one thing by being
there.
The space we stood around had been
emptied
Into us to keep….
--Seamus
Heaney, from #7 of “Clearances” in The
Haw Lantern
The place of the poem is the place of
our homelessness, the place of our groundlessness.”
--Heather
McHugh, in Broken English: Poetry and
Partiality
In short
About place
Going places (and then, its opposite, going nowhere)
Oh the places you’ll go
In place
Know the place
Know your place
Move up (down) a place
No place for…
Place at the table
Place in history
Place in line
Place it/ Can’t place it
Place settings
Placed (located)
Placed (first, second….last)
Placemat
Placement
Place name
Places, everyone
The places we find ourselves
This is (must be) the place
