Haiku 202 + Japanese Forms
In this workshop, we will begin with an overview of haiku and move into other forms like senryu, tanka, renga, and others. We will also explore how contemporary poets are using the forms and write our own. Participants will leave with several poems and a strategy for writing more.
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Beginning List-Making
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Haiku 202
on
kigo
kireji
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Find a partner: Experimental Haiku
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Other forms
Senryu: Like haiku, but instead of nature these are about human flaws. They often also have a dark humor.
Tanka: The Japanese tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line. A form of waka, Japanese song or verse, tanka translates as “short song," and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. Similar to a sonnet (which ironically means “little song”) as there is a turn.
Kyoka: means “wild” or “mad poetry.” Is a popular, parodic subgenre of the tanka form of Japanese poetry with a meter of 5-7-5-7-7.
Renga: Means “linked poem,” to encourage collaboration. Like linking tankas, where the first person writes a haiku, and the second person writes a couplet of seven syllables each. The next person
becomes the first person, while another follows as the second. Continue on. Theme is important for its success.
Haibun: Haibun combines a prose poem with a haiku. The haiku usually ends the poem as a sort of whispery and insightful postscript to the prose of the beginning of the poem. Another way of looking at the form is thinking of haibun as highly focused testimony or recollection of a journey composed of a prose poem and ending with a meaningful murmur of sorts: a haiku. The result is a very elegant block of text with the haiku serving as a tiny bowl or stand for the prose poem.
Haiga: Haiga are typically painted by haiku poets and often accompanied by a haiku poem. Similar to a comic book?
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As a way to write a contemporary form of haiku: When we think of writing haiku, we think of our connection with nature. However, we are at a time of environmental uncertainty. Whether it be the manufacturing and results of plastic, the need to minimize trash via recycling, to local, national, and global environmental concerns, one can argue is it is possible to write haiku while ignoring the possibility of human extinction. Maybe the choice of not choosing to be socio-political is a socio-political choice? Let’s make a new kind of haiku.
Make a list of your environmental concerns, locally, nationally, or globally.
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Thank you so much for coming and participating! I hope you have a wonderful time this weekend.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
2016 MMLA Conference St Louis MO
I am honored to give two presentations at the 2016 MMLA (Midwest Modern Languages Association) Conference in St Louis, MO in November.
Here they are:
My Secret Wars of 1984: A Hybrid Mashup
“The self and the poem make each other real,” Rachel Zucker confirms, but what if the place of the poem is set when the self has no voice? What other complication arises as the self writing the poem [now] has a voice?
This presentation goes through the process of my hybrid mashup My Secret Wars of 1984, an alphabetized 366-sentence poetry-memoir collage, using texts from the year 1984 (Lyn Hejinian, Ronald Johnson, bell hooks, Marvel Comics, Dungeons & Dragons, President Reagan, etc.) with sentences of my own—within the context of political and personal struggles of that time (my mother coming out in the midst of living in a conservative neighborhood, bullying I faced, the American recession, daily nuclear bomb threats, etc.).
It challenges the genre and expectations of prose poetry via my appropriation of texts that “represent who I was” in 1984 (comic books, D&D, films, songs), as well as “who I became” in the now from those texts I didn’t have access to (Hejinian, hooks). With the alphabetization (because I alphabetized everything back then as a way to cope), the reader helps to create new contexts within the sentences, as new meanings come out of the multi-contextualized sentences to make new connections and contexts.
For the presentation, I will go through the process of the book’s conception, getting permissions and gathering sentences, the feedback (positive, negative, and neutral), and continuing with the work through a book-music video with a punk band. The story of this project definitely meets the call for a work in negotiation of “borders between poetry and prose, between artistic and academic, between theory and practice, between artistry and pedagogy to bring together sides that traditionally do not converge.” It is a blur between the public and the private, surviving and having survived.
Amy King says about the collection, “To read My Secret Wars of 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process.”
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Teaching Documentary Poetics to Students Without Creative Writing [and Reading] Experience: A Pedagogical Journey
Documentary Poetics uses text and image, map and rhetoric, alongside the poet’s own choices in collage and mixed form to reflect social concerns and activism with a personal connection. In other words, Documentary Poetics combines a hybrid of historical sources alongside the poet’s story to create a kind of mashup of resistance, voice, and investigation.
Can this complex, critical-meets-creative form be intimidating to students without experience in reading poetry? Oh, yes! Can students successfully emerge and come out with their own quality, highly-generative, publishable work? Even in a Freshman Composition course?
This pedagogical presentation highlights my experience with successfully teaching Documentary Poetry—both reading, interpretation, and writing—with wonderful results. I will begin with a brief history of the movement, beginning with Reznikoff and highlighting poets from the last ten years. I will then share my lesson plans for a variety of classes using Documentary Poetry focusing on Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave and Joseph Harrington’s Things Come On: an amnoir, what worked, what didn’t, and the positive student reactions and projects. Often, we would enter the books bewildered and come out ready to write our own, to take our own psychogeographical drifts and compile our “truths” via memory and documents.
The session will end with participants beginning their own Documentary Poetics projects.
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More about the conference is here.
Here they are:
My Secret Wars of 1984: A Hybrid Mashup
“The self and the poem make each other real,” Rachel Zucker confirms, but what if the place of the poem is set when the self has no voice? What other complication arises as the self writing the poem [now] has a voice?
This presentation goes through the process of my hybrid mashup My Secret Wars of 1984, an alphabetized 366-sentence poetry-memoir collage, using texts from the year 1984 (Lyn Hejinian, Ronald Johnson, bell hooks, Marvel Comics, Dungeons & Dragons, President Reagan, etc.) with sentences of my own—within the context of political and personal struggles of that time (my mother coming out in the midst of living in a conservative neighborhood, bullying I faced, the American recession, daily nuclear bomb threats, etc.).
It challenges the genre and expectations of prose poetry via my appropriation of texts that “represent who I was” in 1984 (comic books, D&D, films, songs), as well as “who I became” in the now from those texts I didn’t have access to (Hejinian, hooks). With the alphabetization (because I alphabetized everything back then as a way to cope), the reader helps to create new contexts within the sentences, as new meanings come out of the multi-contextualized sentences to make new connections and contexts.
For the presentation, I will go through the process of the book’s conception, getting permissions and gathering sentences, the feedback (positive, negative, and neutral), and continuing with the work through a book-music video with a punk band. The story of this project definitely meets the call for a work in negotiation of “borders between poetry and prose, between artistic and academic, between theory and practice, between artistry and pedagogy to bring together sides that traditionally do not converge.” It is a blur between the public and the private, surviving and having survived.
Amy King says about the collection, “To read My Secret Wars of 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process.”
[
Teaching Documentary Poetics to Students Without Creative Writing [and Reading] Experience: A Pedagogical Journey
Documentary Poetics uses text and image, map and rhetoric, alongside the poet’s own choices in collage and mixed form to reflect social concerns and activism with a personal connection. In other words, Documentary Poetics combines a hybrid of historical sources alongside the poet’s story to create a kind of mashup of resistance, voice, and investigation.
Can this complex, critical-meets-creative form be intimidating to students without experience in reading poetry? Oh, yes! Can students successfully emerge and come out with their own quality, highly-generative, publishable work? Even in a Freshman Composition course?
This pedagogical presentation highlights my experience with successfully teaching Documentary Poetry—both reading, interpretation, and writing—with wonderful results. I will begin with a brief history of the movement, beginning with Reznikoff and highlighting poets from the last ten years. I will then share my lesson plans for a variety of classes using Documentary Poetry focusing on Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave and Joseph Harrington’s Things Come On: an amnoir, what worked, what didn’t, and the positive student reactions and projects. Often, we would enter the books bewildered and come out ready to write our own, to take our own psychogeographical drifts and compile our “truths” via memory and documents.
The session will end with participants beginning their own Documentary Poetics projects.
[
More about the conference is here.
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