Experiments

 I’ve had four writing groups this week that were extraordinary and bursting with talent and honesty.  Yesterday TWO people arrived with poems they had written outside of group and shared them–not just with me, but with everyone.  There was this sense, as we sat around the table, of a genuine safe creative space created with each of us anchoring it.  At the end we passed around a book and each of us read that classic poem by Robert Frost “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  The same poem, read over and over again in each of our voices.  I got this idea from Denise Levertov’s “The Poet in the World.”  I felt a little hokey when I suggested this–and everyone in the room was skeptical (but, because they are awesome, willing) “The same poem?  Again?”  But something happens when we get to the fifth person or so–the music of the poem rises forth.

I’ve been studying music in poetry lately–I read Levertov’s book and then am taking some steps away from theory and into studying and imitating fixed forms intently.   I wrote a 30 page paper on this as my senior thesis–and somehow managed to forget this practice–and while the fixed form poems I wrote during my study weren’t all (or even mostly) gems, they did make it possible for some of my bolder experimental work slice through my subconscious and show up on the page as though I hadn’t worked for them at all.

One such piece was published today online at Pithead Chapel, a journal that I genuinely love and have taken inspiration from in my own writing and in writing groups.  I’m so excited to share this with you: http://pitheadchapel.com/volume-2/volume-2-issue-8/