Forget the Manuscript, Let's Just Write

Most things are best kept simple. Last week Warrior Writers kicked off a fall workshop series at Suffolk University with a discussion about manuscripts. But the most productive and uplifting part of the night was the opening writing prompt. So instead of talking about manuscripts, the rest of our workshops will be generative.

We're going back to the original workshop model. It's simple: we read some flash fiction or a poem, free write for 15 minutes, read aloud if we want, repeat. The point is not to polish turds, but to flush the floaters. We're not all writers, but those of us who enjoy writing improve by jettisoning a whole lot of shit. The moments of inspiration that emerge during these brief sessions of shit writing fertilize future focused efforts, broadsides and performances.

This site and associated social media handles offer a ballast against shit posters, a digital front for sensitive creations inspired by Warrior Writers. It is not a partisan space. It's not about being right or wrong. It's about expressing complexity with elegance.

While I like graffiti in some forms, the digital graffiti in my personal social media feed is clogging up my mind and wasting my time. So I'm stepping back, rethinking my efforts and focusing instead through this server, to publish promotions and creations for Warrior Writers.

Sure, I'll probably read Reddit, but I’m not ready to engage fully at the moment. We need editors to step up for the subreddit, mods to improve new posts up there and encourage those that step through that gauntlet (even through anonymity) to share their efforts.

This post here is either the beginning of something new, or a decent toward the delicate end of an otherwise lovely effort to connect through Warrior Writers in Boston.

Workshops will continue through the end of this year, and with cooperation from The Longfellow House, in the spring too. But we’re doing strictly generative workshops. The other steps can be done with professionals, through private editors and in MFA programs. The Warrior Writers workshops that I’ll continue organizing are purely for writing now.

War Poetry: workouts from “Carrying the Darkness” ten count

For the Warrior Writers workshop at The Old Oak Dojo in Boston on Wednesday, August 29, 2018, 6pm

Let’s create some fresh language. It’s important to focus throughout this process, not fall into a rabbit hole of research and distractions. You will make mistakes. You will write things wrong. So maybe do this exercise on paper to avoid imprinting your raw words into a computer’s memory.

You will get more out of this exercise if you explore your own memory, without digital performance enhancements. Revise and type up your flow later, if you like it.

Prepare to go analog. Get out your notepad and pen. Get a stopwatch that will beep after ten minutes, preferably not from your phone. Print this out, or better yet buy “Carrying the Darkness” and mark the following ten poems with the prompts. Put your phone away. Walk down to a local park or coffee shop and do this work on a table there, away from the kids, away from Reddit, away from the huddled masses yearning for your attention. Shut off distractions and focus on the art of textual communication.

The following ten poems are taken from "Carrying the Darkness" Edited by W. D. Ehrhart.

Read each poem, and then take about two minutes to reflect. If sitting there in silent contemplation bothers your body, if you’re feeling anxious about what to do with your hands while thinking, maybe dance in a large circle, sprint a hundred yards, do sixty push ups, make a cup of tea. Get your mind in the zone for each poem. Then write for ten minutes straight. You could do this with a stopwatch, or just write until you are out of words, until your last thought escapes.

For each of these prompts write your words, right out of your brainwaves. Write onto the paper. Don’t stop. Don’t lift the pen from your page. Just go.

Jan Barry - Green Hell, Green Death

1. Color Associations - Pick a color to repeat and explore your memory. Whenever you lose the image that you are conjuring, return to the color, and expand on its many shades. Think of this color as a metaphor for deeper truths as well, or as a stand-in for another idea. Explore the potential of this color, how and where it might appear.

Igor Bobrowsky - The Journey

2. Senses Other Then Sight - Write a scene using other senses than sight (flavor, scent, sound, feel). Try eliciting a moment, building a story from the ears inward. Listen. Taste. Touch. Smell. Bring a scene and story to life out of your mind instead of through your eyes.

John Balaban - The Guard at the Binh Thuy Bridge

3. Build Anticipation and Let it Ride - Develop a scene and slowly add action. In the end, do not the the tension go. Revel in the potential of whatever might or could happen. Use active language in describing the scene, like Balaban does: “billows creep across / his cooplike…” and hint at whatever dangers “boxbombs” might be floating.

Horace Coleman - Night Flare Drop, Tan Son Nhut

4. Layer Society with Appearance and Explosions - Describe a place and time you’ve been as though it were a historical moment. Think in generalities. What are others doing at the same time, a block away or on the other side of the globe?

Frank Cross - An Accident

5. Time in Action - Decisive events that occur in seconds, can expand out in both directions. There’s the aftermath. There’s the series of choices that initiated the action. Write about an accident. Focus on the moment it happened. Linger and describe what happened before and after.

W. D. Ehrhart - Time on Target

6. Cause and Effect - Explore the responsibility and ramifications of your work. Think about something you do or have done on a regular basis, and its effect on others. Every action creates a reaction. Can you enter the head of someone affected (positively or negatively) by something you did?

Christopher Howell - Memories of Mess Duty and the War

7. Excavate the Tedium - Think of your most simple duties on deployment. What did you do in the Mess Hall, or before going to bed. Did you have a routine in the morning that you kept? Describe some simple action, and build from there.

Bryan Alec Floyd - Captain James Leson USMC

8. Inverse Elegy - Write an elegy for an enemy or from an enemy’s perspective. The goal is not to dishonor the dead, but to complicate death and conflict. Put a death in your mind, and write about it from a foreign perspective.

Bruce Weigl - Amnesia

9. The Second Person - Address your reader. Write about an experience in the second person. Build a scene around your reader, and place them there. Make them the object of your own experience. Imagine seeing your younger self in a mirror and describe where you are, addressing yourself objectively.

Walter McDonald - The Retired Pilot to Himself

10. A Benediction - Remember something, like a moment or an image or something you did, and detach yourself from that memory. Write about that past time abstractly, and project your role in that moment against a backdrop of things the people around you were doing as well. Did you do anything different? Did you do something more, something less?

[Fair Use Clause] a) This is educational content, b) used to inspire new writing and comment, c) photographed in public from the original print, not digitally copied or transcribed. The Editor of this poetry collection, W. D. Ehrhart approved this post. If you enjoyed these poems, and would like to read more like them, order Carrying the Darkness from the publisher, Texas Tech University Press.

Every Line Breaks, and You Choose Where

It’s not all about breath, beats and cadence. When words combine to make a line sound perfect, altering the way a poem breaks on the page changes both the tone and meaning of a poem. Let’s talk about line breaks and prose poetry.

For Valentines Day the Boston Chapter of Warrior Writers gathered for a workshop at the Suffolk Poetry Center. Jose Diaz, an associate editor working with Consequence Magazine, brought prompts to get us thinking about the power of line breaks.

Starting with a prose-poem (or poetic essay) from Brian Turner’s new collection “The Kiss,” we wrote a freestyle responses to “The Evolution of a Kiss,” first printed in Guernica. The poem tracks with evolution from the kiss of ants (apparently a real thing) to “a step up, past the lizards,” the way birds feed their young, through foxes licking each others’ faces, to a specific kiss, a memory.

Our small group argued briefly over why any of this text matters. It’s all flowery nothings. So why write poetry at all? Why not just read Wikipedia? We’re not looking for info, but inspiration. It’s free form communication that also triggers ASMR.

For 10 minutes, we each wrote whatever came to us without putting down our pens, and read what we wrote aloud. The next step, for homework, would be to break whatever we each wrote down into lines, each line bringing a new punch, adding verve and intrigue, creating verses.

If this prompt inspires you to write something, share your rough draft for honest and encouraging comments on Reddit.com/R/WarriorWriters

Next Jose Diaz brought out two poems from Volume 9, the 2017 issue of Consequence Magazine. The 10th anniversary edition comes is out now, and available on consequencemagazine.org, alongside the 9th edition. There imprisoned behind a print paywall, you can find the real versions of these poems.

Condensing these poems into paragraphs, Diaz offered up bars of text for us to break down into new poems. Try it out. It’s mind altering to make your own thing from someone else’s text, and then to see the impact of the poet’s line breaks. Maybe someone will post a picture of the real poems from the book on Reddit, so you can see where you’re wrong and what changes.

Here are the two poems that Diaz brought without any breaks or added punctuation:

Mother Tongue
by Sokunthary Svay

Cambodian script resembles slurped noodles in Phnom Penh, immersed in orange curry peppers as red as blood and turmeric, golden as my cousin’s monastic robe. I wanted only noodle dinners for two weeks as a child. Mother sliced strips of beef like em dashes. They stiffened in the heat of her broth. Some characters look like the outline of my daughter’s pinky, sometimes inverted with a loop beneath or above, like her bangs curled upward. Every morning I detangle the knots she creates with her dreams, draw a line to part her hair. Once straightened, I braid her hair into sense. I unravel the curls of this script, trace family lines pronounced as my hip slanted as my eyes, looked like my mother’s sarong as it comes undone.

Prisoner
by Melissa Hem

you speak to me, in pungent air that waits, ready in the whispers living in teardrops, steady waiting to burst down from the clouds heavy you speak to me with your brown, weathered skin, and no reprieve from the day your fragile bones brittle while hands beg and pray the honesty behind shining eyes revealing a deadened gaze too many footsteps have marked the numbness of strangers that withers hope away you speak to me spinning red tracks against mud sticking between thick rubber tread speedy distance from memories that evoke the dead a foggy wake of exile and mass burial sites still, nothing is more haunting than the wind as it cries

Copy one of those chunks of text into a new document, and make your own breaks. Then go to consequencemagazine.org and buy your copy of issue 9, support the arts. The difference between your version and the poet’s might blow your mind. Because there is a right way to read a poem. Line breaks (at their best) can add purpose and meaning to text.

Defining the Sonnet

These days, any 14 line poem could be considered a sonnet. As with all poetry, the rules of form are mere suggestions. Some great sonnets are 12 or 15 or 18 lines, defined instead by meter and rhyme. Once a poetic pattern gets recognized by critics, it gets old quick.

The sonnet grew out of Latin and Italian iambic pentameter verse. In English, Shakespeare wrote such famous sonnets that one of the two oldest branches of the sonnet is named for him. His sonnets use a rotating rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The Shakespearean sonnet is generally printed as a single stanza, condensing three quatrains (four line stanzas) and a couplet into a single verse. While rhyme scheme is negotiable, Shakespearian Sonnets end with couplets. And that’s not always true.

The sonnet is named for the Italian poet Petrarch, originally introduced to England by Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century. Translations of Petrarch’s verses into the relatively rhyme deficit English language by Henry Howard evolved the Shakespearean sonnet’s rhyme scheme.

The Petrarchan Sonnet established the 14 line sonnet structure with its sing song rhyme: abba, abba, cdecde or cdcdcd. These sonnets are often divided into two stanzas, 8 and 6 lines each.

One of my favorite modern books of sonnets is Habeas Corpus by Jill McDonough. It explores the history of the death penalty in America by describing 50 executions.

One of my favorite sonnets is Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I met a traveller 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.”

Explore the Origins of English Poetry through the Heroic Couplet

Rhymes (especially rhymes at the ends of lines) are a trademark of traditional English poetry. When two consecutive lines in a poem rhyme, that’s a couplet. The heroic couplet adds a steady beat. Take for example this line from “Couplets on Wit” by a master of the form, Alexander Pope:

Now wits gain praise by copying other wits
As one Hog lives on what another shits.

Heroic couplets use the “iambic pentameter” rhythm, meaning each line has five measures (called feet), with two beats (syllables) per measure. The beats are in iambic order, which is generally considered to be a normal speaking cadence. The second syllable is always stressed, while the first hangs on lightly before (now WITS gain PRAISE by COPYing OTHer WITS).

Figuring out the rhythm for a poem is more difficult than seeing the rhyme. Generally I’ll write whatever comes in my head naturally and then revise it. I read back over and change words to make them more precise and metered. This process is a little like molding clay. To really understand meter and rhythm, find a better explanation at the Poetry Foundation (or wherever) and read poetry.

In print, Chaucer pioneered the heroic couplet with his epic Canterbury Tales, but it probably existed before him. The couplet appears in other poetic forms, like the sonnet, and it is one of the oldest poetic devices to appear in printed Romantic languages.

If you want to better understand the form, here are a couple of good places to start:

Dryden established the Heroic Couplet in the late 17th century: http://www.bartleby.com/218/0912.html

Alexander Pope perfected the form in the early 18th century, and it’s never gotten better than this: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44899/an-essay-on-man-epistle-i

Pope's poetry can get difficult, but he often wrote to destroy Enlightenment era elitism: http://poetry.eserver.org/rape-of-the-lock.html

Plot through the prism

One early step, after maybe a few long pages of throat clearing and consideration and finishing a few shitty first drafts, in writing a story is to identify an appropriate point of view (POV). Sometimes the POV comes naturally in the first person. But your first instinct will not always be perfectly suited to telling your story.

Readers naturally wonder about the identity of the storyteller. Is this person trustworthy? The opinions and perspective of your narrator color and distort the text. If your narrator is inconsistent, reveals future events too soon or relevant backstory too late, the spell of your story easily breaks.

Text must distort through the prism of some specific voice with some certain perspective, agenda and worldview. Even the most convincing or abstract voices have to be consistent, under girded with ideas about the nature of reality, space and time.

Stories flow, cause and effect, one event into another, through the perspective of a narrator. The narrative is the structure of those events, the overall facts that make your story plausible and keep it consistent. The plot is the basic drama, the rise and fall of the action: the girl meets the boy, gets pregnant, marries or aborts or whatever. These elements of composition are all governed by the POV the writer chooses.

We have three basic narrative modes available to develop a sense of POV and authority: 

First Person uses the pronouns I, me, us and we. It’s oral history in text, and it places the narrator as a central character in the plot. 

Second Person uses “you” as the subject. You write at your reader. It’s tough to make this work through a long plot, because it often reads as a list of instructions.

Third Person describes characters from a distance. It can convey a sense of clairvoyance, or unreliability, depending on how it’s used. Often broken down into “limited” and “omniscient” categories, the third person is versatile and often used. 

Whatever POV you choose, consistency is key. Whether the narrator is omniscient, conjuring a new world in a reader’s imagination, or like a security camera, ignorant to everything outside of its frame of reference, your narrative needs rules to succeed. When you write a story, the narrative mode or POV you use sets the rules and the tone for your story. You can always add new rules, but it’s very hard to nix a rule once established. 

Take 15 minutes, and just write down something that you experienced in the first person. Then rewrite the same story from the perspective of another person involved, or write it in third person omniscient or limited perspective. In your rewrite think of the narrator as a character. What can they know and what can’t they know?

When I attempted this writing prompt at The Longfellow House, it turned out to be much more demanding than I anticipated. In fact, this prompt will probably take several sittings to complete, depending on the length of your story. But it will be worth the effort. Let’s spend some time writing a story, a true story that you have told before. 

You might find, reading back, illogical shifts in perspective or disconcerting leaps in time and place. Plow forward to finish a rough draft. Get out the plot and characters. Then revise and rework what you’ve written with special attention to who is telling the story in relation to the characters and the plot. 

Here are a few examples of stories that use POV in interesting ways:

An Occurrence on Owl Bridge, Ambrose Bierce

http://fiction.eserver.org/short/occurrence_at_owl_creek.html

Sevastopol, Leo Tolstoy

https://archive.org/stream/sevastopol00tolsrich/sevastopol00tolsrich_djvu.txt

Three Soldiers, Bruce Holland Rogers

http://www.vestalreview.net/threesoldiers.HTM

The Art of the Stanza

Stanza - Establishing meter and rhyme in isometric or heterometric lines through the first stanza, the pattern repeats.

A Poetry Workout Regimen

In the effort to revise and rewrite poems I wrote while in the Navy, I'm revisiting the exercise regiment I did on the boat. It produced an awful spew of grey matter, filled four thin moleskines, about 300 poems, mostly irredeemable stuff. But reading back through them I’ve found phrases, memories and images here and there amongst those tortured, angsty verses that I like, and I’ve transcribed those into a series of wave poems, like free verse, rhyming and breaking as the ideas and imagery collides.

Now I’m realizing that I’ve lost (probably drowned in a sea of liquor) some of the mechanics, the terminology and language of the trade. For the next eight weeks I am going back to review eight classic forms. You’re welcome to join me. I’ll be posting my attempts with the prompts on reddit.com/warriorwriters. I’m focusing on forms that developed through poems written in the Romance languages:

1. Stanza - Establishing meter and rhyme in isometric or heterometric lines through the first stanza, the pattern repeats.

2. Blank Verse - Epic and often used for drama, blank verse does not rhyme but it sticks strictly to iambic lines, each with ten stresses and five beats.

3. Sonnet - Reimagined by Jill McDonough in her masterful study of the form in her first book, Habeas Corpus, the sonnet generally composes 14 lines in either a Shakespearean or Petrarchan rhyme pattern.

4. Villanelle - Song-like, two of the first three lines repeat (aba) throughout the 19 lines of the villanelle.

5. Sestina - A military march, six end-words in lexical repetition for six stanzas, the sestina repeats in an unrhyming pattern.

6. Pantoum - Beginning and ending with the same line, the pantoum repeats two lines (abab) in each four line stanza.

7. Ballad - A story told through four line stanzas in a memorable meter, rhyming (often abab), ballads use common dialect (rap-like) to relate events, love tragedies, and tales of the supernatural.

8. Heroic Couplet - Often in iambic, sometimes in tetrameter, the heroic couplet pairs rhyming lines (aabbcc) to explore high-minded subjects.

I’ll also be working on a pastoral, an ode and an elegy. I’ve already posted a prompt for the elegy here, and I still need to respond myself. I’m putting that off. Death seems so serious in the American culture and boring. I like Epicurus’ view, “The wise man neither rejects life nor fears death. For living does not offend him, nor does he believe not living to be something bad” (The Epicurus Reader). So those Shaping Forms, the emo stuff, might take a little longer to make right, honest and real.

While afloat I dedicated an hour after work each day to write a poem. I used “The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms,” chosen because it looked like a good pick up from the bookstore at the mall before my one OIF cruise in 2007-08. Plenty of other books and websites (eg. poetryfoundation.com) explain the mechanics and forms of poetry better than me. I’ll write up prompts, directing you to good sources I’ve found. I’d love help finding poems by warriors that fit these eight categories.