Writing Therapy

Lesson 2: Turn Up the Volume?

Ways to modify your poetry to turn up or down the emotional volume.

Introduction

Lesson Two, Section One: Introduction.

During this lesson we will be working on ways you might want to try using to deepen your expression or change it. I will be using a chapter Barbara Danish has in her book, Writing as a Second Language, on anger as I happen to like it and anger is always a fruitful topic to generate discussion. But there is no need for you to own this particular book as the techniques are pretty general and I would hope we would all be bringing in and discussing a wide range of techniques from the books on the list here and elsewhere.

I have arbitrarily divided the techniques here into 1) owning feelings and 2) changing feelings by changing form to give you a better feeling for how the process works. These two ‘types’ of techniques cannot really be separated, but I would like to invite you to look at them separately. In addition to the example from Danish in section two, I would like you to consider what Pennebaker has to say about expression (I will explain this further in the section as it is quite close to the clinical meaning of emotional expression).

When we come to the second aspect (changing), I’d like to invite you to think about this quote which is from a blog of a major contemporary poet, Ron Silliman:: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com “So what is meaning & where do you find it? Williams called it ‘the news,’ but that phrase, bandied about as much as it is, is often understood in far too narrow a fashion. I often will find it in a poem lurking not in the words as such so much as in the vowels, or in the way a phrase alters my expectation in how lines enjamb or a phrase is inverted, in the length of a line. All to me seem primary modes of meaning.& the student who is not taught how to see, to read these things, has in fact never been taught to read.” Williams here refers to William Carlos Williams, who was a major American poet of an earlier generation.

I certainly don’t expect you to understand this in it’s entirety but I’d like to direct your attention to the way that the poet is aware on a conscious or unconscious level of very subtle nuances as he or she constructs a poem. You will find the same attention to nuances in Mullen’s work This attention to what is called the ‘materiality’ of a poem, be it a traditional work, a sound poem, or a visual poem, is one hallmark of contemporary ‘experimental’ poetry. The other major characteristic I want to draw your attention to here is the tendency to distort, mangle, or cut up traditional forms. Both of these tendencies are useful in accentuating gesture and expression.

A poem as a gesture made by the poet is a reflection and expression of the poet’s emotional (and embodied) feelings. I am not going to encourage a lot of reading here as these are complicated issues and I would like to stick as close as I can to a ‘common’ or popular conception of these ideas without getting stuck in clinical or research issue.

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