This past Friday, the Pulse hosted our second poetry workshop in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union Center. There were some new dimensions being reached in the structure of the workshop, as well as in the poetry! This was our first iteration of the workshop that was accompanied by an open mic – imagine getting up there and saying whatever you’d like.
It was poetry night!
The evening started with the flicker of synthetic candles, glistening over glittered table tops under the din of light jazz. The Student Union provided us with the impeccable ambiance in the activity zone, which set a proper tone for poetic incidences to occur. We finished the table setups with some sheets of paper and pens – just like the old days. Of course this was a device-free event because, though we are an online publication, we believe that our devices sometimes get in the way of our ability to be able to fully engage with our creative side.
We started the workshop off with a collaborative exercise that struck a nostalgic note: Mad Libs.
Well, not your average zany story Mad Libs, but poetic Mad Libs. Our previous senior editor, Lauren Lutge, took famous poems by poets like John Keats and Paul Laurence Dunbar and removed certain nouns, verbs and adjectives so each team could rebuild the poem without knowing the context. When we shared the outcomes, laughs, snaps, oohs and ahhs filled the room.
After we got our words warmed up, we then broke out into three groups to get the workshop working. We generally split our workshops into three difficulty levels so there’s something for everyone. We had a poetry activity group, a free-verse group and a form-focused group.
The activity group did an exercise called Exquisite Corpse. This game is generally played with drawings: someone draws the head of a monster, folds the paper and then the next person draws the body without seeing the previous section, and so forth. Strange things happen when you play this game with poetry. We started to pick up on some subtle synchronicities. Check it out:
“The Love Poem”
By Lauren Lutge, Satya Roth, Miriam Yfrah, Merlot Ghadoushi
You left before I opened my soul
Empty hand, looking down – I miss your dishes and laundry.
The ground crackles beneath my feet. A pile of maple
Leaves gathering under a rooftop like your syrup
Missing from the table.
But, what are we doing on Saturday?
Your caveman poems carved in my bone
To my dismay you leave my page.
This is a game you can try when you’re out with your friends. Just write a sentence and fold the paper so the person you pass it to can’t see the previous line. (Bonus: If you want, you can leave one word at the beginning of the following line). Get creative!
The free-verse group started with a constraint poem. I know that sounds paradoxical, a constrained free-verse poem, but there were levels to it! Everyone in the group shouted out some things they saw that day, and then wrote them on sticky notes. The only objective was to incorporate all of the words that had been suggested. It was a little more difficult than we thought. That’s when we pulled out Obliterating Writer’s Block.
Obliterating Writer’s Block is an exercise we did in a Pulse Lab a few weeks back, and we got incredible feedback on it. It can really be tough to find the motivation to write that essay. Sometimes it can be hard to even know what to say. If you’ve experienced this, that’s okay. Here at the Pulse, we recommend sitting down with a paper and pen – again, no devices, too distracting – and write words aimlessly with no prompt and no stops. Sometimes you write the same word over and over again until you become mad about the shape of those letters and start ranting about how linguistic systems just bog us down. Other times, the inner-workings of the mind manifest.
Here was an example of what someone wrote:
My life is like a poem I wrote or was
written in flow state by God. All these random
insignificant moments that were all weaved
together in the end to make a beautiful
poem. At the time it made no sense
it felt insignificant, but the Great Poet
knew what he was writing. And maybe it’s
not for me to know what the Great Poet
was writing. Maybe I just need to trust that it is
being written and written well. And maybe
The poem of my life is for someone else to read.
- Gabrielle Abigor
Amazing things can happen when you allow your thoughts to flow without hesitation.
The form-focused group went for a bit of a challenge – simulating structure in a chaotic world. Everyone wrote their own quatrain (four lines) with an AABB rhyme scheme and a creepy theme. After we did our own quatrain, we wrote the first line of a CDCD scheme, setting the rhyme and passing the papers to build the poem.
This is what we came up with. All stanzas were written separately, then later combined to form one poem. (See if you can identify the AABB CDCD thing going on):
I saw the blood dripping from the blade
That’s when I left the masquerade
I wondered who the killer could be
Is there any way it could’ve been me?
Gorgeous corpse in the shade of my basement
Love reflected in the blood on the pavement
Forever made real with my two hands entangled
Lifeless in love with my undead angel
Everyone’s got something to do
So I look up at the moon
Oh moon! it’s just you and me
And the cool shadows in the tree
This shadow speaks like a friend I once knew
A pale friend muttering in a blue dome
All of these things it tells me, couldn’t be true
But then why does this place feel like home?
Sorrow echoes through the hollow corridors
Should I bury him or watch him decay?
I talked it up with all the coroners
And a cool air grazed the window pane.
It couldn’t be, my conscience says,
There would ever be a thing to confess
I’ve worn this guilt for seventy days
And hide the shame inside my chest.
This is what would happen if Edgar Allen Poe attended our workshop.
We wrapped up the workshop section with an open mic. Several speakers rolled with the flow, following the calling, popping up one after the other. The energy was electric, perhaps even a bit mystic. Spoken word poetry is so much more than words. These words are weapons, wounds, daggers, bandages, messages, memories, songs you don’t need to sing, proof of the human being. Poetry is all of these things, and more: you.
We want to thank everyone who participated in this special event. We’d also like to extend our gratitude to the Student Union for allowing us to convert their space into a mystical underground poetry milieu. Whatever you do, don’t stop writing.
And don’t stop being you.
We’ll see you at the next one.