September 2022 - Workshop Shit!

Workshop Prompt 09/13/2022

For the workshop this month, poets were encouraged to think about how to use abstract and unusual phrases to create metaphor within their work. Poets drew inspiration from a passage in Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, Dreams, which begins:

“A swan of bees,

A window of kisses,

A blackboard of dreams […]”

From here, they were asked to come up with phrases of a similar construction to these initial three lines. While there were numerous entries, a few key phrases are listed below. With this list in hand, poets set out to craft poems that incorporated any or all of these phrases. While the listed phrases seemed to be unrelated and inspired at random, the responses tended towards a common goal of finding a cohesive through-line, and showcased the unique character of each poet.

Phrases List:

“A forest of idle voices”

“A bag of insecurities”

“A field of f***s”

“A royal precession of coffins”

“A whisper of starlight”

“A pincushion of expletives” 

“A thread of dust”

“A melody of atrocity”

“A body of leaves”

“A path of regrets”

“A scent of poetry”

“A drink of honesty”

The Rules:

1) Use the format “A [blank] of [blank]” to invent four to twelve phrases.  

2) Select at least two of these phrases to incorporate into a poem. There is no upper limit as to how many phrases you can choose to incorporate.

3) One of these phrases should appear in the first line of your poem. To weave it in, you might structure it as such: “I was given a [blank] of [blank]” or “Have you ever seen a [blank] of [blank]?”

4) Set a timer for fifteen minutes, and explore your phrases through a freewrite. Try to incorporate as many of your listed phrases as possible. You don’t need to finish the whole poem in fifteen minutes, and you don’t need to use the whole fifteen minutes to finish the poem.

5) In some cases, it may be appropriate to alter a phrase slightly in order to more gracefully weave it into the poem. For example, in the response below, the opening line “A forest grown of idle voices,” is modified from the original phrase “A forest of idle voices.”

Andrew’s Response:

A forest grown of idle voices sings

Today, like yesterday, and every year.

Out there somewhere, Death dances on dark wings

To melodies of atrocity and fear.

And people here walk paths forged in regret,

And vomit drinks of honesty, and wait,

And work, and worry, trying to forget

The field of f***s they burned with love and hate,

As royal coffins’ presence pass to past,

Betraying common thread of dust to dust,

Like bodies made of leaves, which long to last

But brown and wither, falling as all must.

Soon we’ll all walk with heartf***s down some way

Where idle forest gossips dare not stay.

Rikhav’s Response:

In the stillness, there was a blanket of whispers, woven with a thousand threads of silken dust, lain haphazardly across an oaken bed of memories, with firm beams supporting pillows of punches and sheets of sullen silence. 

On the nightstand lay candles formed of sweat-laden wax and crafted with tears that had never come to pass across tensed cheeks. The surface was stained with a drink of honesty, bitter with truth, and the scattered remains of a pincushion of expletives.

But beyond walls of isolation, built of shorn timbers of time and mottled with the plaster of past, there lies a freedom, an expanse of emptiness.