November 2022 - Workshop Shit!
Workshop Prompt: 11-08-2022
For the workshop this month, poets were encouraged to consider the use of surrealism in poetry, and to incorporate surrealist imagery into their own work. Using Shuzo Takiguchi’s poem shown below for inspiration, poets collectively compiled a list of words and phrases that suggested surreal images to use in their own responses. We noticed that early-on, the words and phrases that poets were suggesting were very simple, and often images pulled directly from the prompt poem, such as “A shredded shore,” “Flow incessantly,” or “A human echo.” But as the list grew longer, the images that poets suggested evolved into more complex and inventive constructions: “A human echo melting over a stony beech,” or “A red wave hits a shredded shore four-score and seven years past Porky Pig.” From this point, poets were free to incorporate any or all of the listed phrases into their own poems during a free-write, which yielded a stylistically diverse range of responses.
Prompt Poem:
René Magritte
By:
Shuzo Takiguchi
Translated by:
Mary Jo Bang
Yuki Tanaka
René Magritte
Released silhouettes
flow incessantly like water,
flow between mountains
swiftly like a kaleidoscope.
The solitude of the North Pole
bustles with human silhouettes.
Endless transmission of ABC.
On the shredded shore
a silk hat burns
like a mirror trick,
like a human echo
burns a silk hat endlessly.
Then the flames
were received like ABC.
On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse
the silhouettes smiled.
The Rules:
Read through Shuzo Takiguchi’s poem René Magritte.
Identify words or phrases within the poem that stand out to you, and write them down, as in the first list below.
Take those words and phrases, and start combining them with your own inventions to compile a list of images like the second list below.
Free-write for 10-15 minutes using as many or few of the phrases in the list as you feel are necessary.
Words/Phrases List from the Prompt Poem:
Immobile water
Silhouette
Shredded shore
Flow incessantly
A human echo
ABC
Transmission
Kaleidoscope
Invented Phrases:
A kaleidoscope of weapons
Silhouette surrounded by darkness
A human echo dancing bright
A human echo melting over the stony beach
A red wave hits the steps of the shredded shore, four score and seven years past porky pig
The blood flowing incessantly from closed eyelids teeth stamped shut ears filled with wax
masking blocked transmission of all but clutched pearls
The ABC that no one knows
ABCs of Chinese characters as sanctioned by the communist party
Andrew’s response:
There’s human echoes dancing sad, and bright
Beside kaleidoscopes of weapons’ bones;
There’s wasted war-things, filling skies with fright,
While politicians’ toys wake-up with moans.
Who are the dead? Pale zombies under moons
Turned red, who beg for brains? Or spirits fled
From haunted places to escape poor dooms?
Or silhouette transmissions that have bled?
The world is dancing on a barber’s blade,
And shaves too close beneath its stubbled chin:
One cut’s enough to kill when blood is made
Of glowing, paper green, and skin’s this thin.
The hallway’s quiet: no one knocks on doors
They know are locked. What’s in there? No one dares.
Rikhav’s response:
There is a language lost to the world, sung in the ABC’s of existence, woven into the breath that is expelled by every living thing. It echoes in the rumbling of the earth and whistling of the wind, in the thundering of the waterfall, and the crescendo and decrescendo of the dawn and dusk.
This language is sown in the seeds of every drop of dew, and twined in every silken spider thread, in the twirling horn of the narwhal, and shimmering scales of the koi. The beauty of existence spells its own alphabet, understood only in bits and pieces, by those who embody each of its script, shimmering, shining, sleek and stolid.
Still more, it is embodied in the putrid decay and dank stench of the fens, in the decrepit and the dilapidated, insubstantial and infirm. What once shimmered in the sun dulls with time, windworn and well burnished with age. What stood for thousands of years slowly disintegrates and fades away. This, too, is part of the language of existence.
Between these extremes are the every day, the words and phrases that build the rise and fall of species, cultures, empires. The bustling streets and abandoned cities, the grand celebrations and cold, quiet grave sites. We revel in a world that speaks a thousand tongues, yet are unable to truly understand the unifying language that binds us to the world we live in.
We are deaf to the language of existence.