March 2023 - Workshop Shit!
For the workshop this month, poets were prompted to read five short poems. While each of the five poems examined is stylistically unique, a common thread among them is the use of language highlighting at least one sense. In Hilda Doolittle’s The Pool, the poet engages with the sense of touch to help paint a picture. William Carlos Williams’ Smell! is evidently an ode (or complaint) to his nose and sense of smell. Thomas Hardy engages the sense of hearing with The Voice, and Maya Angelou reminds us that the sense of taste matters in The Health Food Diner. Lastly, Emily Dickinson’s poem “Best Things Dwell Out of Sight” opens the reader’s eyes to what may be out of sight or intangible.
Keeping these poems in mind, poets created a word bank based around the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), brainstorming to come up with a body of sensory images. The table used to organize this word bank is included below. From there, we created a list of different locations. With the sensory images and locations in mind, we started a fifteen-minute free write, producing responses that sought to incorporate the images we’d brainstormed, and which relied on sensory and sensual language to convey a sense of place and time.
The Pool
Hilda Doolittle
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?
Smell!
William Carlos Williams
Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?
The Voice
Thomas Hardy
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
The Health-Food Diner
Maya Angelou
No sprouted wheat and soya shoots
And Brussels in a cake,
Carrot straw and spinach raw,
(Today, I need a steak).
Not thick brown rice and rice pilaw
Or mushrooms creamed on toast,
Turnips mashed and parsnips hashed,
(I'm dreaming of a roast).
Health-food folks around the world
Are thinned by anxious zeal,
They look for help in seafood kelp
(I count on breaded veal).
No smoking signs, raw mustard greens,
Zucchini by the ton,
Uncooked kale and bodies frail
Are sure to make me run
to
Loins of pork and chicken thighs
And standing rib, so prime,
Pork chops brown and fresh ground round
(I crave them all the time).
Irish stews and boiled corned beef
and hot dogs by the scores,
or any place that saves a space
For smoking carnivores.
“Best Things Dwell Out of Sight”
Emily Dickinson
998
Best Things dwell out of Sight
The Pearl—the Just—Our Thought.
Most shun the Public Air
Legitimate, and Rare—
The Capsule of the Wind
The Capsule of the Mind
Exhibit here, as doth a Burr—
Germ's Germ be where?
The Rules:
Begin by listing the five senses, and brainstorming four to five words or phrases that are tied to each one. A table like the one shown below is a helpful way of organizing this word bank.
Think of different unique locations, and start a list. These can be specific locations (eg. “the corner of my kitchen”) or more vague (eg. “a forest”).
Choose at least one of the locations you’ve listed, and write for the next fifteen minutes, trying to incorporate the sensory vocabulary that you’ve brainstormed. Try to paint a picture of the location through senses. You can use as many or as few of the words from the word bank as you feel necessary, and you’re encouraged to come up with new ones on the fly.
If you want to show us your own response to the prompt, you can share in the comments section below.
Word Bank containing Ill-lit, A voice, Fetid, Putrid, Quiver, Vibrant, Quavering, Musky, Salty, Coarse, Luminous, Ringing, Sulfur, Spicy, Silky
List of Locations
A Swamp
A Pool in a River
The Sea
A Tavern/Pub
Outer Space
Andrew’s Response
Low voices in the tavern by the sea
Make music, mumbling melodies and dreams.
The ill-lit room smells sweaty; brawlers’ screams
Are carried off the streets by winds set free.
The sulfur sting of oil lamps dares breath
To stop. Outside, the clock rings midnight bells,
Thunder rumbles, and the hot rain swells;
But Hell is cozy, locked against Earth’s death.
A splintered table’s length between old friends
Remains where oceans stood once. And one voice
Starts quavering in silky song alone …
The murmurs and the brawlers draw to ends:
Each silenced – somber, through they still rejoice –
And shudders every soul to heart and bone.
Douglas’ Response
ONE SMALL BODY
One small body spinning in space
Free of gravity
Free of connection
All the strands of consciousness coming together
Here
At the vertex of a gossamer web
One small creature among the void
One point in space where beams of light intersect
Centering on this cosmonaut
Floating at the juncture of waves of electromagnetic radiation
From one hundred thousand million stars
Shining in one of one hundred thousand million galaxies
Exuding more conceptual constructs than any one of those
Hundred thousand million stars could imagine
Bedeviled by a ringing inside this skull
As if it mattered which luminous vibrant explosion
Were reiterating its repetition inside
The burning synapses of this twirling one
Alone against the backdrop of dark matter
The mouth eyes nose and tongue of what
Will never come to conceive of a new something
Too beset by that fetid smell of sulfur
Too miniscule for damnation or salvation
Just floating without a secure tether
Arms akimbo
Toes free of any contact with any other body
As if there were some perfect moment
Some precious caring
Some persistent existence
That could be experienced
Felt at least even if never explained
This is me
Here this morning
Standing in the yellow sunlight
Breathing for a quavering moment