May 2023 - Workshop Shit

This month’s prompt stemmed from a broader ambition coalescing around the concept of the “Other Five Senses,” which sets-forth the notion that in addition to the tangible five senses with which we interact with the physical world (Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, and Touch), human beings are capable of processing a range of more complex and subjective senses. This model gives space to recognize senses such as the sense of passing time, or a sense of physical sense awareness. Below are the five additional senses recognized in this model.

  • Equilibrioception – A sense of balance

  • Proprioception – A sense of physical self-awareness

  • Kinesthesia – A sense of physical motion

  • Nociception – A sense of pain

  • Chronoception – A sense of the passing of time


Following a brief introduction to this concept, poets were encouraged to focus on the sense of balance (equilibrioception), and how it made appearances in the following two poems by Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes.


Passing Time

Maya Angelou

Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

Dreams

Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

 

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

In both poems, the poets evoke a sense of balance through a sort of linguistic tug-o-war. In Passing Time, Maya Angelou uses the ends of line pairs to contrast the ideas of “beginning,” and “ending,” polar opposites that here seem to compliment one another. In Dreams, Langston Hughes places dreams in the same breath as life. Although those concepts aren’t total opposites, Hughes seems to be inviting the reader to distinguish between them.

Poets then brainstormed a list of words and their balancing opposites. From that list, and with those word-pairs in mind, they then brainstormed a series of questions to consider in their own poetry.

List of Word-Pairs:

Word - Balancing Opposite

End - Beginning

Dreams - Life

Darkness - Light

Noise - Silence

Emptiness - Fulness

Sleepy - Awake

Chaos - Tranquility/Order

Happiness - Sadness

List of Questions:

Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?
Is this a dream of life or a life of dreams?
Can light exist without darkness or must darkness exist without light?
At what point does silence become noise?
What is happiness without sadness? What is sadness without happiness?
Can order be born of chaos?
Is there tranquility at the heart of chaos? Is there chaos at the heart of tranquility?
If you’re awake when you sleep can you sleep while you’re awake?
What exactly is emptiness full of?
How is saturated fat empty calories?

During a 15-minute free-wright, poets used their time to incorporate as many or as few of these questions as they liked into a poem. There was no requirement to answer any of these questions, though no guidance not to cave to that temptation.

The Rules:

  • Consider the concept of Equilibrioception (a sense of balance) both in isolation and in its relation to the concept of the five additional senses listed above.

  • Using a graphic like the one shown above, prepare a list of words, phrases, or concepts. Then pair each of them with at least one word or phrase that somehow contrasts or offsets it.

  • Using those word pairs, brainstorm a list of questions that bring these words into contact with one another. Do they compliment each other? Do they challenge each other? Do they balance each other?

  • Take 15 minutes and address those questions in a poem. You may incorporate as many or as few questions as you feel is right. If the thought strikes you, feel free to rework or rephrase any of the questions to better fit your poetic voice. You may try to answer the questions, or simply leave them for the reader to mull over. Have fun.

  • If you decide you want to share your response to the prompt, feel free to drop it into the comments section below.

Andrew’s Response:

So tell me, at what point does silence fade

To noise? And when does tranquil peace awake

To chaos? When the dark itself degrades

To blinding light, and things that sleep forsake

Their happy dreams to groan, and stretch, and grin.

First birdsong by the window loudly rings;

Alarms sound, and the tree leaves (flashing green

Beneath a burning sun whose tempests sting)

Are thundering with gentle, morning breeze.

Worlds’ voices rattle through thin walls, down streets

And clacking rails, up stairs … when cities freeze

In busy minutes, hours feel complete.

The heart of Chaos screams tranquility:

Like meditating through loud symphonies.


Douglas’ Response:

DARKNESS & LIGHT

Darkness exists irrespective of the light.

In between the stars, the dark matter hovers, without revealing its place, without suggesting its nature.

We would not be able to spread our wings, to rise like phantom birds with imprecise halos surrounding our auras if we were not also akin to the Prince of Darkness, angry and abandoned, our raw, burning skin torturing us on the volcanic marl, so full of pain, so intent on suffering that we insist on spewing defiance in the face of grace.

What deep mystery is necessary to keep hidden here within the black hole of the soul, gathering every errant, happy beam of sustenance, pulling into that secret place from which no hopeful wishes could escape, the darkest space of darkest night, without a scrap of color, without the possibility of refracting luminous salvation into a rainbow of possibility.

 We need to admit the need for nothingness, for that darkest hole of dark emptiness, which is not divorced from its opposite. 

Light cannot be light without the wild void in which it flows, so the consciousness that knows how to burn brightly, how to reach into every soul that hovers above the black husk of its empty chrysalis is the same as the consciousness of darkness unilluminated uninitiated understanding.


Mill City SpeaksLowell Poetry