1. COULD YOU IMAGINE WRITING A PIECE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF COVID-19? What would the virus's perspective be? What would its goals be? How would it "feel"? What does it think of humans? Of the world? Of its spread? Would it be happy, sad, conflicted, guilty, power hungry? Would it be "evil" -- trying to take over the world like a superhero villain...or something else? What would its sense of community be like? And community with what? With other viruses? With humans? dogs? How might the piece of writing reflect on what you (we) are experiencing and your sense of what others are experiencing? What might it say about the other? About our bodies, communities, societies, government? What tone might you take -- Science Fiction, humorous, satiric, tragic, lyric, or some combination. How might the structure or form of what you write be influenced by the form of the virus, by how it spreads or by how it is affecting us?
2. There’s no place like rhizome: Virtual COW writing prompt.
We’re practicing social distancing, staying physically distant from each other: either hunkering down at home or keeping 6 feet away from each other. Though it might feel, what with things feeling so unreal, that we’re both more distant and yet also closer to ourselves and…everything.
I was wondering, what would it be like if trees kept their distance, at least above ground, but were connecting by a root system. Oh yeah. They do that. There’s no place like rhizome. There’s no place like rhizome.
But what about birds, clouds, fogs, frogs, whales, filing cabinets, teeth, telephones, ideas, colours, people? How do they communicate, how do they build community, how COULD they build community from afar? What about the one goose who must keep separate from the V? What about the single car which longs for “contact” with other cars? What about the emotion left at the office that can’t connect.
What can distance look like? Or closeness? And what can communication look like? Can one part of a text be distant from the other? How might it communicate? How does a beginning look like an end and vice versa? What even is “distancing” in a world filled with gravity, capitalism, desire, anger, fear, love, molecules, dark energy, strong forces, electromagnetism and hadrons and humour.
3. Under the Two Suns: Virtual COW writing prompt.
Things are the same. And then they change. They’re not how they were. What would that look like in writing? A stranger at the door. Or a group of strangers and a door arrives. There’s no light. It’s only dark. Or there are two suns. And they seem to disagree. All the verbs have disappeared, there are only nouns, or only words with the letter A in them. Maybe all the animals are in hiding. Or we must be at least six feet from another. Dancing is something we do in private, like weeping. There’s not time for long sentences, they all must be short. Or instead, there’s time now for long sentences. There’s no more singular. It’s all plural. No one buys anything. We trade. There is no music. It is all music. We don’t talk anymore. We sing. We don’t sing, we only shout. We whisper into our pillows in the dark that is light, under the two suns, without animals or verbs. We dance while we cry. We never finish our long long sentences. We write.
4. Ekphrastic Writing.
5.
6. Writing from Graphic Scores
7. FORM (See prompts on form below)
Is the form something that you fit content in or is it part of the content?
What opportunities does the form provide - for 'shape of thought,' for drama?
What does the form itself say about the world-view or the assumptions of the writer/speaker?
How can the form and its implicit assumptions be played with/against?
David McGimpsey on the 'chubby sonnet':
DM: "I’ve always written sonnets. Sonnets and other fixed, sequential forms are helpful when you are possessed of many thoughts but are too high on them to give them shape and identity. The very first publication I had (in a small literary journal associated with McGill called Rubicon) were part of a sequence called "batman sonnets". Since my first book Lardcake I've always fooled around with a 16 line sonnet that I called a "chubby sonnet" and that this book would be all in that form is really, where it all begins. I'm interested in the relationship of form to sequence; how episodes create plot arcs (as in TV shows) but how narrative expectations are thwarted by character limits (as in a TV series where, say, if the boys in Big Bang Theory all decided to stop being nerds there would be no Big Bang Theory).
I’ve used this sixteen-line structure in my first three collections of poetry and it definitely came out of interest in writing sonnets. When I was in my twenties, I was writing sonnets in a fairly intent and disciplined way and that was how, for better or worse, I developed the rhetoric of my poetry. I call it a ‘chubby sonnet’ not just because I’ve always been fascinated by the comedic betrayals of weight gain – but that’s part of it – but because I’ve always liked the episodic structure of the sequence of regularly paced poems. The sonnet’s speaker doesn’t end the condition of his care with rational dispersal: the sonneteer doesn’t just figure out their love or pain is not worth it and say, ‘Aha! Problem solved!’ The condition of the speaker’s personality continues and persists. Like a sitcom, the characters do not ‘change.’ Removing these poems from the traditional strictures of the sonnet with a capital ‘S’ hopefully gives enough relief from the more material expectations of that tradition – while engaging that tradition with more bluster and demand. The regularly paced sonnet-like sequence is, furthermore, my homage to John Berryman’s Dream Songs and Robert Lowell’s History, two books of poetry that had a strong influence on me.
A variety of forms:
Bhanu Kapil: Definitions in Urban Dictionary
Hay(Na)ku,
http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/form/haynaku.htm#poem
Haiku: Lynn Crosbie, Carrie Leigh's Hugh Hefner Haikus
Jo Harjo: She Had Some Horses
Jon Paul Fiorentino, The Report Cards of Leslie Mackie
Matthew Rohrer, Greater Forces
Matthea Harvey, Lamb
Theodore Roethke, The Waking
David McGimpsey: The Chubby Sonnet: Here's one: here!
Ghazal: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/ghazal-poetic-form
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/wwe (Fatimah Asghar)
The Canadian Ghazal\
John Thompson: from Stilt Jack
Dorothea Lasky, Monsters.
Gabriel Gudding: Congratulations on Being Here and A Defence of Poetry
Lunes, other forms
*
Activities:
1. Hay(na)ku: write five (or more!), linked or unlinked.
(also: see Lynn Crosbie's haiku above.)
2. Write some "definitions" for dictionary words, made up or re-visionedized. See Bhanu Kapil's examples in Urban Dictionary (above)
3. Write a Chubby Sonnet (see David McGimpsey above)
or Ghazal (the refrain repeats the same word/phrase)
[see Lasky's Monsters, above, for poem which more freely repeats the same words.]
3. Same Lines Sonnet. No rhymes except for the final couplet. Each line a version of the one before. See this. Also, Stuart Ross's Sonnet (Hey, Crumbling Balcony, p.110)
3. Write "Short" Villanelle. The last three stanzas of the form. Rhyme only the last two lines, i.e. the two refrains. See here.
