Teaching Poetry

Wait until the night before it’s due to begin your research
Research for 30 mins
Watch an episode of Gilmore Girls
Watch two more episode of Gilmore Girls
Research for 1 more hour
Struggle over writing a creative thesis before giving up and using a sparknotes ideas
Write an outline
Clean your bedroom
Begin writing your intro
Realize you have no idea what you’re talking about
Wonder what it all means
Cry and type
Go on facebook
Cry and type
Make a coffee
Cry and type
Print off your paper 30 mins before your class starts
Speed to class
Get a ticket
Hand in essay

Dance Dance Dance ladies and gentlemen,

Dance away to your hearts’ content.

‘Tis time for the Morris dance,

stepping rhythmically,

wearing bell pads

tinkling to and fro

waving handkerchiefs

brandishing swords

holding sticks

and dance, dance, dance.

Dance until Christmas

And then we go a mummering,

Performing St. George and the Dragon

At each other’s homes,

Dancing,

joking,

reciting,

and above all,

eating.

1. Start by being 17
2. Go to a club with a fake ID
3. Argue with the bouncer that, yes, your eyes look brown and the card says green, but really, ICBC just got it wrong
4. Say things like, “no really, I got a nose job… it bothered me my whole life, ” and “people always tell me I look young for 23.”
5. Bat your eyelashes
6. Go inside only to not drink and sit at a booth the whole time
7. Leave after an hour and eat McDonald’s
8. Repeat until you’re 19 and can legally go out but don’t want to anymore anyway

Roll your hardened polymer clay against your cheek.

Soften it. Heat it. Dash it against ridges and lumps.

Flick it against the back of your teeth.

Then speak. Speak proud and clear in your broken alphabet.

1. Get a chair, perhaps a folding table with a table cloth, bring a lunch, your computer, maybe some personal items. Got to a busy street, find a open parking spot. Put money in the meter, then set up your chair, table and other items in the parking spot. Invite your friends or business associates to join you. Spend all day. Engage the meter attendant in a discussion about rental rates for space in Vancouver.

Go there in the evening of a high summer day when the sky is clear and the moon is full. The light of it, and the stars, will be cold in the warm air. Be barefoot, as you will want to experience the boundary between the warm dry sand and cool wet pack through the soles of your feet. Lie on your back so that you can feel the loose sand shift beneath your weight, mold to your spine and fill the hollow of your lower back. Feel your heels sink into the earth. Don’t close your eyes. Open your mouth and breathe out. You are sending a piece of your warm self upwards into the cold starlight to become part of something ice cold and infinite.

Scar the writhing salt meadow of stranded jade
And trench the oozing sepia
Frame shambling barques and splintering quays against the sapphire glory
Ravage the ebbing expanse
Live the dying profession
And dye in living meagreness
Then fade into the swelling seas of generations
And watch the living strands of emerald transpose the harm
Festoon your expanding pupils with skyfire silhouettes
And adorn the flowing darkness with your insight.

Start by grabbing the plumbus by its gleeb
Next, rub the gleeb to release the fingles
We’ll need the fingles later.
Now, turn the gleeb counterclockwise,
This will activate the stoob without overheating the gleeb.
The stoob now locks in position to allow the pingslot room to breathe.
Pass the plumbus over the water trough, and dunk it in the porseball.
Now, take the fingles and attach them to the plumbus near the base,
Unhinge the stoob and roll a farnstock over the gleeb three times.
Now the plumbus is ready for the final step.
Cover the plumbus in stoffle shavings,
and it’s ready to eat.
Be careful not to stimulate the gleeb while you eat, or the fingles will become bitter and expand, deflating the stoob.

Step through the doors into musty air mixed with acrid, sweet colognes and nostril-singeing perfumes.

Don’t let Bob Gibson ogle your Mom or touch her long fingernails.  He’ll bike to your house while your Dad’s at work and scare her.  Have a laugh with your Mom and sister as you hide upstairs, terror turning to relief as you watch him swearing at your German Shepherd, Sheba, who won’t let him anywhere near the house before he bikes away in defeat.  Give Sheba some table scraps that night, and let her sleep inside for the first time.

Sit quietly during the sermon like all respectable five-year-olds.

Suspend your disbelief.

Listen to your father mumble lyrics in a deep, self-conscious monotone during the hymns, and wonder why he didn’t choose a religion that doesn’t demand group singing.  Also wonder why they would put high notes in almost every song.

Avoid questions or dialogue about mental health or identity issues when the minister is hospitalized for “exhaustion” and a member of the congregation shoots himself through the mouth during a lone, off-season, late night “hunting accident.”  After all, these issues have no place in the 1980s, or in a community setting aiming to inspire and uplift the human spirit.

Praise Him.

Suspend your disbelief.

Get kicked out of Sunday School at least every other week. Be proud that you are the reason your family sits in the back of the church so your grandmother doesn’t notice when you are sent back to sit through the sermon with your embarrassed parents.

Grow up into a hardened Athiest with basic critical thinking skills and a beautiful contempt for believing shit just because people tell you it’s true.

Drive by an empty relic of spirituality so forgotten and unnecessary that it pollutes the landscape with many others in small towns across the map. It’s ominous shell can’t contain your spirit, and you never needed it to be a decent person.

Hi Folks,

Sorry I cut time too short after the ecopoetics walk to share with you some examples of event poems. On one level, I’m glad I didn’t, as I don’t want reading these to influence your event poem in any way. I want it to be whatever you come up with, not what you think it “should” be.  I have now posted examples on the Resources page, (click the tab on the header, scroll to the bottom). These are examples from the anthology Technicians of the Sacred, edited by that master anthologizer, Jerome Rothenberg. Connecting to event poems as a tradition situates us. It is a way of connecting to the land and to all aspects of place, as they tend to be place specific, they are put into practice when they are realized. They can teach something more important than poetry on its own: they can teach the art of “living poetically”, as our own Carl Leggo writes about, see his article Pedagogy of the Heart: Ruminations on living poetically.  http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/23767223?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

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