What's the last book of poetry you've read? What is a poet? What is a poem?
These were some of the questions that our guest speaker asked our Creative Writing class tonight. Greg Lainsbury, a long-time resident of the north, gave us the low-down on what's happening in the world of contemporary verse.
From post-World War One Dadaism to the underground samizdat movement in Russia to the up-to-the-minute poetry news and events on Ron Silliman's blog (www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com), Lainsbury took the class on a whirlwind tour of the contemporary poetry landscape.
This is not your father's poetry. It may not even be your poetry. But for sure, today's poets are doing interesting (if not always understandable) work. Some is a mixture of art and poetry, what I refer to a visual poetry.
Lainsbury explained that such visual or collage poetry is really just one stage in the composition of his poems. Via YouTube, we watched him at work constructing a poem. He said his method consists of gathering interesting phrases, sentences, and words throughout the year. Once he has his raw material--scooped from many sources--he lays out the individual pieces of paper on which the words and phrases have been typed and somehow, through the magic of the creative process, it all comes together into lines of poetry. He compared himself to a farmer gathering and sowing seeds, then reaping a harvest.
In addition to gathering words and phrases, Lainsbury also has his eye out for interesting images that add to the story he's building. It's an eclectic collection--a gallimaufry of colours and lines and images from science, popular culture, news, and other sources--that enhances or brings out the meaning of the words.
This was all new to me. I'm more on the lyrical and narrative end of the poetry scale myself, but I was intrigued by the difference in approach. Poetry has a bad rep, beset by the whiff of the school room and the church basement.
Maybe it's time for spring cleaning.
interesting, would love to watch the you tube segment! the world of haiku has a similar form: 'found haiku', where the poet gathers lines from a magazine, book, advertising copy, perhaps bits of conversation, and uses these to build a haiku. the idea, as i understand it, is that it encourages us to notice our world more deeply and see our words in a different light. r.h.blyth explores this concept in his book "the genius of haiku".
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