Learning from Michael Martone

I first heard of Michael Martone in 2010 during a fiction workshop with Melanie Rae Thon at the University of Utah. He was one of the gurus she cited during the course (English 5510) along with John Edgar Wideman, Carole Maso, William Maxwell, John Berger, and numerous others. He has resided among my files as "EXPERIMENT #8: THE MARVELOUS MICHAEL MARTONE." Melanie's exercise suggests re-imagining a common object (like Martone's "Chatty Cathy Falls into the Wrong Hands" story) or a disturbing historical fact (his "It's Time" essay about people hand-painting clocks with radium) or any revision at all using Martone's "remarkable sense of detail as inspiration for your own work."

Experiment #8 was heavier lifting at the time, what with needing to find the Martone texts in the special coursepack in the English Dept. office, so I'm glad it worked out to meet Michael in person at the 2013 Writers at Work conference and to see him again there this year. He's very entertaining, and the lifting is light indeed when you get to listen to him read or talk. He's likely to make you laugh. Pretty hard.

I want to note that I saw Michael Martone and Melanie Rae Thon in conversation during a break in this year's conference at least once, and I realized the situation: both of their names end with the syllable "tone." So, of course. Not that many names do, after all.

Michael Martone, University of Alabama
Website: http://english.ua.edu/user/84*
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Martone (not the hockey player)
Workshop title: The Four C’s: Cut, Compress, Context and Collage

*a website that appears to contain an actual bio rather than a fictional "contributor's note," however yesterday the site was down and who knows about today?

June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?

Michael got the conversation going with a reference to William Stafford, who said if you can't write, "lower your standards." Writing is not the same thing as writing in a publishing-oriented way. In fact, Michael deplores the displacement of our sense of the pure value of text. In schools now, children receive coupons for pizza as a reward for reading a book. Not great, Michael says. It used to be that "reading was the pizza."

Michael brought up the "everybody writes" vs. "special people write" divide exemplified by Jack London on the one hand and Henry James and Edith Wharton on the other. He cited critic Frank Norris' dismissal of the "tragedy of the broken teacup" in works such as those of James and Wharton. I located a discussion of this idea in Michael Martone's 2005 book, Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art. I won't pretend to have read the full discussion there, but I share the title because it's emblematic of the sort of thinking Michael does on a rigorous and regular basis: What can be reversed and thought about completely differently?

The idea of publishing is in flux, Michael says. The old "publication equals validation" equation is fading. Now the "means of production" are in the hands of the writers. The concept of vanity publishing is not the same as self-publishing. Roles are intermixing--writer, editor, publisher--cultural "gate-keeping" is less a power of the publishing industry.

The panel ended with comments about genre specialization being too extreme (Robin Hemley) and Ellen Bass' comment that you're a writer if you're writing and not if you're not. Michael gave a push for innovation: look for a new way everyday; the greater culture expects progression.

What I learned about Michael's workshop from my "spies"

As with the fiction workshop, my infiltration of the multi-genre workshop was somewhat desultory. I knew from friends on the inside that things were interesting and fun, but exactly what they were up to, I can't say for sure.

One day at lunch, Chelsea Blackman walked through the dining room with a handful of paint samples, four colors on a strip of paper. She was distributing them for an exercise in the Martone workshop. “I’ll take one!” I said, greedily. I love colors, and paint swatches are a great place to look for color names. So is the Wikipedia List of colors (although it’s alphabetical, not by actual color, which can be tedious) and the Wikipedia List of Crayola crayon colors (which is a trip back into deep memory).

What I forgot to do was ask about the exact assignment. I expect Michael had something specific and perhaps counterintuitive in mind. Nonetheless, I’ve done the exercise. I did it this way: use all four color names in a text. What I enjoy about this sort of prompt is the way it challenges me to imagine things I've never seen before and to play them out for a little while. Here's my text.

Luncheon 

A silver half dollar, soldered on the underside to an unseen ring, gleamed from its perch atop the rolled cloth napkin, next to a setting of silver salad fork, fork, empty white plate with dimpled rim, knife, and soup spoon. A Kennedy profile, staring off to the left: round and round the table, the Kennedy napkin rings stared. 

The napkin, sharply pointed top and bottom, slid out from the ring and opened as a white diamond, corners folded toward the middle like envelope flaps. A veritable lap robe, so large and crisp and white. 

Tall cylindrical glasses, filled moments ago with water over perfectly square cubes of ice, sweated in a ring at the interior of the table, just inches from a silver platter beneath the central arrangement of lilies. Light from the window bounced off the platter, pierced the glass, and projected a peculiar illusion: iced cube silver. 

Knees and thighs brushed against chantilly lace. Ice rattled in glass. John F. Kennedies rolled sideward. Crisp damask sails snapped open and disappeared. Lilies dropped crumbly dark pollen. Teeth thudded on silverware. Forks clanked against porcelain. Breadcrumbs lodged in crochet. Ice vanished. Coffee spoons dripped. Napkins fell like white mountain ranges when knees pulled back and away from lace.

(Now I wonder if I ought to have included or not included a broken teacup...)

June 6, Reading by Michael Martone on Friday night

I spent Michael's reading being a pleasing mixture of baffled and entertained--so much so that my notes are spare. He gets you thinking, for example about "the four nows." That's the now of the story, the now of writing, the now of reading, and the now of talking about the above. Concepts like "now" find themselves on shifting ground. Michael led off the reading with a few "Contributor's Notes," familiar from his reading last year and fun to hear again. He's created a small genre: false or perhaps semi-true biographies that follow the form of the literary bio. When asked for an "actual" contributor's note for the real back section of a book, he tends to send another of this genre instead.

Michael read from a series of 25-word memos, a form that derives at least half its power from the titles (which are exempt from the word limit and tend to be hilarious). No notes; I was laughing.

Ditto for whatever he read called "Amish in Space"--a collage piece that falls under "Indiana Science Fiction" and puts Amish space travelers in no gravity with livestock.

The Martone book I purchased at the conference is The Blue Guide to Indiana. I believe he read from it (about the Bob Ross Museum) because my notes indicate that and I've heard Michael read that bit before, but I have a blank spot in my memory from this particular evening--could I have been so completely entertained as to not remember it? (So it goes). The Blue Guide is a "fake" travel guide. I haven't read it the full book yet, so I'll just give you Melanie Rae Thon's blurb from the back jacket: "Michael Martone is a man with a mission, a fabulous inventor of history and memory, landscape and people. His quirky, magical tours hurl the reader across the borders between fact and fiction into a country of the mind where what we desire and fear fills our senses. Take the tops of your convertibles and fly! Trust The Blue Guide to Indiana to point you to some of the most delightful places on the planet."

Michael concluded his reading with something quite new: Four for a Quarter (as in the old-style photo booth where the camera took four separate shots in rapid succession). He called it fictions of things in fours. The piece he read is called "Four in Hand" and talks about knots in neckties: Windsor, Bow, Half-Windsor, and Four in Hand. The piece is very touching--how he knotted ties over the years for his father, who died earlier this year. Michael told me my own reading the evening before about my son's death had given him a nudge to present this work.

More on this topic, Michael has just had a photograph called "Curtains: My Father Dying, April 8, 2014" published by Ascent magazine, complete with a contributor's note.

June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?

Michael presented collage, one of the topics addressed in his workshop, near the opening of the panel discussion. It's about juxtaposition and recontextualization. Found objects, natural collaging, randomness, fragments, association, improvisation. It favors velocity (not perfection). One of my favorite quotes of the conference: "Quantity not quality." To underscore the point, Michael cited Joseph Stalin's position on military tanks: "quantity has a quality all its own." Michael advised us to think of the work as expansive. "Write this and move on."

Another favorite one-liner I've already shared with writer friends: "Remember, a page a day is a book a year."

When asked about stepping out of genre, Michael said the human impulse is to order and sort. He encouraged us to confuse and rearrange. Rather than accepting categories like "good" and "bad," he said we need to "worry the categories." He stressed, as he had in the opening panel, to find in writing a different value than commodity.

I now see that my notes do not contain a "favorite exercise" from Michael Martone. Is this another black hole in my note-taking, or have we in fact been short changed here? Some category worrying going on right now...

I can report that I applied learnings from Michael almost immediately (in addition to the stolen paint chip). The day after the conference ended, my last day on US soil for an undetermined period of time, I finally made it to Nordstrom Rack, where I tried on some summer dresses. In the end, I couldn't make up my mind. So, I bought three. That's what you meant, Michael, about quantity and tanks, right?

Lapidaries--preview to Learning from Robin Hemley

I can't follow with the next lengthy post today (I have Michael Martone in my sights), so I am presenting a small preview of my learnings from Robin Hemley. Robin was the instructor to whom I apprenticed myself during the Writers at Work conference: I took part in his nonfiction workshop, I listened to him read and speak on panels, and I discovered many common interests. So many of his ideas have resonance for me that I am perhaps now more aware of why he selected my essay when judging the nonfiction fellowship competition.

In workshop, Robin introduced a simple exercise to write "the shortest travel essays in the world." He said Victor Hugo had a practice of writing miniature essays called "lapidaries" in four lines. The idea is to write quickly, saving polishing for later. The result is four lines of detail in haiku-like prose. The form takes its shape, and name, from the practice of carving an epitaph in stone. As a writing practice, it develops minutia awareness. The idea reminds me of something I do "out and about" to entertain myself. I look up at the ceiling of a church, for example, and notice the first thing I see. I keep looking and note what I see next. And next. I'm always astonished at the hidden details that emerge around step four.

Robin suggested a practice of writing 5-10 lapidaries per week: "One a day will be a collection."

So, I've tried it. I also did some mostly fruitless research into Victor Hugo and other possible lapidary writers. Web searching turns up the occasional literary site but also yields a lot of companies that sell stone-carving equipment. There's one famous quote by Hugo that uses the word lapidary (but about a stone-carver, not an essay form): "Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman." (http://izquotes.com/quote/89064) I believe Robin really has something else in mind, though.

At my friend Cindy's garden last week, the place where I wrote ten lines of iambic pentameter (Ellen Bass, exercise 4), I wrote a few lapidaries, too. Sometimes I cheated a little in the length, and none of these are about travel. The below texts are very minimally "polished."

1

Voice trails in empty air--an erasure
Lulled consciousnesses stir in tiny alarm
Is it now--was that it? Do we need
to clap? Dry hands shuffle together
like canvas flapping in wind.

(from a note to myself: what does perfunctory clapping sound like?)


2

Canyon crack in dirt departs knapsack strap
carves nearly straight, then bends at rise
around tuft of grass in a quarter circle
before it splits into paths of wide divide.


3

Tongue-colored trumpet bells out
round and gentian violet; an only
bloom on a twine-held stalk
aiming toward the sun in open promise.


4

Empty chair: black mesh with shiny
charcoal armrests casts square shadow
on the grass, soaks in the rays of sun.
The seat would warm my thighs.


This practice is a lot of fun. I highly recommend giving it a try!

Learning from Lawrence Coates

Lawrence Coates writes, among other things, about California wine country. Living near hillside vineyards here in Germany, I took an instant interest purely because of the subject matter. That and his affiliation with Bowling Green University in my home state of Ohio. Over the course of the conference I appreciated his particular note of inquiry and unusual perspective. He's reminded me that a lot can happen when you bring "unrelated" ideas together.

Website: www.lawrencecoates.com
Workshop title: The Story and the Novel--Forms and Variations

June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?

Lawrence commented that some people write from tragedy and pain (I would count myself in that group), but that he writes primarily out of inquiry, out of not necessarily accepting what's taken to be "real." He writes historical novels. Writing is a means of understanding the self as one of many; of locating the stories of others; of exploring how people live in relation to the natural world in the place he comes from. Similar to Ellen Bass (and her comment picked up from Lawrence's), Lawrence says writing is about the pleasure of making.

What I learned about Lawrence's workshop from my "spies"

Well, I didn't have any official spies that I grilled about the fiction workshop. We heard from several participants during Open Mic readings, and I was moved, entertained and impressed by what I heard. Fiction writers create worlds without hanging on to actually occurring or already occurred realities. In my own writing (so far) I remain so connected to rendering actual events that this ability to create worlds is a marvel to me. I read a good deal of fiction, but I wonder if I will ever grow the muscles to write it.

Despite the lack of spy activity, I have located one of the fiction workshop activities based on texts Lawrence shared during his reading and in a posting he made on Facebook right after the conference. He described the exercise as picking an improbable image to write to. The images are generated by a group of writers together. Then each picks one to write about in 500 words. I'm sure if you try one of these prompts, he'd be delighted to hear from you.

From a June 9, 2014 Facebook post by Lawrence Coates:

"If anyone who has done a common image story with me is interested, my group came up with three new prompts at Writers @ Work. The rules are simple... you have to write a short short, 500 words or less, with one of these images included:
1) Baby doll in a wheelchair.
2) Panties in a pine tree
3) Pizza in the rain.
It seems that one of the shorts I read there, 'Lobster in the Laundromat,' made an impression. At least, one of the other faculty members said that his students were talking about it."

He's right, "Lobster in the Laundromat" made an impression on me and others. I've looked for a published version to link to, but I haven't turned one up yet. My current lead is a literary magazine called Lake Effect. However, it is print only, and the website does not indicate the issue that contains the Lobster story. I'll update this entry when I get the information.

June 6, Reading by Lawrence Coates on Friday night

Lawrence opened his reading with two of these short shorts. The first, "Bats in Purses" and the second, "The Lobster in the Laundromat." Both pieces carried compelling and bizarre imagery. It stays with me, the picture of a lobster watching clothes circle around beyond the glass door of a washer. The good news is that another piece, The Trombone in the Shopping Cart, was just published by Ascent. It's different from the Lobster, but the stories share an aching loneliness--the loneliness of being overlooked--that pierced me when I listened to the reading.

During the second part of his reading, Lawrence read the first chapter of his newest novel, The Garden of the World. While researching a previous novel, he'd come across an historical event that he chose to be the ending of this novel. (I won't say what the event was; you might find it more interesting to discover for yourself.) He conceded that some of the research for this winemaking novel was "liquid and pleasurable." When he mentioned the "fruiting canes" of the grape vines in the second paragraph, I became alert: here was my chance to learn English terminology about vineyards, since I've learned most of it in German.

This novel was the Coates book I purchased. I started it on the airplane home and finished it a few days ago. The pages are filled with sweeping and intimate scenery, with period detail in buildings, clothing and vehicles, and with characters that fully inhabit three dimensional space. Most of the chapters are subdivided into morsels of scene and image. The events accumulate in a way that feels close to life--memorable segments add up while the stuff in between fades away. There's lightness in the language--not in the sense of lacking content but in the sense of moving easily, without being weighted down. Here's a sample from a World War I battlefield in Chapter Two "Loyalty Day" (page 17):

       "There was only one tree still standing in the cratered earth between the two trenches, a stumpy, unidentifiable tree, with most of its branches and leaves blown off, more like the memory of where a tree had been than anything yet living. ...
        Then, suddenly, the tree was lit from within, a great tower of light from in the heart of it, illuminating it to the tip of its crippled branches. Gill remembered very clearly that sudden light."

June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?

Bouncing off Ellen Bass' comment about looking for multiple metaphor options (rather than aiming at some ultimately "right" one), Lawrence shared a technique he uses to get clarity about a character. Define the character by generating ideas this way: "S/he's the kind of person who _____________." Like metaphor, these ideas need to stay on the level of the concrete. He gave an example of the character Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, a man who wears cuff links made of human molars.

As a favorite exercise, Lawrence offered the disparate image activity described above. Another image possibility: Wedding Cake in the Road. Although I haven't tried it yet, the exercise reminds me of a prompt I've tried from Brian Kiteley's 3A.M. Epiphany. This link to Kiteley's website will direct you to some exercises from his new book, the 4A.M. Breakthough. Similar concept. Exercise 15 in the 3A.M. Epiphany instructs the writer 1) to develop a vivid, haunting image; 2) to develop a second, unrelated compelling image; 3) to write a story fragment out of the two images together (600 words). I was astonished at the energy of this when I tried it several years ago. I'm guessing the disparate image idea has a similar source of tension and creativity.

I'm always grateful for creative impulses from fiction writers and especially from writers as generous and pleasant as Lawrence Coates.

Poetry addendum to Learning from Ellen Bass

Yesterday I linked to Seema Reza's page, where I posted poem ideas within the comments of a prompt she posted. I thought I'd also post them here.

Original draft, June 8, 2014

Precise black nibs, air-filled and
separate, top jaw flopped wide
I contain a gathering of long-sleeves
along on a summer trip, the other
shoes, embroidered vest, crinkled receipt.
I await repacking for a multi-flight
return; my teeth will perform their
miracle against the odds
and ends I hold while I totter and wheeze
and glide and shudder when you shove me
in that overhead bin. But I will not
be the one flung in the hold below, so there,
bigger bag, so there.

Reworked draft (for shape), approx. June 10, 2014

My precise black tines comb empty air
flat jaw flopping floorward
mine are the long sleeves brought on a
summer trip, embroidered
vest, birthday cards, receipts, the other
shoes. My tiny hooks yield
one by one—a corps de ballet—we are
a miracle against the odds
and ends I hold. I’ll glide, stand, topple
and shudder at your shove
in that lunchbox overhead. But I’m not
the one who’ll be flung on
a belt towards a crushing, frigid pit. So
there, bigger bag, so there. 

In my notebook, I also found this embryonic text, fed by poetic impulses and written June 8, the day the conference ended. 

In my writing I seek Simon
a boy who would not be little now
whose voice could be gravel or stew
or honey like his father's
who would know private things
he'd not tell me
who would sweat and lust
adultly arms and groin and growingly seek to leave
yet still be one I can't keep my
eyes from, one whose sleep
I watch like drinking wine
whose calmed face reminds of the
tiny closed eyes, the mouth
owning my nipple.

Learning from Ellen Bass

The 2014 Writers at Work conference (June 4-8 at Alta Lodge in Utah) featured four workshop instructors: Ellen Bass (poetry), Michael Martone (multi-genre), Lawrence Coates (fiction), and Robin Hemley (literary nonfiction).

As a participant in Robin Hemley's workshop, I spent the most time learning directly from him about the genre I write in: nonfiction/memoir. However, I made it my business to learn as much as I could from the other three instructors as well. I listened carefully during faculty panels and readings. I made use of "spies" in each of the other workshops. I took advantage of opportunities for conversation at meals, in the hot tub, and walking down the halls.

Reflecting on five intensive days spent in the midst of writers takes some time, especially after the travel I did in May and June (Oberlin, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and Alta during three weeks in the US). The next trip, barely a week after I returned to Germany, took me to Austria for busy days of family visiting and music performance in celebration of Markus' parents' 50th wedding anniversary. If it weren't for the distraction of World Cup soccer in Brazil, I might be digesting my conference experience more swiftly. But that temptation is too great, and I enjoy watching the games.

My idea is to share what I learned from this year's conference faculty, each of whom has sent me forth with impulses and energy for my work. I want to begin with the poet, Ellen Bass.

Website: http://www.ellenbass.com
Workshop title: When I Met My Muse

June 4, Opening Faculty Panel: Why are we writing?

Ellen offered a good, basic reason for writing: because you want to. She compared writing to making a mudpie--something you do for the primitive satisfaction of making. "If you love sentences, then you can write." She considers writers to be "people for whom writing is more difficult" and she sees writing "as a way to pay attention, notice more deeply." When terrible things happen, she said, write.

When the discussion moved on to writing about challenging topics, Ellen encouraged us to be bold. "Nothing is taboo; you have to be brave to reveal, to be controversial, to write things somebody thinks you shouldn't be writing (or another part of you thinks you shouldn't)." She said she thinks of herself as being in the special olympics and trying to do her best there. It's an honor to be in the lineage--you put your pebble, not necessarily a boulder, on the altar of writing.

Ellen also spoke about facing ignorance--our own and "dumb questions" from others. I liked a term she used: you develop "functional calluses" against what others might say; you learn to give stock answers. If I understand my notes correctly, Ellen indicated an energy about her own ignorance--that it means she always has something to bring to the "blank page," something to work on.

In closing, she offered: "If you're writing, you're a writer. If you stop writing, you're not a writer. The whole game is to keep writing."

What I learned about Ellen's workshop from my "spies"

My lodge roommate, Katharine English, and workshop mates Star Coulbrooke and Natalie Taylor from last year's conference (during which I boldly joined the poets for the three days of workshop led by Katharine Coles) kept me apprised of their progress in the poetry workshop. Notably: Ellen structured each of the three days to include a two-hour writing block. Participants wrote a new poem each day. (To those of us in "workshop method" critique-based sessions, where you can learn a great deal but you must then apply the learning on your own later, this opportunity to generate work inspired some envy.) We heard several of these new works during Open Mic readings.

The second thing my spies raved about in Ellen's workshop was her critique method. For a given poem, the critique began with an opportunity for participants to praise the work in question. Then Ellen carefully, kindly, wisely and thoroughly offered a spot-on critique. I believe I can picture this process, but I would have enjoyed seeing it in action.

Finally--and quite amazingly for me--my own writing found its way into the poetry workshop. As described in the June 11 post The night I read at Alta Lodge, my Thursday night reading had a direct connection to Ellen's topic for Friday's workshop: Sentiment vs. Sentimentality. (I.e., emotion is present in the writing without relying on expressions like "It was terrible.") My fellowship-winning essay, "Objects of My Attention," goes into intimacies and detail about my son's death to cancer and about my ensuing grief. The topic is loaded with sentiment--knock-you-out-at-the-knees sad and awful experiences--but the writing is object-based, specific and unsensational. Over and over at lunch on Friday, poetry workshop participants enthusiastically told me how often they had referred to my writing in their discussion that morning.

June 7, Reading by Ellen Bass on Saturday night

Ellen read from her poetry collection Like a Beggar. As I generally do, I scribbled along while listening. She began with a lovely assertion: "Poetry is one way of choosing joy." Katherine Coles offered a similar sentiment last year. I believe I am beginning to see over the edge and into the deep poetry well of joy. Here are the snippets of language that made it into my notebook.

"breasts that remember the sting and flush of milk"

          "the backyard potatoes swell quietly"

"as darkness was sinking back into the earth"

         about killing chickens, Ellen said, "I loved the truth"

"rhododendron blossoming its pink ceremony"

          "the moon rinsing the parked cars"

I allowed myself to purchase one book by each of the faculty (watching my luggage weight limit). I chose Like a Beggar.

June 8, Closing faculty panel: How we got here and where do we go from here?

During the final panel, Ellen stressed the concept of discovery. "If you get to the end of the page and you have only written what you already know, then you haven't written yet. Allow the poem to have its way with you. The poem is smarter than you are." In her workshop, she said they focused on finding sentiment, not bland statement. She cited neurological studies that support the idea that sensory detail activates brain response. In workshop they looked at metaphor, and her advice is just write a bunch and select later rather than tunneling toward the "right one."

Example: After reviewing these notes, I tried the metaphor idea. I'm struggling in one piece of writing to describe a certain Christmas tree decoration typical of my Austrian relatives: special chocolates wrapped in fringed tissue paper, hanging as ornaments on the tree. How to describe that tissue paper wrapping, the fringe? I've tried pompoms. No. My sister-in-law suggested those fringed papers at then ends of chicken drumsticks. No. (A Christmas tree covered in chicken legs?!) So (sitting on the toilet) I let my mind wander. I saw the toilet brush. Then in sequence: hairbrush, toilet brush, street sweeper, car wash scrubbers flapping around, anemone in water. Hmm. Could I use the idea of anemones? Then I saw the color palette of the tissue paper as that of tropical fish. It's quite accurate. Perhaps I can make use of this association. Perhaps I'm still looking.

Another Ellen-ism from the panel: Why make a fool of yourself? Why not make a fool of yourself?

An audience question from Lori Lee, a member of the nonfiction workshop, yielded a true bonanza of inspiring exercise ideas. I am so grateful to Lori for asking the question. Ellen contributed a series of "writing prompts that bring up a lot."

1. Write a scene when father (or other) comes home at the end of the work day when you are a child. This sort of "poem of the moment" has the best odds of working out as a poem.

2. Discovery is best when it "just happens," but when it doesn't, you can be aggressive about discovery. Ask your poem: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" If it says "I don't know" then look at its "test scores" and say (like a school guidance counselor) "maybe you can be this."

3. Imitations. Do them tight or loose. Try same syllable count. Imitate metaphor and image, reflective statement. "Suck DNA out of the poem. Steal its exuberance." As a poet, you absorb rhythms in your cells, especially from older poetry. Appropriate as much into your body as you can.

4. Practice before you begin work every day: write ten lines of iambic pentameter. It can be nonsense. Use the practice to walk through the door of poetry.

I tried this on June 26 during a writing group session:

To sit and think and write and look and breathe

I go to Cindy's garden hut and reach

my arms too high to write, my elbow up

my shoulder slant; I angle chin and line

of neck to accommodate this chair, this desk--

a table rounded, brown and formed to look

like wood, like walnut, eb'ny, something dark

but plastic, meant for outdoor use in rain

or sun, still new because the garden's new--

a hiding place with birdsong, breeze and light.

5. Gather suggestions and prompts from writing books for exercises, put cut up slips into a basket, pick one before bed at nigh. That's your assignment for tomorrow.

6. Purposely write something bad (150-200 words). "To write not bad, you should avoid using adverbs." If you succeed, you have managed to create a "good badness." The exercise can disable anxiety about your intent (what you want to do) and performance (what you do do). "If you write bad well, you can feel good about it." (I've tried this before, and it can be a lot of fun.)

My gratitude and admiration go to Ellen Bass for her gifts at the conference. I wish I'd taken the opportunity to speak with her directly. Somehow the time went by--and I missed my chance for an autograph in her book. However, I was paying attention!

I'll close with one more mention. I left the conference with poetry inspiration, quite probably because of Ellen's reading on the last evening. The next day, back in Salt Lake City and getting ready to re-pack for the flight home, I happened on a poetry prompt on my friend Seema Reza's blog. Instead of packing, I wrote a poem from the prompt. Then over the next days (including endless hours in airports and planes) I fiddled with a relining/rewrite of the poem to give it a visual shape. In the end, the first poem is the best because it holds the energy. But it's amazing how far you can travel in re-expressing ideas and adding/removing syllables or letters to fit a concept. If your eyes haven't fallen out already from this long post, head over to Seema's blog and read my poem versions in the comments on her June 2 post called Normal. Then stay on her blog to read her June 11 stop on the Blog Tour.