Thank you, Alida and Nonnie, for your poems,
I would like to write a 'Casa Dega' poem myself, and have some images swimming around in my head. Like the Indian swami portrait pasted on the wall, next to Walt Whitman's, the wind chimes that drew Blair and I to our seer.
And then this year my Mom has embarked on a full-blown genealogy search, so maybe I will write something about that, too, in a more epic form, like yours, Nonnie. At it stands, I have bits and pieces of family history in more typical forms.
What I could suggest to you, Nonnie, is to keep going with it and see how long it is, naturally, before going back to revise (or is this how long you want it?). I think of Carolyn referencing M Atwood's idea of writing the whole memoir - for me this would also go for longer family history poems and / or(other) epics - out to completion in one draft in one fell swoop as a first step.
Alida, thank you for all that humor. I feel the speaker of the poem as an ambivalent participant in it all. I am wondering if some more divisions into stanzas would pull out some lines, especially spoken ones, that deserve more pause in my opinion. For example, a new 2-line stanza at "Oh, Lakshmi"; another after "out there"; another at "Really, I did"; then, "it is your voice"; her incantation (for 3-line stanza); and new one at "the things...".
On a more administrative note, is anyone a AWP member? And if so, are you signed up for the whole program, ie, access to everything? And if so, have you found it helpful and in which ways?
Thanks,
Ann
Welcome to the BFA Workshop in Poetry at ACA, 2015 This guided workshop will be both generative and critique-based; we’ll be looking at past work, learning methods of revision, and writing new poems from prompts and exercises. Poets should bring seventeen copies (each) of three poems they would like the group to read and critique. A blog will be set up to help us to prepare in advance, to aid us in communicating between our meetings, and to foster our community after we leave the retreat.
