This was a really fun workshop to teach, so I'm posting my handout and lesson plan here. 

Read the poems and try your hand at writing a bop or a tanka. Or teach the workshop yourself, if you like. The materials are here for you to use.

Link to Handout

Link to Lesson Plan

Crossing the Great Divide

Editing and revision may be the bane of a writer’s existence. Ted Kooser wrote:

“Revision, and I mean extensive revision, is the key to transforming a mediocre poem into a work that can touch and even alter a reader’s heart.  It’s the biggest part of the poet’s job description.  I’ve published hundreds of poems, most of them less than twenty lines in length, and people are always surprised to learn that I might take a single short poem through twenty, or thirty, or even forty versions before I think it’s finished” (The Poetry Home Repair Manual 16).

He reminds us to be patient:

“Don’t worry that the process of revision seems slow.  The writer’s tools were developed early - paper, pen, and ink; a watchful eye; an open heart - and good writing is still the patient handiwork of those simple tools.  A poet who makes only one really fine poem during his life gives far more to the world that the poet who publishes twenty books of mediocre verse” (ibid. 148).

Why should we bother to work so hard, for so little reward? Kenneth Koch in his discussion of “poetry language” concludes by saying:

"The last inclination of the poetry language I'll mention - though there are more - is specifically addressed to making whatever is said into a work of art. Without this one, of course, you may be writing, but you're not writing poetry" (Making Your Own Days 69).

Never Give Me a Security Clearance!

Seriously.

I attempted this writing prompt from Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days:

________________________ but I never told anyone 

[repeat as necessary to create the poem]

The Trade-Offs of Travel

Painted Desert, Arizona
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

Last summer I took a 30-day cross-country road trip. Because diesel fuel was so expensive, I left the motor home and took my Toyota van. I stayed mostly in the cheapest Kampgrounds of America cabins - the ones without plumbing - or with relatives. For the cabins, I brought my own bedding, a minimal camp kitchen, a folding table and a chair. To avoid midnight treks across the campground, I bought a portable toilet, complete with plastic bags and chemicals to absorb moisture and odor. 

 I thought that I might miss home-cooked meals, my own bed, or watching TV and crafting in the evenings. I also expected to miss my husband, dogs and friends more than I actually did. Since I had no one to talk to, I listened to music and audio books. However, I soon discovered that I needed to be careful because I was liable to miss my exit while listening to exciting passages. After getting lost in a wilderness area with no cell signal and no GPS, I decided to hit the pause button more often. 

Garden of the Gods, IL
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

 My father always told me, “Look out the window. You don’t know if you’ll ever come this way again.” So I planned my itinerary to include points of interest, knowing that every day could be my last chance to see them. I loved meeting new people and seeing new places every day. 

 Unfortunately, my husband grew up with a different kind of father, a pedal-to-the-metal driver who wanted to reach his final destination as soon as possible. They cannot see the journey as its own reward, and it’s difficult to persuade my DH to pull over for an unplanned stop. 

 My solo travel is leisurely and more spontaneous. Perhaps that's why I didn't long to be with my husband while on the road. 

Cave-In-Rock State Park, IL
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

What I missed most, to my surprise, was my comfy chair. My lower back had quite a few complaints about long days of driving, despite the memory-foam cushion I bought for the trip. At the end of the day, I wanted to lean back in my recliner in front of the TV. Sitting in a camp chair wasn't the same, even if I could pop open a cold soda or a craft beer and watch YouTubes on my tablet, and my body knew the difference. 

 The other thing I really missed was having a refrigerator like the one in the motorhome. It was annoying to drain the cooler and buy ice every morning. Also, I couldn't shop ahead and keep the food cold for several days. Instead, I had to find a grocery store, and neighborhood grocery stores are rarely close to the interstate. Walmart Supercenters and small-town grocers became my go-to's, but sometimes all I could find was a convenience store, aisle after aisle of processed snack foods with not a fruit or vegetable in sight. 

 Have you ever taken a long trip? What was the most unexpected thing you missed when you were away from home?

The Open Road
©2023 Tina Quinn Durham

Precariously Perched But Holding

Chiricahua National Monument

Travel opens the heart, invites one to take photos and write a travelogue. So recently we loaded up the motorhome and drove to the Chiricahua National Monument. It's supposed to be a wonderland of rocks and I had never been there. Surely this novel landscape would inspire me to write something interesting.

Well, the Chiricahua Mountains are indeed a wonderland of rocks, but I found myself staring, wondering what to say about a static, rocky landscape so hot that even the insects were silent. It didn't inspire me the way lakes and rivers do; it didn't steal my heart and invite me in as the ocean does. So what could I write about this forbidding, ancient place?

Yes, once there was movement and great upheaval – a volcano so hot it created rhyolite tuff, a fine-grained rock composed of quartz and potassium feldspar, lava flung up from a twelve-mile caldera in a vast pyroclastic eruption. Even today, Hollywood with all its special effects could not begin to re-imagine the magnificence of that cataclysm. 

The lava hardened as it cooled and twenty-seven million years later, the stone has weathered and fissured. Water, wind and time have sculpted a land of spectacular towers. Massive and angular, undoubtedly holy, they are so completely themselves that I have nothing to add.

This is slot canyon country, with slumps and a natural bridge that no human can cross. The mountains are fancifully adorned with pinnacles and spires and perfectly balanced rocks that someday must fall to the power of water and wind and time.

If elements of this landscape were to move real-time, I would not want to see it. I need those rocks to stay there, balanced just so on their impossibly tiny bases, believing that if I were to come back in another twenty-seven million years, there'd still be something to see.

Musing on Truth and Lying

The task of the poet is to invent lies in the service of speaking truth, which is of course, deeply paradoxical. However, this is the fate, not just of poets, but of every human alive: to attempt to articulate that which cannot be fully known or articulated. 

Kenneth Koch understood this tendency of poets to "have the feeling of knowing things that may be unknowable" and as a consequence, to "make grand pronouncements." He wrote: 

Something close to lying is pretending to know more than one does know, or possibly could know, and/or pretending to have more power than one has or could possibly have. The impulse to so pretend may be highly emotional (Making Your Own Days 66).

Job caught a glimpse of the Infinite when God appeared to him in the whirlwind. He cried out, "I declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me which I did not know"(NASB). His immediate response was to repent in dust and ashes, and ask God for instruction.

The character of Job may have repented of his words, but the author of the book did not. Confronted by an existential crisis, the author created a masterful series of poems exploring the causes of horrific, seemingly random events and our responses to them.

Thus we see that the poet's response is almost always to write another poem. That works for us as poets, perhaps because our work is tied to strong, genuine emotions and because we are trying to discover the truth, not obscure it.

In contrast, language used to deceive and manipulate others is the bread and butter of politicians, what George Orwell called "doublespeak" in 1984. Men and women addicted to power cannot perceive or speak truth; instead, they engineer photo ops and sound-bytes for the poisonous theater of the absurd.

Paul, in 1 Timothy, complained about men who wanted to be teachers of the law yet who "did not understand either what they were saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions" (NASB). Caught up in their own rhetoric, these men - like some modern teachers and politicians - had forgotten that their proper goal was teaching people to "love from a pure heart." Lying to themselves and others, they lost their way, and the result then (as now) was divisiveness and hatred.

Proverbs 15:33 says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (NASB). Whatever your concept of God and the universe, it's good to begin by acknowledging that you are small and the world around you immense, astonishing, and too wonderful for any of us to fully categorize, define or explain. Kafka said it beautifully:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet (Goodreads)

Thus we come to the writing of poetry, and the articulation of impossible truth.

My Current Writing Routine

If you’re a writer, you know that your writing routines and schedule change over time. What works for you today may not work tomorrow. Or you come across an idea in a book about writing, or a friend mentions what she does, and you think, “Hey, I ought to try that.” If the experiment helps, you incorporate that new thing into your writing life.

Last January, Melissa and Dave of Journey Sixty6 hosted an online writing workshop about writing rituals, which got me thinking about how I might make my writing time more creative and more productive. Their idea was to use something sensory, rewarding, specific and repetitive to get your writer brain started every day.

"Coffee related (Free stock photo)" by trophygeek 

is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

My rewarding sensory cue is to bring my tablet and my cup of coffee to a comfy chair where I can see trees and the sky. Then I start my daily writing routine:

1. Copy three quotes or interesting phrases onto small pieces of cardstock and put them in the “Magic Cauldron” (an old metal box with astonishing powers) as inspiration for future poems.
2. Read a poem. At the moment, I’m reading The Best American Poetry 2022, but it could be any book or magazine with poems in it. Alberto Rios always told us to “prime the pump” and he was right - when I’m not reading poetry, I’m not writing poetry either.
3. Attempt to respond to the poem in some way. If I’m still feeling uninspired, I read from a book on the writer’s craft. At the moment, it’s Kennth Koch’s Making Your Own Days.
4. Attempt to write a poem. If I’m still uninspired, I shake up the Magic Cauldron, pick three random quotes and try again.
5. If I still can’t write a poem, I free write for ten minutes or go to my desk to revise something. Generally, at this point, I have generated some text of some sort, and feel pretty good about my morning, but if the Muse was elsewhere, that’s okay too. I’ve enjoyed my coffee and fired up lots of neurons. My soul has been nourished on sky and leaves moving in the wind. 

Nobody can write a good poem every day. Heck, no one can even write a mediocre poem every day. But writing isn’t just about publication. It’s also a spiritual practice.

The important thing is to show up, and listen.

To show up.

So that’s what I do.

Words of Encouragement to Read During Hard Times

 I wrote this for me, but maybe these words will encourage you too.

You really are smart and capable, even when you don’t feel that this is true. And people are capable of changing. If you don’t like the way something is going, it’s okay to try something different. 

This may sound counter-intuitive, but you don’t have to like something to get it done or to like the end result. Being unhappy or tired or bored in the middle is often part of the process. Suck it up and deal with it.

Finally, be kind to yourself in hard times. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone has bad moods and bad days, everyone experiences failures on the way to success. It’s okay not to know how to do something and it’s okay to mess up while you’re figuring it out.

The wonderful thing is that we get through hard times. Hard times don’t last forever. 

In the end, everything will be okay. Really.