Let's Make Beautiful Stuff Together Week 4
Lucie Brock-Broido and word hoards
THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 2023
Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash
We continued to practice Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process on each other’s poems, as three brave poets shared their CPR’ed cliche pieces this week to get us started.
Poem of the Week
Then we read our poem of the week, which was Lucie Brock-Broido’s “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World.” We read it out loud and reveled in its turns of phrase and use of white space, its stolen title!
Generative Exercise
We spent about 15 minutes generating poems from word hoards we had been gathering since our first session four weeks prior!
Instructions: Now that you have been collecting evocative, striking, meaningful, interesting, and exciting words and phrases into your own unique word hoard, it’s time to harness the ridiculous leaps the mind can sometimes make between its three brains, as Robert Bly describes in Leaping Poetry.
Get a little experimental with this one, letting your mind connect the words and phrases that might not obviously connect. Use some of the words or all of them, restrict yourself to only the word hoard or feel free to weave them into your poem sparingly. Play around with repetition and sound! Dig deep into your subconscious for this one.
Bonus content - Listen to an entire reading she gave on the Seattle Arts & Letters Podcast:
We have one more week of workshop with this group making beautiful stuff together. Subscribe (for free) if you want access to the archives where I’ve been posting these poems and exercises every week and to continue to get updates from my poet-brain.