Let's Make Beautiful Stuff Together Week 3
Camille Dungy & CPR for cliches
THURSDAY, APRIL 13, 2023
Poem of the Week
Our poem of the week was Camille Dungy’s “Trophic Cascade.” We read it out loud and talked about the word “trophic”—is it related to trope?—as well as the cascading feeling of reading the poem. How the long extended metaphor makes its point and punctuates a trope.
Generative Exercise
Then, we spent about 3 minutes each making our own list of every cliche we could think of. Then, we each selected one cliche to perform CPR on; we spent about 15 minutes generating our own cliche-initiated/initiating poems. This truncated exercise is borrowed from a longer prompt Camille shared with Commonplace Patreons a few months back in which she offers the challenge:
How can you invite yourself and your readers to think about the language you use in a more vibrant manner?
There was also an invitation to spend a few minutes defining the chosen cliche for ourselves and/or a few minutes researching its origin.
And we closed by watching a few minutes of a reading Camille gave where she reads “Trophic Cascade” and discusses it briefly (14:40 - 18:23).