A visit to Mahak Jain's class about poetry, writing about nothing, haiku, bad poems and awful but engaging words. MOIST MOIST MOIST!

 

I was delighted to speak to three of Mahak Jain's Intro to Creative Writing classes (hello, you 8am early risers--or recliners!) and made this little presentation with some ideas about writing and some writing activities. Link to slide presentation 

Though it was exceedingly strange to talk to the screen without seeing or hearing anyone (hey, that's like writing a novel) except what was written in the chat, I got used to it and everyone was really great--full of good ideas, comments, poems, and energy. 

I ran out of time in two of the classes, but in one we wrote "our very worst terrible poem," which is always really fun to do. What makes a poem terrible? And then, can it be so terrible that it becomes good? (You know, like my cooking...) What does it reveal about what we look for in poetry? Or what we avoid?

We also wondered whether poetry had to include words, such messy, hard-to-spell things. Here is a sound performance I did a couple days ago for a launch for Carousel Magazine's new issue. It's all about the sound of the voice and visuals of ampersand, both voice and visuals were processed through live interactive digital programming (Max/MSP)