Friday, March 12, 2010

Forward Motion: Writing and the Writing Community at DWC PRO

by Peter McShane

It's true that writing is a solitary pursuit, but ironically you can't do it alone.

When I decided to try my hand at writing a memoir, the words flowed, thousands of them. It read like a confessional. A few family members said it was terrific. They love me; I knew better. I wanted to write something that non-relatives would read.

I decided to take a few courses at the DWC and quickly learned that I didn't know anything about writing. In the words of acclaimed writer and educator John Gardner, the key to writing stories is creating for the reader a vivid and continuous dream. This holds true whether it's creative non-fiction or fiction. It's difficult to pull it off with exposition alone. Adding characters who interact draw the reader into their lives. Successful writers use a combination of exposition and dialog. This helps to create what Gardner calls profluence, or forward motion, drawing the reader in and holding his/her attention.

What's next after you've learned all this procedural stuff, like genre, style, theme, point of view, plotting; the nuts and bolts? It's finding readers to test drive your work; people willing to read through your early drafts and tell you what works and what doesn't. That's what workshops are all about. It's an eye-opening, humbling experience, but your writing will improve. You'll get encouragement from your instructors and peers, and one-on-one tutorials with experienced, published writers who provide valuable insight and suggestions for fine-tuning your work.

All this is what you get in the DWC PRO program: people serious about writing stories and instructors who validate your work. More importantly, it's an introduction to the writer's community. This is how successful writers do it. It's not easy, but the reward is a reader who can't put your story down.


Peter McShane and nine other DWC PRO students will be featured readers this spring, and in June will comprise the very first DWC PRO graduating class.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Sapphire Goes Hollywood Swingin'

There is a trend with the writers invited to read for the Downtown Writer’s Center: they often receive greater national recognition after they have been booked for us. Take, for example, the fact that both Ted Kooser and Charles Simic were named Poet Laureate. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon was nominated for the National Book Award. Others have received honors or they were already prize winners before they visited Syracuse to share their work with our crew.

Now it has happened again but this time with the stamp of Hollywood’s approval. Sunday evening, Sapphire was among all the glamor of the Red Carpet. A poet and novelist, Sapphire is experiencing a second wave with her 1994 novel, Push, as adapted for the screen in the movie Precious. Sapphire read at the DWC in 2006. At that time, Push was a bit of an underground novel. Push is a bold, courageous look into one story based on one young woman facing extraordinary, terrible circumstances. The novel depicts both the horror of what a human can inflict or experience as well as the great odds that a human can overcome to achieve personal strength, self-esteem, even salvation.

With this novel, Sapphire opened a discussion about incest and rape at a time when we, as a society, were still silent regarding these “family secrets.” The brutal truth behind the veil is the high percentage of women who are raped, either by a stranger or someone known to them. Some say one in three, others one in four. Either statistic is chilling. Each represents a gash in that life that will never be fully healed, a person who may never be able to trust again. These data do not address the depth of pain associated with multiple occurrences of incest, sometimes for years.

In the late 80s, when this story is set, we were very closed-mouthed about incest and domestic abuse. But Sapphire needed to instigate the conversation. We were closer to exposing the horrors and commonality of these experiences when the book was released. Sapphire chose to be a part of that developing transparency.

Now, in the 21st century, the book has become film and has achieved critical acclaim. Had Lee Daniels, the director, won the Oscar, he would have been the first African American to receive the award. Instead, the first woman won so we can hardly find much fault with the Academy there. Another milestone has challenged the history. The many other nominations and awards that were given to Precious were warranted but also signal a change in America. We are more able to face our demons to tell the truth.

I believe that both the movie and the book are critically important as “herstory.” It is not easy to sit through the film. It is not comfortable to experience the novel. That is not the intention of the tale. But there is a heroic hope, just as there is hope for Haiti, or for our young people in urban schools, as there was for those who survived the Holocaust, or those who cross borders for work. Humans can survive just about anything but it is a confounding mystery as to how we do it.

The release of the film, and the recognition for its achievements, has spurred a challenging discussion over the internet about the depiction of African Americans, and Black men in particular. It has been fascinating to listen to the discourse, which has been quite passionate. There have been heated debates about the aspects of casting (light-skinned vs. dark-skinned actors for key roles), the negative view of men, the potential correlation of that one semi-fictional family to African American families in general. Noted writer and scholar Ishmael Reed has been very forthcoming with his objections and Sapphire has responded in print. There has been a lot of “How dare they?!” attached to the project. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have been implicated in the process because they took the film from its premier at Sundance last year as a low-budget indie film to major distribution. How dare they?!

I ask, when is any piece of art speaking for all of a culture? Were the Huxtables speaking for all of Black America? No. But are there upper middle class families like them? Yes, just as there are families much like the Evans family of the situation comedy from back in the day, Good Times. Is Waiting to Exhale, either the book or the movie, a statement of all Black culture? I see horrid stereotypes, particularly of women, in that story. Is the fact that the Hip Hop artist Common is in the trailer of another Hollywood movie as a pretty-faced thug with a gun a statement as well? I think so. Why does he take those roles? When will he be a male lead? A positive image on the big screen? His music breaks the stereotype of Hip Hop expectations but his acting career is sadly typical.

It cannot be escaped that humans have tremendous capacity for hatred and unconscionable deeds. We have to speak of the horrors to overcome them. We can open the discussion one story at a time. Sapphire was able to do that with her fiction and then, by patiently waiting for the right ensemble to bring her words to image, we now have Precious.

The up side is that Sapphire is being rewarded well for her book. The film is honored by many. Push has been reissued for the mass market. Target included it as one of their featured books a few weeks ago. It is on the shelves in Wegmans. I assume the royalty checks are huge. Sapphire deserves recognition and remuneration for the book. It is not perfect. It was a raw piece from an emerging writer. But hers is an important book.

Sunday, Mo’nique won the Best Supporting Actress title. In fact, she has swept the category in all the major awards this season for this brutal character portrayal. She was magnificent and chilling. The film won the Oscar for best screenplay adaptation. Unfortunately, as the Oscar recipients accepted their awards the other evening, neither thanked Sapphire nor her novel, although she was seated in the audience.

I hope all the other glory that has been afforded Sapphire makes up for the criticism and the lack of gratitude for all of her effort to create the work and then get it to print, then the long wait until she found the team she trusted to bring her vision to the screen. I will write to Sapphire and tell her that I am grateful. She changed me as a human and gave me strength to be clear about my truth as well as to maintain hope in spite of any and all adversity. She also gave me clear vision to my own purpose as a writer. We must start from the place of truth, no matter what the reaction may be.


Georgia Popoff teaches at the Downtown Writer's Center and in schools throughout NYS. In Fall 2009, she taught a class on contemporary African American poets for DWC PRO. She is a frequent poster to this blog.

Why Go PRO?

By Philip Memmer, who, when he's not directing, can be found here.

Since we started DWC PRO two years ago, a number of people have asked “What exactly is a certificate program?”

It’s not a bad question. All of us are well-acquainted with the idea of applying to a college degree program, and we are also familiar with the idea of simply taking a class at a community venue. But DWC PRO is somewhere between the two. It is a two-year time commitment, with a number of requirements (some quite strenuous)… so it is clearly similar in ways to a graduate writing program. On the other hand, PRO does not grant a degree, nor does it provide any kind of accreditation that can be used professionally… in that way, it is similar to a community workshop.

In our view, what DWC PRO provides is a way to take your literary training seriously, without completely rearranging your life. The cost is reasonable, the workshop hours are manageable even with a full-time job, and you don’t have to pack up and move; that’s the easy part. The hard part, of course, is the work itself: you will take 11 classes and 6 tutorials over the course of two years. You will work with six or more different authors, all of whom will make demands of you and your writing. And you will be expected to become part of a community of writers with goals similar to your own.

None of that hard work will earn you a degree. If your end goal is to someday teach at a University, or to earn a Masters degree, then DWC PRO is not for you. But if you are simply interested in learning more about the craft of writing, looking for a way to challenge both yourself and your work, and for a push to complete your first book manuscript, then the PRO program could be exactly what you need.

Stay tuned this week for more on DWC PRO, from our own PRO students.


Philip Memmer is the author of three books of poems: Lucifer: A Hagiography (Lost Horse Press, 2009), which was awarded the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry; Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (Word Press, 2004), and Threat of Pleasure (Word Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Mid-American Review and Poetry Northwest, and in several anthologies. He is director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA, and founder of the DWC.


Friday, March 5, 2010

Spring Is Close - Come Celebrate with Poetry This Evening

The air will be clear and bright this evening, according to the forecast. Are you feeling cabin fever? Then plan on being at the Downtown Writer's Center this evening. Our guests are the DWC's own Nate Pritts and his good friend and educator, Matt Hart, who is traveling in from Ohio to share his work with our community.

Nate Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon, 2010), Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008).  The founder & primary editor of H_NGM_N, on on-line journal of contemporary poetry, Nate currently teaches at the DWC. Now we get a chance to feature Nate not as educator but for the poetry he creates.

Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forthcoming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

The Spring calendar of readings will be released soon but you can get a jumpstart on the season with this last of the Winter line-up. The reading starts at 7:00 p.m. and, as always is free. We encourage you to bring a friend as well to share the evening. The Downtown Writer's Center is located off the main lobby of the Downtown YMCA, 340 Montgomery Street, near Syracuse's Columbus Circle. We hope to see you!

Thursday, March 4, 2010

The Imaginarium of Matt Hart

by Georgia Popoff

Reading Matt Hart’s poetry, I find myself negotiating undercurrents of a “normal life:” the job, the baby, the wife, the dog who definitely wants to move faster than her human, the confusion of a morning started too early; all of the elements of a life reaching middle stages, all its trappings but no ordinary observations wending into typical narrative form here.

Matt Hart agrees to let us witness the Venn Diagram of his inner thoughts, where his love of language meets his rock-n-roll heart. Coffee and the paper are not enough. I am reminded that there is a period of rock-n-roll I missed. Matt has archived that era for himself, and the blare of punk seeps through as he wanders an interior landscape, where the topography is constructed of fanciful images and the orchestration of the poet’s daily query to establish place, create meaning, dispel wonder. He is also bold enough to resurrect the poetic “O” and get away with it.

He risks our meddling. His reader has a spyglass of Matt’s specifications to witness the confusion a man feels when suddenly he looks around at his own trappings to see a world he created and, at the same time, stumbled into without realizing. Take, for instance, these lines:


Tonight the sun is shining, and I am joyful,
but why? The world is weird wired
and white as hydrangeas. I am joyful
in my blue plaid mind, even as I think
terrible thoughts against my wife,
my daughter, the leaders of my country.
There is no end to my terrible joy.
I am like a wolf with an egg in its mouth,
the yolk running over its mad lip curling.


The poet is not about to stray from his family’s routine but still there is a dark foreboding. He is at ease in his station as professor yet I hear a challenge in his poems, a slow rumbling of “Why are you listening to ME?” In the midst of this ongoing questioning of the universe, the magic realism never ceases to amaze Matt.

His is a world influenced by the masters who have gone before him, not just the sparse Zen of Philip Whelan or the angst of Johnny Rotten, but the singsong of Dr. Seuss, the acid touch of Lewis Carroll. There is the craft of the finest and the storm of a summer night. The Bootsy bassline and the order of a Wordsworth garden. Every poem gives me reason to stop, read it phrase by phrase, question the song of wind chime in late winter, challenge my own poetry to a duel of fascination.

As I sit in a seeming silence, the timer for the living room light to fool the potential interlopers ticking a frantic pulse, the late winter breeze outside creating a random etude, my coffee growing cold too quickly in my cup, I think maybe, just perhaps, I get it. Matt will let me know on Friday, as he breathes these words into air.

Don't miss Matt Hart and Nate Pritts at the DWC Friday night, 7 pm.


Georgia Popoff is a well-traveled teaching artist, community poet and currently serves as interim managing editor for Comstock Review. She is definitely someone you should know.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Calm Poem

by visiting author, Matt Hart, who can also be found here.

1.

Several years ago I was in a poetry workshop with Tony Hoagland. During a one-on-one meeting about my work, he noted all the noise and disruption in my poems—all the feedback and chaos—and said “Here’s what I want you to do: write a calm poem and call it “Calm Poem.” Make every line a line of clarity and tranquility.” He said that, or something like it... Anyway, his point was that I was garbling what I wanted/needed to say, clouding the issues in a lot of unnecessary roughness—sabotaging myself with fireworks—which are maybe thrilling for a few minutes, but don’t last very long. Somehow I needed to find a way to keep the lights on in my work, even if what it illuminated was completely weird and chaotic.

Here’s the poem I wrote:

Calm Poem

Of all the calm poems I've written

This calm poem


is definitely my favorite.

It came at the end of a calamitous day—


I couldn’t remember what to say

during a lecture.


I cried while reading

a philosophical preface.


When I looked in the mirror

I saw pieces of a bluejay


and the world turned

my stomach


in the gathering dust.

Forget it, said the poem.


Now you’re safe at home.

Many people love you.


No need to create a scene.

No need to punctuate


the roar of the page.

Go to sleep and dream


you’re a giant paper snowflake.

There is nothing to be afraid of.


2.

What’s interesting to me is that traveling around giving readings and teaching workshops, I often hear people expressing a desire to make their poems wilder, stranger, more surprising and dynamic. Almost never have I heard someone wishing to make their poems calm down and behave. And yet, aren’t there occasions when staying calm is the most surprising and weird thing of all? As a result of this exercise, I have come to believe, even though I’m not always capable of acting on it, that to say a thing plainly and deliberately with clarity—with calm—is among the most poetic (i.e. surprising, strange and depth-charged) ways of saying anything.

With this in mind, I’ve adapted Tony’s assignment to me as one I sometimes use with my own students, especially when they’re being weird for weird’s sake and seem to have more on their minds than mere weirdness. This is how I put it to them:

Write a Calm Poem. In fact, use Calm Poem as the title, so that when we gather round the table next week we can survey the varieties and vagaries of calmness. Is calm merely the opposite of calamity? Is it a warm bath? Is it listening to Coltrane (the early stuff) with the lights down low? Is it chicken soup and sickness and clouds overhead? For some of you it may be soccer, and for others, a Sunday Stroll. For still others, what’s calm is a hardcore band for breakfast. I don’t have any particular designs on calmness (I’m barely calm at all). I’m looking for the truth; I’m looking for a world to kick back in, some place to have myself a bottle of wine, some place with a view of the ocean. Remember, too, that what’s calm in a poem may have nothing to do with its content. Calmness may be the result of purely formal maneuvers—the lengths of your lines, the kinds of stanzas you use, the way you arrange the words (and the white spaces) on the page. Pacing may be everything. What does calmness mean to you and/or how does it go down in language? Be steady, breathe easy, take yourselves away. Nobody panic. Stay as steady and calm as you possibly can. There are a million emergencies to contend with, and someone has to feel at home in them.

TWO MORE CALM EXAMPLES

Here’s one by my friend Nate Pritts that’s incredible for its steadfast attentiveness to the moment and also for the way it manages chaos—that’s what calm is in a sense managing chaos in the moment:

Calm Poem

It’s November 15th, 2009, & I’ve never been

Nate Pritts today. I’m 35 with about two months


tacked on & I’m taking your advice. Early

morning & there’s a halo of helicopters


harrowing the blue, sending word through the

static about the crowded intersections—


all that crosstown traffic—& I stepped

right in front of the car. I knew the speed.


I don’t care if it’s calm. It’s okay if it’s calamity.

Early morning & the buzz is circling my head


like a certainty. Three or four times a day,

I feel like I’m about to get shot out of myself,


like there’s a vibration approaching catastrophe

& I need to run. I’m thinking of language


like it’s something delicate I can hold in my hand.

I’m worried this might break. Early morning


& I don’t care if it’s starless. It’s okay that it’s

endless but full of endings. It’s November 15th,


it’s 2009, it’s me taking your advice because I’m

left without my normal faith in talk, that I could


fill a room with voice & tip the scales.

So hard to get through to you isn’t something


I’m saying but something I feel & the you isn’t

you. I don’t care if it’s indeterminate. It’s okay


that it’s not referential. Early morning & sun

gathers slowly in the clouds. November 15th


& I’m Nate Pritts right now more than ever &

the trees are already empty. It’s not fall


in Syracuse. It’s not fall; it’s fell. It’s exquisitely

dark. It’s this terrible. It’s this fierce destructive.


It’s the end of my favorite season ever & the beginning

of my dark poetry & I don’t care if it’s dark


as long as there’s light. It’s okay that I’m on my knees

to restart the fire as the damp wind whips


tumultuous & elegant. My faith is that more & more

will outweigh the less & less, that an I & a you


accumulates. I’m trying to be calm with the bomb

in my hand because it seems right to pretend


I don’t hear it counting down to one from two.


And this one’s by a former student of mine, Scott Dennis, who of course found a way through the assignment to something marvelously SCOTT DENNIS:

Calm

These are the tricks that make us calm:


The last bits of light

burn images of peace

into my skin.


I dream of dream-catchers

and of things salvaged.


I dream of things primitive

and of communication.


Ritual stimulates

me to my grave,


where the shaman takes me

and helps me survey the wreckage,


where my hands will not reach

my weaponry and my

face melts off my skull.


The only thing you have to lose in an exercise like this is pretense and the chains of expectation, but what you have to gain is something clearly and radiantly yourself.


Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forth coming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

This Brand New Treasure: Nate Pritts' Wonderfull Yeare

by Jack Davis

Yesterday, in an delicate box, perhaps a hundred years old, I found a copy of a book called The Wonderfull Yeare – A Shepherd’s Calendar by Nate Pritts. I may not have given it a second thought, but it was a book of poems.

And, as I thumbed through the leaves, the poet Pritts took me to another place; one of Chaplinesque nimbleness, dusky form and shadowed structures. Mr. Pritts sculpted golems of transitive vision with pinched flesh on bent knees in quiet prayer. And these prayers cast seed of private virtue and personal need to secluded places warm and moist.

He traced the cracks of reason and mercy with a voice as articulate as his perspective. Some poems, like the “Sonnets for the fall,” left lasting impressions in mourning mud. Nate proclaims that even the thinning light finds cricket sounds, but no leaves.

I must say it was a real pleasure to find this brand new treasure in that delicate old box. As the last several years have left us all on the cusp of some dangerously poor poetry, it is a delight that Nate Pritts has saved us a few pages of real art.

The Wonderfull Yeare by Nate Pritts has found print because it had a choice. Nate is going places, but don’t fool yourself, this book is about where he’s been.


Jack Davis is a DWC student, poet, and all around cool guy.