Governor’s School Begins
I have been writing my prior posts about working on the Japanese myth poetry project, and I will continue to write about my process with that, but I also want to write about my teaching experience at the Governor’s School of the Arts. I am helping teach the creative writing classes in two two-week summer programs. I am doing a prompts class in the morning, where I will get the students generating ideas and images; then in the afternoon, I will be leading a reading discussion in the afternoon, where we will look at the craft elements in a variety of poems.
Tomorrow is the first day of the first session, and I have picked out prompts and readings that deal with images and paying attention to our senses when describing a scene. One of the exercises I am doing is one that I have modified from an exercise that I saw Ed Madden do with a group of high school students in Columbia. The exercise looks at Li-Young Lee’s “The Weight of Sweetness;” first we’ll read the poem and then look at how Lee calls attention to different senses throughout the poem. Then, I ask the students to see how Lee used a concrete image (in this case, the peach) to write about an abstraction (sweetness). This exercise is a good initial one because it gets us talking about “show not tell,” and concrete images. Another reason that I like this exercise is because it gives me a good example to show how writers use their own lives and memories in the poems they write; that doesn’t mean that everthing is true, but things usually are better and more in-depth when we “write what we know.”