Welcome

Welcome to the 2013 Poetry workshop, Thessaloniki and Thassos. This workshop meets under a pergola with a view of the Aegean, or it meets in a café near the water's edge, or one overlooking a marble quarry. We take our breaks in the water. Our poems feast on the poems of the ancient and modern Greeks, and draw from the light around us, and the full sails. When we have finished talking and writing, we go out with Stomatis on his boat to catch the fish we might have for dinner. In the evenings, we listen to poetry read to us near an olive grove, and then we feast and dance in circles to Greek songs. Sometimes we are up very late, lighting fires on the beach, so in the morning we have our tea and coffee first, with cheese and hard rolls and yoghurt under the grape leaves. In the late afternoons we learn a little Greek, or we write in our notebooks or float in the water looking up at the small clouds. We write a lot without worrying about whether or not the writing is “good.” We know that whether it is as yet “good” or not, it is the seed of something, or it is what we had to have written before we could write something else. We play with our poems and move things around in them. We let some words go. They go, they come back. Sometimes we let a Greek poet say something, or we become a Greek poet ourselves. The assignment is to soak up the light, read what everyone writes, and learn about octopus. The assignment is to light candles, have a little psipouru or something else, and learn some dances. To say kalimera to everyone in the morning and Καληνύχτα when we go back to our rooms at night. We hope to leave with many pages of something or another, and to see our work in new ways.˜

We'll most likely be meeting on the lovely terrace at my house (up the road from where you'll be staying). The plan is to meet on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings there and to meet on Wednesdays at Beach Two for intensive writing mixed with private consultations.

Carolyn's Practice Notes

Carolyn Forché's Practice Notes

The Reading Practice: Choose a poet whose work was completed prior to 1945 (Sappho, Homer, Blake, Dante, Dickinson, Whitman, Pound, etc.).  At the beginning of one of the four seasons of the year, decide to concentrate on the works of that poet: his/her collected poems, a critical biography, criticism, journals, letters, prose writings.  Keep this work on the bedside table.  Change this poet each season.
Choose a poet whose work was published after 1945 (Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, etc.).  Place one book by such a poet in the bathroom.  Change this book weekly.
Xerox or copy by hand the poems from these readings, both seasonal and weekly, and keep them together in your own personal anthology.  This is the anthology you will take with you to the desert island.
The Writing Practice: Choose a place for your writing (desk, fruit crate in cellar, kitchen table, box in attic).  During your writing time, clear this of everything that hasn't to do with your writing.  Keep dictionaries, thesaurus, field guides, photographs, etc.  Choose a time of day during which it is usually possible for you to free yourself from other responsibilities/activities (midnight, dawn, lunch hour).  Go to your place and write or sit for thirty minutes. 

The Writing Process:  Make three boxes: one for good lines, one for good sections/stanzas/paragraphs, and one for loved words.  These boxes can be of wood, paper, tin, whatever material you like, and whatever size.  Keep these boxes in the vicinity of your writing place.  During the first fifteen minutes of your Writing Practice, empty your hands of the language that has coursed into them since your last Writing Practice.  Write freely, quickly and without regard to form.  Turn these pages over and save them for two weeks.  After two weeks, you will have about thirty pages if you have written daily.  Read through these pages, and re-copy by hand or into your computer whatever still pleases you or seems interesting (these two are not always the same).  Put the pages in an envelope, date it and seal it.  Put it away.  Keep the re-copied pages.  After two months, do the same thing with the re-copied pages.  Put these final "gleanings" into your Poet's Notebook (springboard, ring binder, whatever).  Along with these pages you will keep your drafts of poems, newsclippings, photographs, epigraphs, lists of loved words, lists of treasures of mind, lists of visual snapshots, lists of lists.  Work on your poems using this notebook.

The "Loved Words" List:  Keep lists of the words you most love—for their mnemonic power, their sound, whatever quality.  Read through these lists before you write.  Here are some of Odysseas Elytis' "loved words" (from The Little Mariner, by Odysseas Elytis, translated by Olga Bourmas, Copper Canyon Press, out of print): agape, Alexandra, All Soul's Day, anchor, anemone, Anna, ant, arch, arm in arm, armoir, aspen, astringent, August, bait, barbette, barrel, basil, basket, bay leaf, beach, beam-reach, beeswax, bell, bergamot, birdsong, bitter sea, blanket, blueing, bluefish, bluefly, boat, bolt, bougainvillea, boulder, braided rug, bride, brine, butterfly.

The "Visual Photographs":  Make lists of visual snapshots: quick verbal photographs of places/times/people.  A shorthand memory.  Here are some of Elytis':  (he names them after the islands where he saw them—some might enter poems, some become poems in themselves)

KERKYRA
Spring night in a distant quarry graveyard.  That luminous cloud of fireflies that lightly shifts from grave to grave.
SKIATHOS
Just as the small boat meets the sea-cave, and suddenly, from the awesome light, you are enclosed in frozen blue-green mint.
AEGINA
Eleven o’clock, wind on the uphill to Old Chora.  Not a soul.
BILLIO
Who lets her nightgown drop, picks it up, discards it finally and sits facing the balcony, her bra unfastened in the back.
The "Treasures": keep a list in your notebook of the works of art, passages of music, the paintings, lines of poetry, etc. which have been made by others, and which you have taken into yourself for safe keeping. Here are some of Elytis':

HOMER
dusky water
brightly burnished interiors
then an ineffable ether was cleft from the sky
SAPPHO
many-eyed night
FRA ANGELICO
Left view of the “Coronation of the Virgin”  (Louvre Museum)
BEETHOVEN
Sonata for violin and pinao no. 2 in A major, opus 12.
Sontata for violoncello and piano no.5 in D major,
            opus 102, 1.



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