Sunday, June 27, 2021

Radical Revisions

 

My poem "Top Five Life Lessons Learned from Saturday Morning Cartoons" published in Issue 3 of Hive Avenue literary journal was birthed in a workshop taught by Nora Claire Miller.

Workshop participants were encouraged to bring in a work that felt hopeless.  Over three weeks we practiced creative interventions on the hopeless.  We translated them into images, wrote them backwards, with the lights off, with our non-dominant hand.

Some of us exposed them to elements.  Some baked them in ovens.  I put mine under my yoga mat and practiced flowing on it.

I had brought in a dead poem that had originally been prompted by Trump's election.  I feared for democracy, and wrote a long whine of an ode out of that fear.  It was emotional but dreadful.  After the radical experiments, I brought out one image that still had a pulse: the Schoolhouse Rock! Constitution Preamble song.

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