Jorge Luhan, who was our guest artist from Mexico, called this renaming lesson beautiful names.
For example fox: the phoenix of the woods.
Moon: lost pearl from Saturn’s rings
Sun: high yellow spark that travels.
River: fleeting bluebird
My favorite was the student sample dragons: stoves on the run.
We made lists on the board and we combined the ideas.
It rained and all the names were lost. Ask the wind, you want me to do your work. Ask the fox but he danced. Ask the moon but it was cloudy. Ask the sun it was also cloudy. Ask the wind when you were so beautiful a hovering blue river of the sky redwoods, the sky on fire. wash your feet in the sea smooth lavender rocks, so warm, smooth rock in the hand of the earth in gods hands. Dusk: a forest on fire waiting for a visit from the moon. The wind took the names to the next village and the first poetic words were spoken, they were born. This is how poetry was born.
Jorge takes all the ideas and then tells us a story, a little boy and girl return return home to tell their mother: we have been moving the smooth blue river of the sky, where the trees were rockets to the sky, where the smooth lavender rocks were in gods hands and a forest was on fire waiting to visit the moon.
My definitions: Marsh: sky catcher of sunset where wild geese squabble and sing in their floating nests. Candle: with its burning eye piercing the night of false dawn. Jasper: a bleeding stone of crushed embers from the first fires. Breeze: a fire roaring in the pines with no flame at all.
Metaphor is discovering the mysteries of the New World around us. Write a poem containing the four sentences from your definitions ask yourself what kind of water, involve the elements, give lots of details.
In another class we explored suitcase words. Or portmanteau words. Jorge asks give me a word that has two syllables in it. We make a list on the board. One thing he says no persons or places. Birthday. Give me another that begins with the word day. Birthday light. We continue to make lists and recombine them. Birdseed and editing becomes birdseedediting, flag and aggravated becomes flagravated. Teacher and cherish become a teacherish. Then he asks us to use our new weird words in a freewrite. It is mostly unreadable so I am not going to type up my sample poem.
One recipe he taught that I loved was picturing when we were 10. The model poem is Jack Grapes’ of course. Since we didn’t have real photographs we had to pretend we had a photo of ourselves when we were young. The problem with this class was a lot of the kids were just 10, or even younger so it was a little hard for them to imagine selves when they were 10. He says to enter into the whole picture. Write about that picture. Look at the lips, look at your eyes, look at the body, what is that person thinking of? You’re writing about what you see, and add feelings or what’s in your mind.
I write:
I am leaning against the sliding closet door made of gold and wood. I am wearing a wig, a fall of long straight synthetic hair gathered up in a ponytail, held by a red cloth rose. On one side the leaves are shiny green, and on the other side, where the wire is glued to its pale stem, my forest green sweater, with its maroon football stripes, on a hot December evening. My eyes are red from the flash, I look like an albino rabbit with a silly grin on my face wearing a wig.
And then he tells us to write from the point of view of the person within the picture.
My hands clasped in front of me comforting jeans. Me at 13, about to begin high school. I feel very big indeed and eager to begin. Inside this picture I’m looking out at a worn older copy of myself. She looks so different. She isn’t smiling like me in the picture. She bends her head and rights and rights and rights. I can hear the distortion of sound as she concentrates on her writing. What is she thinking of? Her dress is old, tiny moth holes in the red rayon. Small mirrors reflect off the cloudy day day. She is a bit cloudy herself, like looking into a murky lake full of algae bloom. She wakes up at night full of fear and sorrow. But during the day she burns white hot like the flash bulb that bleached my brown eyes to red, like the albino rabbit she said yes to, but she turned them down every single one.
I revisit this idea again in another class, but with a different photograph in mind. I think of a much younger baby photo as I can’t share the last poem with the class.
The next lesson is pick four things for nouns ball, dog, bus, tree. The idea is to do stream of Consciousness for each word and then cross connect the words in two columns, and to see what comes up. This is generative writing, more than anything else.
The fog swallowed the bird until it turned green. Another connection. The dog dribbled the ball and made a bank shot. Peppermint tree waved goodbye to the silver ball.
The luminous fog moaned like a singing rose. Kids talking, voices like a ball bouncing in an inside out bus. A lot of it didn’t make sense but it was fun. And then he would say add another word talking ball. Talk of a madman, a strange sort of sense, a pattern emerges.
The fog swallow the bird until it turns green, until the luminous fog moaned like a singing Rose. The fragile fog shook like a speeding train. Why did the verdant bird rise like a flock of trains in the night?
And again.
The slow fog swallowed a small bird until it turned green is grass. The luminous fog moaned like a singing rose. The fragile fog shook its petals until they were like confetti in front of a speeding train. When did the verdant wish of the bird rise like a flock of trees in the night?
OK it becomes more interesting as you continue to work with the recombination process. But at one point you have to let your own sensibility take over. The kids really seem to enjoy Jorge very much, he is magical in the classroom. he certainly is getting everybody to think outside the box.
He asks us if you could tell us what kind of world you’d like to live in, what you change, what you’d keep. Treat it like a five minute freewrite.
In this world what I’d like to keep, what I’d like to get rid of.
I write: it’s hard to know where to begin. I make a list when I was 18. I wrote US out of Vietnam, then it was Lebanon, then Iran, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, etc., the list goes on. I can’t get away from US occupation.
The next question he asks is what would you change inside of yourself?
The third, is to close your eyes, envision your favorite picture.
It looks like I didn’t do this exercise. I think I was overwhelmed and derailed by my US occupation list.
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