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Savannah Skinner wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 8 years, 11 months ago
As part of my directed study with Professor Smith, I’ve been reading and reviewing a few chapbooks. This is one that I would wholeheartedly recommend to everyone!
Original Instructions for the Perfect […]
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Savannah Skinner wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 3 months ago
In class recently, we touched very briefly on the idea that poems don’t have to be about romantic love–a stance that I wholeheartedly agree with. After browsing some definitions of love, I’ve come to one basic […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, American vs. British Spelling: Why? , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
I struggle with this problem most days. I’ve eventually chosen to stick to a rather arbitrary system: grey, towards (to move to) vs. toward (to have something come to you), theatre (for the show) vs. theater (for […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Medical Apartheid Poems, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
This sounds like a really interesting topic to write a series of poems about–it’s something I (and I’m sure other people) don’t know much about. Of course this is a situation where you have to tread carefully, […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Reading V.S. Hearing Poetry, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 4 months ago
I definitely agree that poems become entirely different creatures when read aloud! I’ve been to readings where the poet gives out hard copies of their poems, and the difference is so big that sometimes I don’t […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Poem Playlist , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
This is incredible and ridiculous and instead of studying for my midterm, I am going to make a playlist.
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Eight Weeks In, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
This semester I’ve been trying to work a lot more with white space, which is something scary and new. I think it’s going at least not-that-bad. Like Amy, I’ve been trying to figure out how to effectively use flat […]
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Savannah Skinner wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 5 months ago
For me, starting a poem at the beginning is entirely daunting, and something I have almost never done successfully. In other words, I struggle with both ending and beginning poems. Most of my poems tend to grow […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Making Sense of Something Foreign , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
Lauren,
I was really interested in what you had to say about intonation, and how that can impact not only the way we speak and comprehend language, but the way we read tone into poems. The classic example of […] -
Savannah Skinner commented on the post, [Insert Poet’s Name Here] Poems, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
I liked your thoughts on [name] poems–I’ve been thinking about these a bit too after they came up a couple of times in workshop. A “Savannah” poem or a “Robbie” poem isn’t necessarily just that. By putting a […]
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Savannah Skinner wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
Terry Tempest William’s “An Unspoken Hunger” was the first poem I read in my freshman creative writing class that actually made me nauseous. And by nauseous, I mean it was incredible–when I finished reading it, I […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Is There a Geneseo School of Poetry? , on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
After taking a couple of poetry workshops at Geneseo, I’ve definitely noticed this trend of the “Geneseo School of Thought” when it comes to poems. While I am hesitant to call this a Geneseo-wide phenomenon, there […]
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Savannah Skinner wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
This week’s poetry exercise pushed us to take someone else’s poem, and keep ONLY the punctuation as we tried to fashion an original poem. Initially, I found this task to be a little off-putting. As I flipped […]
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Savannah Skinner commented on the post, Poetry Inspiration, on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
I completely agree that weird facts can make great poems. However, as someone who will continue to write poems on the same three topics until I feel like I’ve somehow resolved a part of myself through them, I […]
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Savannah Skinner wrote a new post on the site The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
This semester I’ve stocked my schedule with classes I may never need, yet have nonetheless ended up loving. Two of my favorites so far are Human Geography and Intro to Urban and Regional Planning. Like Erin mentioned in her post about her perception of a physical space based on what method of transportation she is using, the way we approach the space of a poem is more deeply rooted in crazy spatial ideas of human preference, information construction, and even territoriality. While these classes may seem entirely irrelevant to the creation of a poem, I’ve actually found a lot of correlation between these three topics (proceed to blather on about geography of poems).
In Human Geography we’ve spent a lot of time taking spatial perceptions and preference. For instance, there are places in America none of us ever want to go, just based on our rather biased perceptions of what we think those places are like. Similarly, people are more likely to prefer their home area, just because it’s home. As people, we construct the world around us, based not in fact, but in a strange conglomeration of increasingly unreliable sources. This construction of our world made me think of the way we create our poems. For many of us, there are places in poems that we’re just unwilling to go. I have no desire to write a villanella, but then again, I’ve never actually tried it or bothered to search for an example of one that I’ve really enjoyed. There are probably topics we’re afraid to approach, but feel like we need to at some point within our poems. If we never visit these places within our body of poetics, we’ll continue to perpetuate this strange spatial preference that can often leave us oblivious to some aspect of poetry–a topic or style, etc.– that we could actually really enjoy, or perhaps even be successful with. Another aspect of this spatial preference is spatial territoriality, something I’d never considered on a small scale before. Human territoriality is often personal and habitual–we might use the same bathroom stall every time or sit in the same chair in the library. This territoriality comes across in our poems. We go back to certain sounds, images, and ideas again and again without really thinking about why we do that. We construct spaces that we feel at home inside of–we get too comfortable in them and make them our own, when we should really be branching out to South Dakota or the next bathroom stall to figure out how far we can push ourselves as poets.
I’ve also found that urban planning is incredibly similar to structuring a poem. I hadn’t really considered how much effort goes into creating a functional city. The majority of urban planning remains unseen, whether it’s the sewers that run under every road, or subtle changes in the route of a train that can impact the traffic patterns of an entire neighborhood. There are so many small yet vital aspects of urban planning that allow cities to function at the surface level. The inclusion of green space allows a city breathing room, and contributes to the health of it’s residents. It offers a break from the hustle and bustle, just as a poem might need something a little softer or more abstract to balance out a concrete jungle of images and action. This urban planning is incredibly similar to understanding the way different parts of speech, word choice, line breaks, etc. can all impact the flow, function, and effectiveness of a poem. Poems need you to be their urban planners–if you aren’t there making subtle functional choices, the whole thing could easily devolve into traffic jams or dead zones. Minute changes in word choice or line breaks may seem like insignificant things, but they can change the way a poem functions–where it takes you, what it passes, and what you see, just as a tiny shift in a road can change so much that we might not be conscious of.
Essentially, poems are tiny cities–we are territorial about them, we construct different ideas of our own poems in our heads than our readers will. We have different spatial preferences, and we’re consistently building their infrastructure, whether or not we realize it. We seem to be ending on questions, which I like, so I’ll ask a couple here. What perceptions do you have about poetry that may be different from the reality? What things have you put off trying, and what things do you try too much? Are you including all of the infrastructure of your poem? What’s its traffic flow, how does it function?
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Savannah Skinner joined the group The Contemporary Poem 9 years, 6 months ago
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Savannah Skinner became a registered member 9 years, 6 months ago