| Jan 19, 2024, 8:24 AM |
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With a vessel, or a place for our collective magic to pool, we can make sense together.
Hello Darlings,
If you’re on this message, it’s because you’re one of three people:
You attended the first “Actively Missing You” workshop in November. Here’s a link to submitting your work to be added to the collaborative poem. 
You are a writer, artist, or otherwise *shining* person in the Milwaukee area that I think would love this workshop
You are a beloved of mine that I would like to let know what I’ve been working on and, even if you may not be able to attend, I really want to know what you think about Mad Lib poemsA C T I V E L Y M I S S I N G Y O U collaborative writing workshop #2
Artist-in-Residence Jenna Knapp and I are co-hosting the next writing workshop in a series called “Actively Missing You” at the Lynden Sculpture Garden
Saturday, February 3rd from 1 - 4pm [in person]
[Zoom if the winter is extra loud that day]
*all* experience levels encouraged – writing is for all people!
Fee: $20/$15 LSG members. Scholarship assistance available.
Registration: Space is limited; advance registration required. Register online or by phone at 414-446-8794.
> > > Click here for more backstory for this project. < < <
As a result of these (3… or 4?) workshops, the language crafted in community will be carved into the trunk pieces from the Norway Maple that once shaded the Labyrinth* on the Lynden Sculpture Garden’s grounds.
A note on publicly displayed poems: It’s important to me to reconfigure the emphasis on single authorship in our culture, especially when crafting a poem to be carved into a fallen, beloved tree trunk. All of us are co-authored by our parents, our environments, our experiences. And so will this collaborative poem be the quilt of many different voices speaking together, on the topic none of us are foreign to: loss, love, and missing You.
* Yes, this is the labyrinth that has so inspired me to start my writing community in its name. And, yes, this is the labyrinth that Jenna created with the fine people of the Lynden Sculpture Garden and has fostered for over 5 years.
The two pathways we’ll be taking with this workshop are that of the List Poem and the Mad Lib poem.
Our first workshop was centered around the “You” in “Actively Missing You.” We created space for the elegy poem (take a look at Poemvember 2023’s poem prompts here) and responded to a number of contemporary elegies after reflective pre-writing.
For this workshop, we will write poems together expressing the loss of old identities, or missing parts of ourselves. The aim is to create a radically accepting space for shedding old layers as we make our ways out of winter and toward the new birth energy of spring.
We’re following the course of nature here.
The prairie is intentionally burned to make space for new growth.
(There will be a guided visualization around the process of intentional prairie burning before "quiet time" writing.)
T H E L I S T P O E M
Taking a close look at list poems, I often see the use of anaphora as an organizing principle. Check Brenda Cárdenas’ poem “Because We Come From Everything”:
Because we come from everything—
from zero; from a doubt slender as a hair;
from a land of travelers, wanderers
and its geography of scars; from frayed edges
and muddy hems; from the border sealed
tight as an envelope—Meskin/Dixon/line.
Because we come from Operation Wetback,
Operation Peter Pan, Operation Gatekeeper;
floodlights, sensors, infrared spy videos,
night vision camera, topo maps, helicopters
and holding cells; from sharp shooting
goose-steppers ’round every corner;
from alien gods and alien names
and alien eyes and wild alien tongues;
from the barbed wire politics of stupidity.
Because we come from the ship
that will never dock;
from a parallel universe,
double helix, synchronized sigh,
the infinite division del secreto terrible,
the screaming sun.
Because we come from steel mill smoke
and silt slaughtering the sky;
a matchbox house beneath the shadow
of the freeway, windows so small you’d think
they were holding their breath
and roaches so big they look Pleistocene,
kids hopscotching on the sidewalk
and a dusty, unpaved road called Sal Si Puedes.
Because we come from the geometry of disaster,
schools torn down and sold for scrap,
bristled restrictions and chuco hieroglyphics,
the gash sewn back into a snarl,
crushed cigarette in a glass.
Because we come from linoleum and Formica;
from rooms boarded shut and rented to strangers
en una esquina aparte de los demás,
hole in the ceiling, kids on milk crates,
the hammerhead of responsibility,
tin plate face down on the floor.
We come from brujas, chavalas, carnales, cabrones, rucas, locas, comadres, los vatos, los perros, y los perididos, una vieja
y sus recuerdos, eternal ciphers with voices
bright as chrome. Because we come
from every cell, every follicle, every nerve,
the petals of the body, an orchid of blood, mapped birthmarks, knowing and unknowing.
Because we come from museums and waiting
rooms—hostile territory and collateral damage,
Because we come from the Out-of-Service Area,
from another bad dream, a bowl of beings.
Because we come from el Rasquache—
Tex Mex with a Brooklyn accent,
Santería Tupperware party,
magnet car-statuettes and kitsch calendar art
at the flea market, la segunda,
from the word “cachibaches,”
and la lotería—a world loaded on each back.
Because we come from everything
on top of everything; from unbending dreams
and a long line of eloquent illiterates,
the throat that must clear itself
and apologize each time it speaks—
a sound like swallowing mud.
Because we come from el camino
de la mestiza—the path of red and black ink,
from linguistic terrorism and literary archaeologists;
from each of the star’s stories.
Because we come from a green flutter,
the hummingbird’s throat;
a chorus resounding for acres.
Because we come from dichos,
cantos, cuentos; from the spoken word—
the seed of love in the darkness.
The poet’s note about this poem:
“Because We Come from Everything” is collage poem after a line by Juan Felipe Herrera. With the exception of a few conjunctions and prepositions such as “and” and “from,” which I added, all of the language in this poem was taken from works by Mexican American and Native American authors whose publications were removed from Tucson Public School classrooms when the Tucson United School District banned the district’s Mexican American Studies Program under the 2010 law HB 2281. In 2017, a federal judge declared this law unconstitutional and enacted with discriminatory intent. The vast majority of the poem’s phrases and lines were originally written by Juan Felipe Herrera, Sandra Cisneros, Caridad Svich, Luis Alberto Urrea, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Bernice Zamora, Diane Rodríguez, Luis J. Rodríguez, Evangelina Vigil-Piñón, Cherrí Moraga, Tomás Rivera, Eulalia Pérez, Culture Clash, Gina Valdés, Tino Villanueva, Joy Harjo, and Sylvia Chacón. This poem is for them.
The very vehicle of this poem is to collect the many voices speaking together, and to amplify their interconnectedness in experience, loss, and identity. With this collection of language, Cárdenas gives space to the voices who were removed, erased, and banned. It’s the “Because we come from” anaphora in each stanza that connects all these worlds together.
In our collaborative writing exercise, we’ll experiment with anaphora and poly-vocal writing inspired by this poem, as well as a couple others.
T H E M A D L I B P O E M
I am inspired by Russell Jaffe’s mad lib poems from his book “This Super Doom I Aver.” The experience of them at a reading is electric: Jaffe asks the audience to offer “a noun!” or “a condition!” and, of course, we don’t know what these words will do to (or with) his poem. So, when he performs them, there’s this unparalleled sensation of anticipation and delight.
Here’s a link to one of the poems online, as a part of the Wag’s Revue. And screenshots for those of you that like ‘em:
I'm looking forward to experimenting with this form as we practice writing together. When writing collaboratively, it’s the restraints or the form that act as our "organizing principle." With a vessel, or a place for our collective magic to pool, we can make sense together.
We can make ______ together.
Insert a resonant noun in the blank.
More info about the Workshop on February 3rd is here.
This is also the registration link <3
Will there be a rain (or… snowstorm) date? The plan is to shift to a Zoom workshop if there is inclement weather or sub-zero temperatures. We’ll make the call at least 24 hours ahead of the date and send out a Zoom invite to all people registered.
XOXOX,
KPK