Frank Rubino’s letter of invitation and inspiration to the weekly Red Wheelbarrow Poets’ Workshop of April 20, 2021
Hi Everybody-
This week, I loved meeting the poet Terence Hayes (How to Be Drawn https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317329/how-to-be-drawn-by-terrance-hayes/ & American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567051/american-sonnets-for-my-past-and-future-assassin-by-terrance-hayes/ ) at Brooklyn Poets https://brooklynpoets.org/workshops/craft-labs/ .
Hayes’s session focused on ways to quickly get at what a poem is doing, and then to use that information to generate new poems. He says he derived this approach from the “Maker’s Knowledge” principle of Cartesian opponent Giambattista Vico. Best I can summarize its relevance in one sentence: Descartes with I think therefore I am says you start with an abstract principle of truth; Vico says you start with every practical example you can muster. Perhaps someone better versed in Philosophy will elaborate (https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/descartes). As it pertains to Hayes’s method, the idea is, if you want to know what makes a good poem, make a good poem (God knows everything about the Universe because he made it: humans can’t know the ultimate truth; they can only know what they take their hands and make) How do you make a good poem? Look at the way other good poems are made.
Hayes had us listen to good poems to focus on the poem’s hot spots. I’m writing this to transfer some of the practical knowledge I got from this exercise. One is don’t try too hard. When someone’s reading a poem (this works very well with poems read out loud) you want to background all your critical judgement, so you can be attentive to those moments in the poem that really work for you. You are going to hear and remember the best parts automatically: that’s the way the brain works. Those automatically remembered moments are going to be your key to what makes the poem good.
What makes the poem good is your key to prompt yourself to write your own good poem. This is not an attempt to assess a poem’s universal poetic worthiness. It’s an attunement, and an energy collector. One of the benefits of basing this on Vico is his principle that, because of the variety of human experience, there are many ways to reach a good outcome.
So some of the prompts might be: I like the way John J Trause incorporates legal language into his spiderweb poem: I will write a poem that uses an image from nature and contractual language.
Or, I like the way Don Zirilli speaks in the voice of a Labyrinth: I will choose an architectural structure and write in its voice.
The Red Wheelbarrow Poets 