This is my fourth year at aTi and my third year of completing the poetry sessions. This year, the session is once again being led by Cat Doty. I took aTi sessions with Cat last year too. I appreciated the open environment that she created.
Our group consists of six people: Svea (I met her last year--she is a high school teacher), Mary (another high school teacher and also Svea's colleague), John (an intriguing poet who owns a Staten Island house that is also a historical landmark), Mary (a music teacher who also has known John since 2004), and Melissa (a third grade teacher). Most of us have previous experience with writing, but Melissa is new to the genre of poetry. What I like most about aTi is that the organization encourages people to break free from their general disciplines. While many of the aTi participants are either art or writing teachers, it is always fascinating to have people who teach other disciplines/grade levels too.
We started off the morning by reading several poems that Cat gave us. Some of the poems were ones many of us knew well ("Did I Miss Anything?") and others were completely new to some or all of us.
One of the topics of discussion that came up was titles. I know that when I was younger, I used to put little effort into my poems' titles. The titles would generally be short, 1-2 word phrases. I could easily see myself having poems with titles like "Cornfield," "Broken Heart," or "Loneliness." We discussed how the poem could easily get the poem started and could basically get it "running." For instance, in Tom Wayman's poem, he could have started the first few lines by describing a scenario of a student asking if he/she missed anything from the previous class. Instead, Wayman titles the poem "Did I Miss Anything?" and then begins the poem with the first response: "Nothing..."
A title seems like a small thing, but when you think about it, titles are extremely important. People judge books by covers, but they equally judge books (and poems too) by titles.
We also spent a substantial amount of time on two list-style poems, "In the Basket Marty Brought to the Hospital After the Cesarean" by Thorpe Moeckel and "What's In My Journal," by William Stafford. While both poems were similar in that they were written in list form, we spoke about the differences between the two. The Stafford poem left me, as a reader, thinking. There were lines that confused me and were, dare I say, enigmatic. The Moeckel poem simply irritated me. I've concluded that a headache after reading a poem is one of two things: 1] completely negative because the poem has annoyed you or 2] completely positive, although frustrating, because the poem has gotten you to think.
At the end of the morning, Cat sent us off with a few prompts. We could use Edwin Brock's "Five Ways to Kill a Man" as a springboard for a "Five Ways..." poem of our own. We could incorporate the line "Okay, partner, this is it" into a poem. We could also attempt to use a fragment from Sappho in one of our pieces: "I would not think to touch the sky with two arms."
Off we went to write...
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