Line Assembly

First of all, a booking update: We've added a reading in Philadelphia! Come see us at L'Etage on July 25, doors at 7:30/show at 8pm. And many thanks to Steve McLaughlin of Principal Hand Presents! See you there, cool kids.

Well, then, my sweet gherkins, we have learned a thing or two over the last few weeks. We had a little Pop Tart phase, but now we hate them. We have bug bites and we smell like sweat and Pop Tarts. We've learned the finer points of luggage Tetris, and we invented a no-touching summer hug for sweaty times. The pure products of America go crazy. Who said that? Wallace Stevens? Your butt's a Stevens, so snack on that. See? Road madness. (Ben suggested that attributing the Stevens quote to Stevens is "a little on the nose," and I suggested his butt was a little on the nose. See? Road madness.)

www.theyellowrubberduck.com

Calling all poets! (And we mean all of you!) Close your eyes, if you will, and try to think back to when you first heeded the call of poetry. Perhaps there were furtive glances in the library, or long lingering afternoons spent at the bookstore. How did you discover poetry? How did you find more of it once you were hooked? Who did you write with? What kind of community were you a part of? What do you wish you’d known back then that you know now?

Line Assembly is all about community: It brought us together; it makes us stronger, more adventurous poets; and it’s one of the cornerstones of our project. We’re going to libraries and community centers in underserved areas and holding free one-day workshops focused on encouraging the growth of individual writers, as well as their writing communities. But a one-day workshop isn’t a sustainable long-term contribution to these communities, so to that end, we are creating an easily reproducible, digitally downloadable zine for libraries, community centers, and organizations. And, of course, it’ll also be available on our website for anyone and everyone.

We need your help! We thought, “Hey, this is all about community, so let’s get some ideas from our community.” What topics do you think we ought to cover? What advice do you wish you’d gotten? What would you consider indispensable to the poet’s life? How do you deal with the everyday hassles of being a writer—blockage, rejection, managing submissions, staying sharp? Just so you get an idea of what we’re thinking, topics we’ve already brainstormed include found poetry, collaboration, and how to host a reading series.

All ages: 60-90 minutes

Materials: Computer (or other way of playing music), masks, desks, paper, and pencils

This is a great generative lesson that will introduce students to Mardi Gras if they are unfamiliar with it, or send your class into Mardi Gras break happy and excited if they live in an area that celebrates it. Students can bring their own masks, or the facilitator can provide them. For part two, desks should be arranged as an outward-facing circle.

Instructions:

Part 1: Solo

*Open the activity with a short introduction to the Mardi Gras holiday and history. Lead the students in discussion.

Bonus: Bring in traditional Mardi Gras fare like King Cake.

Then students create a list of words commonly associated with Mardi Gras and write the words on the board.

**Students write short Mardi Gras poems with the following constraints:

If they are just learning about Mardi Gras, they must include one of the words on the board in each line.

If they are familiar with Mardi Gras, they may not use any of the words on the board.

Give students who wish to, some time share their poems.

*If your students are already familiar with Mardi Gras, feel free to skip step 1.

** Alternatively, step 3 could be homework.

Part 2: Collaborative

Before you begin part 2, describe the entire activity and have the students jot down some predictions about the poems they are about to write.

Choose one volunteer. This student will be the first DJ. Have this student stand and remove their chair/desk from the circle.

Pass out a blank sheet of paper and have students write their favorite line from their Mardi Gras poem at the top. This is the title of a new collaborative poem that they are about to create with the class.

Have them pass this poem to the person sitting to their left.

Have each student write the first line of the poem they just received.

Have students fold the paper so that only the first line is visible.

Now have all the students stand and don their masks.

Turn off/down the lights.

Instruct the students that they are about to play musical chairs: Review the directions if necessary. Let them know that while they are circling the chairs, dancing will be required.

Have the DJ choose and start a song. Then have the DJ join the other students. (This is crucial, otherwise there will be enough chairs for everyone.)

The students dance as they proceed around the circle. If they are hesitant about dancing, you should let loose first. Even if they aren’t shy about dancing, it will be more fun for everyone if you get into it, too.

Whenever you choose, stop the music.

Everyone scrambles for a seat. The odd person out becomes the DJ for the next round. Have them come choose a song while the seated students write.

Turn the lights back on. The seated students write the next line of the poem, having only the previous line visible.

Then they fold the paper back so that only the line they wrote is visible.

Turn the lights off and repeat the process. Continue until you have 15-20 minutes of class left. Be sure to let students know when they are writing the final line.

Once you’ve finished, turn the circle inward and have the students share the resulting poems. Then discuss. The final odd-person-out won’t have a poem to share, but can open the discussion. If discussion slows, some of the following questions can keep it going:

How did these poems compare/contrast with the solo poems?

How did the poems compare to your predictions? Were any of your predictions spot on? Any surprises?

The same group of students is responsible for writing all of these poems, so we could have expected them to sound very similar. How do they actually compare to one another?

As a writer, how did the line you could see influence the line you wrote?

How did knowing that you couldn’t see the whole poem influence the line you wrote?

Did you do anything to intentionally influence the next writer? What?

What effects did the juxtaposition of lines with different voices/tones/styles produce?

What kinds of things delighted you about these poems?

What frustrated you?

What did you think about the process?

Would you consider these to be “collaborative” poems? Why or why not?

Etc.

I’ve tried this lesson with two groups of students, both in Southern Louisiana right before Mardi Gras break: one group was in middle school, and the others were undergrads. Both classes were extremely successful. In the discussion, the students revealed that the resulting poems challenged their assumptions about what poems can and can’t do. Students were especially surprised by how much the poems seemed to “flow” despite the wild twists and turns they took. Going forward, my students were willing to take more chances in their solo efforts.

We use repetition all the time: From our songs to our instructions, it serves a vital rhetoric purpose, and is often just plain fun to boot. But how often do we think consciously about how we use it and what it is doing? The purpose of this lesson is to look at, and play with, repetition, rhythm, and form. In so doing, we hope to start a conversation about the forms we write and speak in every day, how they are, themselves, a strong poetry.

Materials:

Mary Ruefle’s “Marked”

writing utensils

paper

container (hat, bowl, or the like)

Activity time: 20 minutes, with sharing

Prep time: none

Read the poem. What feelingcomes across? Putting aside, for a minute, the poem’s meaning(s), listen to its rhythm: ba-dum da da da dun, ba-dum .... What does this do? Does it make you feel comforted? Anxious? Excited? Relaxed?

Now let’s think about some examples in our day-to-days in which we use repetition to convey a point, to get across these very feelings. We make grocery lists; we sing along to choruses and refrains—and maybe even write some of our own. What are some other examples you can think of?

All of these are forms, and all of them we adapt and play with to suit our purposes. Poetry, too, can play with forms, and today we’re going to start to do just that.

To start, write a “why?” question on a small piece of paper. It doesn’t matter what it is, just that it’s open-ended; generally speaking, the stranger the question is, the more fun the writing will probably be. Some questions might be: “Why is the moon interested in us?” “Why is grass green?” “Why is all the milk gone?” Stuff like that. Don’t think too hard about it. Just write a question that you think is fun, and that you want to know the answer to.

Fold up these questions, and put them in the container. Once everyone’s questions are collected, pass it around, with each person choosing a new question. The question you choose will be your prompt! So:

Write a piece in which each sentence is the answer to this weird question, a question that we, the readers, are not privy to.

Share, if you feel comfortable. What was this exercise like? Do you think you’ll do it again? In the future, perhaps you could try different types of questions—hows or wheres. You could try different types of lists altogether! Remember how many examples of repetition you came up with, that we use and see and read in our everyday lives? Choose one of these—and reclaim it. Write a grocery list for items needed to fall in love. Write a wanted ad for a perfect planet, a recipe for a poem.

If you want some other great examples of list poems that we like to teach, try Terrance Hayes’ “Wind in a Box,” C.D. Wright’s “Flame,” and Kim Addonizio’s “My Heart.”

Yeah, yeah, April, cruelest month, etc., we've heard it all before. Except April has been nothing but sweet to Line Assembly, and we've hit some incredible milestones this month. We reached our funding goal on Kickstarter a whole week ahead of schedule, and a few days after that, we became the most funded poetry project in the crowdfunding platform's history! And all along, we've been learning how to work collaboratively, too, which is a huge deal since we're going to share a van for a whole month.

Thanks to YOU fabulous supporters, we have met our initial funding goal! 

And with 5 days to go!

This means we will keep pushing because more funding means more possibilities for poetry and for the tour!

We will keep pushing until the closing bell and hope to get many more backers and *fingers crossed* become the highest funded poetry-related project on Kickstarter to date!  We are so indebted to you for continuing to spread the word!

With love, 

In the summer of 2010, Line Assembler Adam Atkinson collaborated with artists Scott N. Andrew and Mikey McParlane on “Starship Astrotron,” a video, installation, and performance project staged at the Children’s Musuem of Pittsburgh as part of the museum’s ongoing F.I.N.E. Artist Residency Series. This lesson plan is derived in part from this collaboration, as well as from lesson plans by Line Assembler S.E. Smith.

“Out-of-This-World Poetry Personas” has four goals: 1. To generate poems with participants who don’t read or write, or are still developing these skills. 2. To introduce early readers and writers to creative writing that is exciting and easy to comprehend, without necessarily being narrative. 3. To illustrate the power of certain words: how they can resonate with certain participants in a manner (or to an extent) that a different set of words might not have, for reasons that are difficult to articulate. 4. To establish a lifelong relationship with words that is built around imagination, self-inquiry, and heroic levels of confidence.

The activity is similar to Mad Libs in form and execution, so some preparation is required of the activity leader(s): a template for participants to complete and bank of words from which the participant(s) can choose (if they wish). Templates should provide at least three blank spaces for participants, so they that their word selection truly makes the poem theirs. Here’s an outer-space-themed example from Starship Astrotron (printable version coming soon):

I am the most famous ________________

in space! Every ______________________

has heard of my _____________________

and my ____________________________!

___________________________________

is my name! Remember it, space monster!

Notice that the spaces are large, to accommodate strange and unexpected word combinations, and the tone is enthusiastic and proud, underscoring this exercise’s emphasis on proclaiming one’s awe-inspiring to the world. The mention of Crystal Crunchers might be confusing to Here’s how one participant filled out this template:

I am the most famous planet guard

in space! Every mom

has heard of my giant gloves

and my special dragon!

Monkey Foo Foo

is my name! Remember it, space monster!

Wow! The meek and nervous participant who began this activity quickly became the fearsome planet guard Monkey Foo Foo, she of the famed giant gloves, simply by picking the words that sang out to her from the word bank (and adding her own dash of Foo Foo). In short, the participant has crafted a persona poem. Persona poems adopt the voice of someone or some thing that is explicitly not the poet (e.g. a poem from the point of view of Amelia Earhart, a shooting star, or a northern water snake). The beauty is, of course, that this strange new voice is the poet, in one way or another. Monkey Foo Foo is a part of that writer now.

GENERATING THE TEMPLATE

Above all, remember to give the activity participant(s) lots of room to make the poem theirs. Leave blanks in crucial places that will determine the tone and meaning of the poem, but make sure it’s not too hard to understand the incomplete sentence when you read it aloud to the participant(s). At the end of the day, though, “incorrect” parts of speech that leave the poem in a state of syntactical “nonsense” are perfectly fine—look at the last hundred years of poetry! Once you have one or more templates complete, print out a few copies for each participant. Suggested prep time: 30-60 minutes.

Names are not necessary to include in persona poems, but we find that picking out a new name is something that helps participants immediately understand that they are creating a new persona, and what form it takes is entirely up to them. (Plus, it’s fun!)

GENERATING THE WORD BANK

Do you read with or to the participant(s)? Do you know any of their favorite books, games, movies, or TV shows? If so, look through them and pick out some of the punchier words. This way they’re guaranteed to have at least heard the words before and perhaps even developed an affinity or distaste for them. How about words and phrases you’ve heard the participant(s) use before? Those aren’t just fine, they’re ideal! As Line Assembler S.E. Smith once wrote, “What poetry does, and what no other art form can do, is to elasticize our commonest material, the one we use to order pizzas and make small talk at the bus station and explain to nurses our source of pain.” Hear, hear!

Write all of these words down on individual scraps of paper, or type them onto raffle tickets, or type them and print them out and cut them into funny shapes. Picking out the right words should feel just like what it is: searching for diamonds in the rough. Who’s to say what the diamonds will be for your participants? Only them. So make as many words as you can, and be ready to sound them out with beginning readers. Suggested prep time: 30-60 minutes.

In choosing blanks for the template and words for the word bank, try your best to mix up the parts of speech. Adjectives, verbs, and nouns should all be in ready supply. No need to worry much about plurals, possessives, gerunds, or adverbs—you and the participant can alter the words as much as you like at any time. Rules were made to be learnt, bent, and broken!

DOES IT HAVE TO BE OUTER SPACE?

Goodness, no! If you know the participants well (your child? your student? a friend who is learning to read and/or write?), it’s helpful to tailor the template and word bank to their age and interests. If outer space isn’t their thing, why not the great outdoors? Superheroes? A musical instrument? Their favorite sport? Whatever you think will bring out a persona they’ll want to proclaim from the mountaintop.

WRITING THE POEMS

You might have written the template, helped to sound out the words in the word bank, and helped to write them into the blanks, or maybe not. Regardless, let there be no mistake: the participant(s) will have authored this persona poem, so long as you provide them the time and encouragement to make their choices for themselves. What they’ve done isn’t so different than what any poet does: work within the confines of language to construct something specific to their moment and perspective. Good going, budding poets! Suggested number of participants: 1-5 per activity leader. (With more than 5 participants, it’s especially helpful to have more than one template to choose from.) Suggested activity time: 10-60 minutes.

WHAT NOW?

The main goal of this activity is to produce one- or two-line poems that can be used to fill a Line Assembly fortune teller. The poems will be written in the second-person future tense, like a fortune you’d find inside a fortune cookie. (Come to think of it, we’ve received some pretty poetic fortunes from cookies!) Once completed, the fortune teller can be used as a mobile, impromptu poetry delivery system. Dazzle your friends! Impress your neighbors! Have a poem anytime you want one!

Number of participants: any

Required materials

Line Assembly fortune-teller—find printable templates here for side A and side B. (Don't worry! You'll find folding instructions if it's been a little while since you last folded one of these, say, in middle school!)

Scissors

Pens and paper

Time needed: 20-30 minutes

Participants can work solo, in pairs, or in groups. Furthermore, the activity can be conducted either as an oral prompt delivered by the facilitator or in the form of a handout that participants can complete on their own. A fun post-activity idea: Ask participants to come up with their own fortune prompts, which can be collected for future use.

The emphasis is on provoking the imagination. That’s why it’s a fortune teller—nothing stretches the imagination quite like trying to picture what might happen in five minutes, or in the next 50 years. The future is an unknown quantity—anything could happen!

All of us at Line Assembly are curious about the future, too. If possible, scan the completed fortune tellers and send them to [email protected] with a short description of where the prompt was done and who participated. They could end up on this here website!

Some examples to share, gathered from our own work, as well as from attendees of the Associated Writing Programs’ Annual Conference, held March 2013 in Boston:

“A candy machine will give you

an extra Mallomar.”

“James Franco will mention you on his Twitter

and say the nicest things.”

“A band of bird musicians will begin following you around

and playing songs that reflect your mood.”

“You will discover a new type of insect,

and its venom will be used in a medicine that can cure acne.”

“A giant

will give you a pebble.”

“Every time you burp

coins will come out of your ears.”

FORTUNE TELLER PROMPTS

Write a one or two line poem, inspired by the statement. Be specific, because the details are what make your vision of the future yours. Really let your imagination run free - anything could happen!

1. You will develop a superpower.

2. You will agree to do something you have never done before.

3. Fill in the blanks: You will meet a _______ who will give you _______ .

4. You will discover something no one else knows about.

5. You will see something on the street that will change your life.

6. You will grow a strange body part.

7. You will write a memoir with a confusing title.

8. Fill in the blanks: You will go to _______  in a _______ with _______.

9. You will wake up and something will be different.

10. You will eat the same thing for the rest of your life.

11. You will find a new spirit animal.

Truly, none of us have ever endeavored to pull off a project like Line Assembly—we’re not sure anybody has, actually. Touring, workshops, street performance, and a movie? That sounds great, but the logistics will be pretty overwhelming. Aren’t we simply going to collapse at some point from a surfeit of anxiety, jerky snacks, and burned-out endorphins? How ever will we cope?

Luckily (we suppose?), we’ve all built up stamina over the years by attending the original Literature Iditarod, otherwise known as the Annual Conference of Associated Writers & Writing Programs, a yearly to-do for writers, publishers, and MFA programs. Those of you who’ve never heard of it before may scoff: Oh, writers? A bunch of pencil-pushers and grammar snarks? How tough can it be to hang with that crowd for a few days? Oh, my sweet gherkins, it’s tougher than you may think.

AWP is great fun, but it’s also overwhelming and germy and delirious and omgbookssss. You need the proper shoes and the proper snacks and a crackling memory for the nearest coffee place. We’re already a little bit road-tested, even though we’re just now on the fundraising road toward the literal one! And you can bet your bottom dollar we’ll be taking the lessons we learned in Boston (and Chicago, and DC, and New York, and Chicago …) along for the ride. Feel free to use these tips if you’re heading out on tour yourselves or tooling around a lit fest (oh hello, Mission Creek!). Or just to live that life, honey.

Use hand sanitizer. It’s not just for politicians and germophobes anymore. Plus, crazy demands on one’s adrenal cortex = weakened immune response, or something like that. One year, fully two-thirds of us came down with some kind of supersavvy death virus at AWP, and we’ve embraced the sanitizer ever since. Because a certain Line Assembler’s mother will not always be around to make us tea and quinoa as she so kindly did that year.

Wear big boots. Don’t matter if we’re in a snowstorm or under sunny skies: We get our clomp on.

Don’t underestimate the importance of rap music. “My life is all I have / My rhymes, my pen, my pad ....” Sometimes a shortcut to swagger is necessary.

If it gets to that point, there’s no damn shame in washing your underwear and socks in the hotel bathroom sink. Come to think of it, there’s no shame in shampooing your bangs in the hotel sink, either.

Sleep. It turns out there is rest for the weary. It’s called sleep, and we need it. Maybe we’re just getting older—OK, we are definitely getting older—but we noticed the weirdest thing during AWP 2013. Getting more rest equaled fewer fits of depression/anxiety and great productivity! Oh, right. It sounds so obvious.

Eat vegetables. Dude, have you tried these things lately? They are strength and power. Vegetables are victory. Who knows what horrible cocktail of brain chemicals make terrible food seem like a good idea when we’re stressed, exhausted, keyed-up, whatever. Combos? Cheetos? Convenience store pizzas of sadness? Thanks a lot, body; you can be such a jerk sometimes. Fight off the grossness.

“Say ‘no’ with historical urgency.” Thank you, Karen Finley. You can't do it all. It would be crazy if you tried. 

Dance about it. Come on, did you think Richard Simmons was kidding around all those years ago when he told you endorphins from exercise would make you smile? It’s true! And while many of us have our own preferred fitness routines in typical daily life, when we’re out in the world, dancing is the way to go. Even 30-second dance party breaks are pretty damn effective.

Find yourself some cheap fun. Oh, we’re a pretty simple group to amuse, really. Give us some chalk pastels and we’ll tint our hair crazy colors in the hotel bathroom. Give us 20 minutes and a passing conversation and we’ll make up a goofy song. It’s so necessary.