10/ The Delight Song of Tsaoi-Talee

(a special thanks to poet Michael Dennis Browne for this exercise!)

The Delight Song of Tsaoi-Talee
- by N. Scott Mamaday

I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs on the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter of the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to the earth

I stand in good relation to the gods

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful

I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte

You see, I am alive, I am alive

Writing exercise (in several steps):

- Begin by writing a series of "I am" statements. Be free, let this go for five, ten minutes.
- MDB likes to have the writer cut one line completely, change a word, and give specific instructions for small edits.
- The second step is to re-write the poem by shuffling the "halves" of the poem. For instance, in the first line, "I am a feather on the bright sky" and the second line, "I am the blue horse that runs in the plain" could become "I am a feather that runs in the plain" or "I am the blue horse on the bright sky." One does not have to make those shifts with phrases that are adjacent, but rather, let the eyes wander (quickly) and see what comes up.

Share. (MDB would then ask, "What's your pleasure, what's your pain? What was that like for you? Feed the monster.")

9/ Things to do Around Seattle

(a special thanks to poet Michael Dennis Browne for this exercise!)

Things to Do Around Seattle
- by Gary Snyder

Hear phone poles hum.
Catch garter snakes. Make lizard tails fall off.
Biking to Lake Washington, see muddy little fish.
Peeling old bark off Madrone to see the clean red new bark.
Cleaning fir pitch off your hands.
Reading books in the back of the University District goodwill.
Swimming in Puget Sound below the railroad tracks.
Dig clams.
Ride the Kalakala to Bremerton.
See Mt. Constance from the water tower up by the art museum.
Fudgsicles in Woodland park zoo, the Eagle and the Camel.
The mummy Eskimo baby in the University Anthropology museum.
Hung up deep sea canoes, red cedar log.
Eating old style oatmeal mush cookt in double boiler or cracked wheat cereal with dates.
Sway in the wind in the top of the cedar in the middle of the swamp--
Walking off through the swamp and over the ridge to the pine woods.
Picking wild blackberries all around stumps.
Peeling cascara
Feeding chickens
Feeling Penelope's udder, one teat small
Oregon grape and salal.



Assignment: Write your own Things to do Around _______ (campus, your hometown, the town we are in now, Uptown, the dorm, a place you vacationed, this classroom, your friend's house, etc.).

8/ Things I Learned Last Week

(a special thanks to poet Colleen McCarthy for this exercise!)

Copy + read the following poem aloud in class:



Things I Learned Last Week
- by William Stafford

Ants, when they meet each other,
usually pass on the right.

Sometimes you can open a sticky
door with your elbow.

A man in Boston has dedicated himself
to telling about injustice.
For three thousand dollars he will
come to your town to tell you about it.

Schopenhauer was a pessimist but
he played the flute.

Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as
growing from other art. They studied that.

If I ever die, I'd like it to be
in the evening. That way, I'll have
all the dark to go with me, and no one
will see how I begin to hobble along.

In The Pentagon one person's job is to
take pins out of towns, hills, and fields,
and then save the pins for later.



Discuss and have students write their own poem after "Things I Learned Last Week" by Stafford. (This is good early in the year if you are teaching a freshmen-level class.)

5/ Five Senses

As an M.Ed student, my co-teacher Mandy and I had to come up with a series of exercises for the middle school intersession course on creative writing we taught, and this is one that was essentially her idea. We had to practice the teaching with a group of our peers, other pre-teachers, and I'm going to present it as such, though you can adapt it as you see fit:

- Write the five senses at the top of the board. Go through each one slowly, eliciting specifics from students--give them a place (with the pre-teachers, it was a bar; with my high schoolers, it was the cafeteria) and have them shout out responses. Make the list as long as you can with as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives as you can. Emphasize how you haven't been in X place in a long time and really want to imagine what it is like being in that place.
- Review the lists you've created on the board. What words are strongest? Why? Discuss.
- Create a writing assignment around this list--I usually had them write a poem evoking a sense of place using rich sensory details, but you can also have them create a narrative, etc.

3/ Exquisite Corpse

There are several variations to this exercise, but the one that has been the most popular (both as a student of writing and as an instructor) is the following:

- You can start each student with the same line, if that seems easiest, or you can have the students come up with their own first line of poetry.
- Pass the sheet to the left, and the next person reads that line, writes a subsequent line, and then folds over the first line so only the most recent line is showing. Continue to do so for however long you wish, making sure each time, the paper is folded back so only one line of the poem is showing. You can switch directions, collect and pass back out, etc., so that students don't have to continue to respond to the same person's lines.

This is a fun one to read aloud, to see which directions students have gone.

A word of warning: If you have sensitive issues in the classroom, or if you believe they need to be told, make sure you let students know what is inappropriate and what is not. I haven't had issues in university classrooms, but doing this as a high school teacher, there is an opportunity for slight anonymity in responses, which some kids might take advantage of in a not-so-poetic way.