20 Consonant Poetry

R Perhaps an explanation is in order.

W Very happy to be here at Illinois Association Teachers English (help fight the war on acronyms). What you have just been the bewildered witness to is a performance of four 20 consonant poems. In 20 consonant poetry, the assignment is to write a poem which uses each of the 20 consonants in the English language once before repeating any of them. Vowels may be used freely. In most of these poems the letter Y is treated like a vowel.

R In addition to considering Y a vowel, there are numerous ways the poets who composed these texts--Mark Enslin, T.S.Eliot as translated into 20 consonant poetry by William-

W That's me. That's my translation.

R -and Keith Johnson--employed additional techniques and procedures in order to make the assignment easier or more difficult.

W In particular, Keith Johnson, in his poem Bed Down on a Nono, used Rick's Rule.

R That's me. Those were my songs and this is my rule: Rick's Rule allows you to repeat a consonant as many times as you wish as long as no other consonants--only vowels, punctuation, and spaces--intervene. In this poem, the poet uses this rule to stretch every consonant through as many words as possible. [indicating transparency]. B D W N N N N N P P P P Z R R R R R...

W [overlap] This is what we teach: new assignments in formal poetry. We demonstrate a list of assignments, giving examples of each, and then the poets either choose one to work on or are assigned one through a random dice roll.

R These assignments require the poets to pay attention to every aspect of their poem except its meaning. They are asked to keep track of which letters are used, how many letters are in a word, how many syllables are in a word, how many words are in the poem. The students are asked to pay attention to the poem they write and not its semantics, emotional content, or transcendental profundity.

W Let's write a 20-consonant poem together. Here I have a transparency with the twenty consonants of the English Alphabet...

R 20 Consonant Poetry is the first of seven assignments we are going to share with you tonight. Before we turn to the handout we wanted to explain the origins of that what we call 20 consonant poetry.

W Poetry is the easiest art form. The poet is not required to use complete sentences or to make sense. In college level poetry classes, poets are frequently given an assignment no more specific than to write a poem. This creates a problem for students with special needs. What if, for example, the poet is insensitive or not shy, or does not think in vague imagery with inexplicable linebreaks. These are the poets who are left with very little to go on. It was my intention to provide poets with assignments which could be completed without intuition. How does the poet who is asked simply to write a poem know what to do? Unless she actually sees a vision or a flash of insight, she can't tell. If, however, she is asked to write a poem which uses every consonant once, then she is finally given a criteria with which she can begin making decisions. As a graduate college student in the field of fiction, I was recently told by a professor that he didn't like my story but he liked the language.

R In other words, he didn't like the painting but he liked the paint.

W But the poem is its language and its language is composed of letters.

R He didn't like the recipe but he liked the food.

W He didn't like the music but he liked the sound.

R As a composer of new music, I compose poetry in a musical language whose semantics are usually dismissed as beauty. The types of problems I have trained myself to solve in composing music have more to do with A Waste Land than The Waste Land. Recently we have found evidence that similar forms of poetry date back at least a century. However, the idea for 20 consonant poetry was invented as an assignment in music composition by Arnold Schoenberg.

W Another composer, in reference to 12-tone music, suggested to me, over a laser printer in the Hampshire College Library, 26 letter writing. But the shortage of vowels would render such an assignment very difficult indeed.

R Mr. Jock, T.V. Quiz Ph.D., Bags Few Lynx.

W Impossible. Completely impossible. So I thought about 21 consonant poetry and later, in preparing for my first creative writing class at Uni, added it to a list of possible assignments. I tried it out and it seemed difficult to write anything interesting. I tried, in fact, to write a poem called "I Fell in Love" but I ran out of L's right away and had to call it "I Fel in Ove."

R Quarks, boxed, zing. I chafe a limp wavy jet.

W Very difficult indeed. Certainly not beautiful. I showed the assignments to Rick and he spent many hours writing a poem called the Heckler.

R Tuxedo glaze, quasi-jokin' vibe, you chomp a wafer & raise you half-crazy voice-

W It looked so strange. But when I read it out loud...

R -quiet! a pox on my wage job!

W I realized we had solved a problem that didn't exist yet. I tried it again. And again. And so have under a hundred other writers, composers, programmers, doctors and clowns.

R It was a simple complication for me to apply the procedures of 12 tone music composition and make consonant matrices, taking a basic row and deriving 20 transpositions, each with retrogrades and inversions.

W We tell the story of 20 consonant poetry as an example of how one of our assignments was invented. We brought six other assignments to demonstrate for you, four of which we are going to attempt as a group. They are the six assignments in your handout. And now a few words from Dorothy Fuller.

R We are now going to demonstrate six more poetry assignments, this time providing examples written by some of our students at University High School. These are the assignments in your handout. The first of the six assignments in your handout and the second of the seven assignments we are going to describe today is syllable poetry.

W Syllable poetry. This is the assignment which asks poets to pay attention to the number of syllables in each word. The poet selects or is assigned through standardized achievement tests involving dice, a number inclusively between one and six. For example, six. The poet then writes a poem in which every line of the poem has six words: a six syllable word, a five syllable word, a four syllable word, a three syllable word, a two syllable word, and a one syllable word--in any order. [transparency]

for excessive extra

credit, just carefully

write syllable poems.

in syllable poems

the poet assembles

words carefully chosen

on syllable number

resulting in poems

wherein three syllable

two syllable also

one syllable even

seven syllable words

come equally often.

each

line contains

one single example

of every syllable

word ranging inbetween

one until

six

or

more. every

one's syllable ranges

are assigned randomly.

roll lucky

dice!

[roll]

 

Does everybody understand poems

that utilize every quantitative

syllable number with accuracy?

each stanza encompasses syllable

distances within four alternatives

 

R A question that nobody has often asked us is: Why do you make the poets stand on their desks when they read their poems to the rest of the class?

W Yeah, do you have any idea how dangerous that is?

R What we would like to be an inextricable part of writing poetry is the performance of it. Performance is important and we do it every day.

W You are all doing it now. You are all performing English Teachers at a conference admirably well although some of you may not have had formal training in acting.

R How a text is read can affect its meaning. How a text is read can affect its meaning. How a text is read can affect its meaning.

W Remember the poet I described earlier? The one whose teacher simply asked her to write a poem. The one who has just finished reading The Entire Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry twice and was unable to come to any conclusion? The one who even now sits before a slice of parchment chewing on her quill trying to see an image of beauty and failing? She is trying to feel feelings. She has been taught that all poetry is emotional, confessional, humorless, intuitive, and wrought with deeply fiery something or other. She has been to too many poetry readings.

R Ever watch a writer read their writing? Well, sure you have, but did you ever listen? Many poets seem to me eager to demonstrate the inviolability of pure text by proving that they have no interest in music or theatre--in other words, performance.

W ...the melancholy menace of that tone! / For every sound that floats / From the rust within their throats / Is a groan.

R Have you ever seen someone bare their naked soul before a small audience of other poets? Embarrassing, isn't it?

W And so in our culture, poetry - advertising's only antidote - is rightfully dismissed because its poets perform what everybody feels when everybody rightfully feels rightfully ignored.

R Thus, in addition to giving poetry assignments with instructions everybody can follow, we try to teach a performance of it everybody can stand and the poets can enjoy.

W And just as how you read a poem can affect its meaning, so does how interestingly you present poetry affect how interesting it is. Thus we consider all lecture a performance -- an essential one -- and we like write them as if they were plays, scripted and rehearsed, and with props, costumes, and funny noisemakers.

R The next poetic form in your handout is the assignment that asks students to pay attention to how many letters are in each word: number poetry.

W In number poetry the poet will work with a number between two and seven, either selected or prescribed according to certain socioeconomic indicators like dicerolls. The poet can either-

R -write a poem in which every word has the same number of letters-

W -or write a poem in which, given two numbers X and Y, for example 2 and 7, write a poem in which every line has one two letter word, one three letter word, one four letter word-

R [bored, quickly] one five letter word, one six letter word-

W -and one seven letter word. [pause]

R/W -[together] in any order.

R

number

poetry

create 

excess

credit

adding 

chosen 

ranged

length 

letter 

clumps 

spill

small

poems

about

truth

using

equal

sized

words

make

each

poem

with

each

word

same

size

unit

 

poetry entails

poems having counted

each words number letters

and each lines number amounts

so one word every stanza manages

a of two four three letter lengths

o,is not this style tricky?however

do you want poets'poetry instead?

in two four three letter writing

as two dice rolls reveal margins

of the word sized letter lengths

the dice rolls unkind perhaps

poet stuck twelve letters

words letter extreme

limits collide

quickly

W Let's try it out. Rick will roll a die and add one to the result.

R [roll] Oh no! That's a difficult assignment! You'd practically have to be an English Teacher to do that!

R And now an example, and not the only one, of a poet who completed an assignment in a way I told them would be impossible. Edward Stasheff wrote a poem in which every word is one letter long. This poet proved to be one of the best students.

W We don't give grades-

R -and neither should you-

W -but if we did I would evaluate the poems on how strictly they follow the assignment, not on grammar, emotional impact, originality-

R or whether or not we thought it was a good poem.

W We provide the poet with written and oral feedback. The written feedback is written in the form of the poem it refers to. I get a particular kick out of responding to the imagery-

R -dizzy as the full moon broke amid ozone holes-

W -because in many a college poetry class a poem is written around a single image, in our class the images are grotesque accidents spawned from the linguistic and typographical contortions the poet writhed through.

R Our oral feedback usually occurs in the form of performance instructions. Often a poet is asked to read her poem three or four different ways before she is allowed to come down off her desk.

W Okay Rick that was great. Now can you try it just once more only this time sound apologetic.

R [apologetic] Our oral feedback usually occurs in the form of performance instructions. Often a poet is asked to read her poem three or four different ways before she is allowed to come down off her desk.

W Yeah. I like how that made you sound like a really nice guy. I got the impression that your teaching style is not your fault.

R [apologetic] The next formal device whose mechanisms we would like to investigate is the triple anagram.

W Extraneous credit. In this assignment, the poet must begin with a paragraph. The paragraph may be taken from an outside source or invented. The poet will then rearrange the paragraph into three anagrams. The first anagram will be made by rearranging the sentences. The second anagram will be made by rearranging the words, and the punctuation may be altered. The third anagram will be made by rearranging the individual letters, and the punctuation may be altered. Each anagram must contain every letter in the initial paragraph, with none added and none omitted.

R Anagram One: Each anagram must contain every letter in the initial paragraph, with none added and none omitted. The third anagram will be made by rearranging the individual letters, and the punctuation may be altered. The second anagram will be made by rearranging the words, and the punctuation may be altered. The first anagram will be made by rearranging the sentences. The poet will then rearrange the paragraph into three anagrams. The paragraph may be taken from an outside source or invented. In this assignment, the poet must begin with a paragraph. Extraneous credit.

W Anagram Two: In this assignment, the poet will rearrange every letter in the initial paragraph. The Extraneous punctuation may be omitted, or punctuation may be added from an outside source. words may be altered and invented by rearranging the individual letters. The first anagram must contain sentences made by rearranging the paragraph into The second anagram. The third rearranging the paragraph must begin with a anagram and made by the made credit. Each poet then will be taken with The three anagrams and altered. none will be the paragraph, none will be the anagram.

R Anagram Three: now I want everyone to move to another chair. Each poet must now get up and change seats resulting in a rearrangement. u poets will be an anagram ordered in a paragraph arrangement altered. then nun made mayors become doctors made latina pundits rearranging letters and telegrams by president billy c a paragraph by a paragraph, embarrassing him. the media team, with hillary, barring an individual hurting her, will put feminism back in nineteenthirTyeight. Then that tenth dada son Threw an extra dated anger fee at The toe in Teeth. the dean been a bad credit thug.

W And now a triple anagram poem written by a particularly wonderful poet named Tim Rauschenberger. Tim began his poem with a text from the Odyssey.

R

W He then rearranged the sentences.

R He then rearranged the lines, his innovation within the technique. Is anyone willing to perform the line anagram?

W Then the words. Who among us will read the word anagram?

R And finally the letters. Anybody?

W Neither the anagram nor the term