If the blog’s to be companion to the course, the course can be companion to the blog also, and I hope they’ll be buds, swapping gists and piths. Here’s what the syllabus will say to our brave company at the opening.
When you make compost you break down old forms to make new forms. From banana peels and lawn clippings you grow a lemon tree. From street signs and Twitter feeds you grow a poem or a flash essay. In this class you’ll turn a fairytale inside-out. You’ll burrow wormwise through your own prose in search of the secret text it holds. You’ll build a poem out of physical objects. What you won’t do is stare at a blank page or screen trying to figure out “what on earth to say.” In other words, your life’s already a perfect poem, a perfect story, a perfect meditation, you just need to compose it a bit.
I’m new to bloggery but already very struck by how form and process extend the content and back again. I’ve long loved the thought and the fact of the serial poem (e.g., Spicer’s Language, Blaser’s Moth Poem) but haven’t till now come close to composing one …
(There’s a thought in me half-formed about Black Mountain prose style, its relentless parataxis, and how like that the serial poem is in its play ethic. Something about going on your nerve, not resorting to a supervisory intelligence, the mind that knows as the sentence begins what the whole of it will say. A dead form, nature mort. Gonna mull this one a bit more.)
the art of compost 