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Poet in Missoula says poems often 'come' during writing, reads new work
Summary
At a Missoula reading, a poet and creative-writing teacher described classroom exercises he uses to provoke surprise in writing and read poems — including "Electrolux," "Meat Grinder," and "Sweet Citrus" — as examples of meaning found through the act of writing.
A presenter and creative-writing teacher told an audience at a Missoula reading that poems frequently emerge in the act of writing rather than being fully planned in advance, and he read several of his poems to illustrate that process.
The presenter opened by saying, "What I wanna do is I wanna debunk a myth a little bit," and described a classroom exercise in which students imagine a blank landscape, walk to a shoreline and "reach down and grab something." He instructed students to examine the imagined object closely and then "throw it away," using the second object they find as the prompt for a poem. "Then I tell them, throw it away," the presenter said, explaining that the deliberate loss of the first, attractive prompt forces writers into surprise and discovery.
Why it matters: the reading offered a practical demonstration of a common teaching strategy in creative writing — creating constraints…
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