Poetry Walk

I took my first poetry walks back in high school, when I was a student in the Parkway Program in Philadelphia and constantly walked around the city. The program was influenced by A.S. Neill's Summerhill School, which was run according to his principle "freedom, not license." Students chose their own classes and made their own schedules. Truly a "school without walls," Parkway wasn't housed in a central building, so that students could take advantage of the cultural institutions in the city. Classes were held in skyscrapers and museums. For example, rug weaving—taught by Afghani weavers whom the Fels Institute brought to Philadelphia to participate in a special exhibit—was held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Professionals at a Center City advertising firm taught marketing. University of Pennsylvania graduate students taught Poetry Workshop at Smokey Joe's Bar on the UPenn campus. (Undoubtedly, not a place where underage students would be permitted to enter today—in any case, Smokey Joe's, an underground pub with literary ambience, served as a far better source of inspiration than a cinderblock classroom.)

Although I walked around Center City all through my teenage years and wrote poems in my head, I took my first formal poetry walks while a student in Larry Levis's seminar, The Hundred-Line Poem, at the University of Iowa. Most students in the MFA program didn't extend their writing past thirty lines. At the time, Larry was reinventing the narrative and writing the long, gorgeous poems that would become his opus. He happened to live downstairs from me, and I saw him many times composing on a yellow legal pad the poems that would become his book The Dollmaker's Ghost. I wrote all one hundred lines of my poem walking to his class. I lived two miles from campus, and each time I came to a corner, I stopped and wrote down another line. The poem, "Amulet," appeared in my first book. It is filled with the rhythms of my walk, and it practically wrote itself.

 

THE PLAN
Take a thirty- to forty-minute walk with students, and ask them to write at five-minute planned stops. Encourage them to be receptive to the world around them instead of imposing their egos on the landscape. Tell them they need to open themselves to the environment. Poets look at the world the way scientists do, observing minutiae until its patterns and habits are realized.

A problem many beginning poets have is that they don't understand that poems are visceral. They think poetry is mainly abstract ideas in abstract language. The best way to kill someone's appreciation for poetry is to talk about what a poem represents. The thrill of reading an Emily Dickinson poem is finding out that a poem becomes its own reality. Dickinson used the technique of thesis/antithesis, making the meaning of her poems very elusive. Dickinson herself is well known for her visceral definition of poetry in her 1870 remark to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

When I take a poetry walk with my students at Drexel University, we leave the campus and head toward Schuylkill River Park. It's a twenty-minute walk in each direction. Leaving campus, we walk down Walnut Street and over the Walnut Street Bridge. We walk a block, and then the whole class stops. During this time, the students look around and each composes a line and writes it down. Then we walk another block, stop again, and write another line. I have the students write about six or seven lines before I tell them that the next line they write should be related in some way to one of their previous lines, and the next line after that should relate to a different previous line, and so on, connecting every sixth and seventh line or so to a previous line. We strive for twenty-line poems.

For your class, have your students walk for a block or so outside your school, absorbing what they see, before they start to compose their lines. The students can write whatever they like, but they must base their work on things they can see. There's a lot to see in a busy city or town, but if your school is in a more subdued environment, it's fun to help your students focus on small oddities.

Share the poems: before my students and I go inside, they read their poems aloud, sometimes attracting the attention of passersby, which gives the reading an added thrill. The great thing about these poems is that the students think they were writing unconnected observations, but every time we do this exercise, they marvel at how well connected the final poems turn out. It may be that randomness is impossible because of the logical structure of grammar, but whatever "meaning" these finished pieces create occurs through language and as such is a worthwhile lesson. Another added benefit of this lesson is that students get to experience writing by the line. Many beginning writers do not understand the integrity of the line and write what amounts to chopped-up prose. This exercise forces students to write their poems one line at a time.