Dan Simpson
Poetry writing workshop; Putting the Geek into Poetry, Poetry into Geeks
What we are doing isn’t necessarily writing where folks outside our area don’t understand our illusions.
Word game: simply words
whatever springs into your head
associating
introduce your name: what do you want from this?
Jane words flowing
Simone geekness and poetry together
Shane don’t want to read poetry
Phil gain confidence
Rayanne like poetry
Sally read poetry, don’t often write
Kat do write haven’t done any geeky things (unusual topics)
Graham writing poetry, not a lot, not learning how to write poetry bits
Dan—spoken word background
first collection coming out today
Still waiting to see it. Box delivered?
I won’t make you read it out loud. If you were school kids, I would. –Dan
“We don’t torture adults.” Shane
Exercises:
kind of stream of consciousness
getting stuff down
First
Open freewrite:
Where Rockets Burn Through
take a random page and a random line
“if anyone ever asked, I would like to say, yes, somewhere out there.”
investigate: Who is the I?
What is the question?
Where is somewhere out there?
What tone of voice?
mundane and fantastical contrasting works too.
Next exercise
Write a character piece.
Example: with one of my own poems
What I like doing with geeky references
character piece, character you like
orange ghost from pac man—Cool poem.
looked up all the names of orange pac man—picked on ghost
tried to elicit sympathy for him
poem about being the odd man out
feeling about not fitting in
he doesn’t fit in
wrapped up in jokes, wrapped up in silliness
So, choose a character that you know from something. Write the name and where they are from.
series of prompts:
What do they do?
Outside of that, how do they act? what do they do?
Where are they from?
What do they look like?
Something they love.
Something they hate.
Tell me about an adventure they had.
How did they feel about adventure?
What would happen if they were dropped into our world? this hotel. this con.
Last exercise
Extended metaphor?
poem about love, mathematical and scientific terms—example
identify subject matter: evocative words… fantasy, science fiction, comics, manga, anime, cartoons,
20 words about the subject
pick 4 words with multiple meanings
then take those and try to create a poem
Coin Opera: Fulminare’s Revenge great poetry book