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Creative Writing Assignment:

Poetry Across the Disciplines

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Description

This is an interdisciplinary assignment designed to allow students a creative break from their major fields of study even while they continue to engage those fields of study. That is, in addition to gaining practice as literary artists, students will “write to learn” about their chosen disciplines and/or the world of work. They will gain perspectives not otherwise available in university curricula, while at the same time learning to write a good poem.

Instructions

Write a poem in any form which in some way involves a real discipline or profession—any facet or feature of that discipline, from the micro to the macro.

Suggestions:

• Describe a thing or process related to your discipline in both a technically accurate as well as “poetic” way. Examples: a poem about a Petri dish, a building schematic, a math problem, or a chemical reaction; a poem about plowing a field, filling a customer prescription, designing a government website, or supervising road repair. Try an elegy about, or maybe an ode to, the hospital gift shop, morgue, or operating room. Try an ode to courthouses, corporate farms, private art galleries—or tax accountants' offices on April 15th!
  
  
• Write a poem in persona; that is, from the point of view and in the voice of someone in a particular profession.
  
  
• Write a narrative poem; i.e., a poem which tells a story about something that happened or might happen.
  
  
• Write a personal, expressive meditation (in your own, everyday speaking voice) about your feelings toward your chosen discipline or a discipline of interest to you.

Your poem’s parameters are open—just be sure that some important element of the piece is discipline-specific. However you decide to focus your poem, it's important that you attend to the following:

à Read some model poetry. (See below.)

à Do some intensive field research. Whatever you discover can only enrich your poem. If you don’t know much about what worklife will be like in your future job, now is the time to find out by talking with advisors, teachers, and real people in the workplace. Go hang out, listen in, invite someone to coffee…Pay special attention to how people speak and interact, to their body language and dress, to specific, concrete workplace elements as well as ambiance. (Scientists: include in your poem authentic details of lab work. Artists: integrate real particulars from the gallery, studio, or stage. Etc.) Good poems need lots of vivid, credible detail. Carry around a notepad or voice recorder.

à Do some library and internet research into a particular job. Look for training manuals, college programs, personal testimonies/memoirs, case studies, job advertisements, vocational guides, and real-world work documents of all kinds.

à Borrow, when possible and as appropriate, on any content you’ve already been learning in your major field of study: information, skills, ideas, procedures.

à Get factual information right. This is important for making your poem convincing (especially for readers actually in the profession), as well as vivid. You might even have your poem fact-checked by a teacher or teaching assistant in the field in question. (I’d give you some extra credit for this.) Where and how you take liberties with facts will ultimately be up to your own judgment—your aim is a good poem—but for this project I recommend as much verisimilitude as possible.

à Try to integrate at least one real, discipline-specific genre into your poem. This means memos, letters, reports, financial transactions, etc. Try to make the appearance of this item as natural and integral to the poem as possible, and try, if possible, to heed any discipline-specific conventions for writing such an item. It might be interesting to create your poem out of the document itself, or to use it as a structural device for your poem.

à Use this opportunity to explore your own feelings about your possible future livelihood, about livelihoods that are simply exotic or interesting to you, or even about ones that you think would be downright awful.

Purpose

· To practice writing poems in a variety of modes and through a variety of strategies; to expand the creative writer’s “canvas” by exploring the world of work. (Learn to write.)

· To practice literary writing as a means of imaginatively engaging with and learning about various kinds of labor, major fields of study, and future professions, including the actual content of particular disciplines. (Write to learn.)

Audience

First and foremost: any well-read person interested in original, engaging, fine-arts poetry which moves, surprises, and challenges. Second: any member of the profession in question.

Aims

To write a poem suitable for a literary magazine, a professional journal which includes quality creative work alongside its typically technical fare, or possibly an anthology of poetry focusing on work of all kinds or a particular profession.

An additional place of publication might be a college or department disciplinary newsletter, such as, at

NDSU:

o Tabula Rasa (Communications Department)

o Nursing News (College of Pharmacy)

o It’s Our Business (College of Business)

o The Source (College of Engineering)

NDSU’s Extension Services likewise produces many newsletters:

o Dairy Connection (Ag and Applied Science)

o Water Spouts (Ag and Natural Resources—Irrigation)

o Crop and Pest Report (Plant Pathology, Soils, et al)

o Parenting Newsletters (Human Development and Family Science)

Some of these very technical publications like to include occasional creative pieces, though the quality may be uneven.

Recommended Reading (details coming)

Philip Levine’s

James Galvin’s

Gwendolyn Brooks’

Ted Kooser’s

Wallace Stevens’

Walt Whitman’s

C.W. Wright’s

Sharon Old’s

Theodore Roethke’s

Elizabeth Bishop’s

A. R. Ammon’s

Ai’s

Evaluation Criteria

DO’s:

Your poem should show some meaningful connection to a discipline or profession of your choice. Use engaging, fresh language, vivid details, and surprising, even odd insights. If writing free verse, pay attention in particular to your line breaks and the identity of your lines (lineation), and read your poem aloud to check for meaningful sound patterns and tone. Go for unusual and striking comparisons (metaphors, similes), and take imaginative LEAPS. Kick your internal editor (as well as Hallmark Inc.!) out of your head, trust your intuition, and let yourself discover ideas and truths as you write. Take as your subject something you DON’T already fully understand, and write in a spirit of inquiry into your subject. As always, be sure to edit and proofread as suitable for audience and style. For this assignment in particular, be sure your facts are accurate.

DON’TS:

· Avoid sentimentality (unearned emotion).

· Avoid sing-song rhythms and too-easy end rhymes (unless they are somehow appropriate to your subject matter). If using end-rhyme, explore various alternatives to exact rhyme.

· Avoid excessive generalization. Just because something is rendered in a general way does NOT mean that it has universal appeal. Stick with real, concrete, specific details from your actual experience, using all of your senses.

· Avoid vague sentiments. Just because something is rendered vaguely does NOT mean that its meaning is enriched. Vague ≠ depth.

· Avoid fancy fonts, unless you are doing some kind of concrete or experimental visual poem. Fonts carry rhetorical baggage, and you don’t want to send the wrong “message.”

· Avoid cliché’s and platitudes.

Additional Aims

WAC:

1. To forge connections across discourses and disciplines.

2. To help connect creative writing and literature, in a very small way, to broader academic and social contexts.

3. To experiment with hybrid discourses and voicings; to defamiliarize genres in the service of fresh imaginative literature as well as creative perspectives on the disciplines. Bakhtin: "The transfer of style from one genre to another not only alters the way a style sounds, under conditions of a genre unnatural to it, but also violates or renews the given genre” ("The Problems of Speech Genres" 66).

4. To engage with writing as a way to acquire (not just to demonstrate) knowledge.

5. To emphasize the importance of both writing and imagination to and in any discipline.

General Education:

1. To communicate effectively in a variety of contexts and formats.

2. To comprehend intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics.

3. To integrate knowledge and ideas in a coherent and meaningful manner.