First Poetry Workshop at St. Godric's

Before he left for his trip a couple of weeks ago Father Joseph asked me if I would lead the monks in a poetry workshop once a week in place of their regular afternoon session at St. Godric's, and I agreed.

Today was our first meeting. It was overcast. We took a walk in the woods. They brought their little notebooks.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for when we went out, but near the edge of a clearing I finally found it. Sheltered beneath a newly blooming shrub (in one of those places where the snow is last to melt and even in April you can be surprised by a chunk of ice) was a patch of dead oak leaves.

I asked each of the monks to pick up a hand full of the leaves and crush them between their palms, roll them around, break them up and then cup their hands to their noses and inhale.

After a few deep breaths, they sat around the clearing on deadwood or just on the new grass and followed these directions:

1) List four adjectives that come to your mind to describe the smell of the crushed leaves.

2) List three things that the crushed leaves smelled like.

3) Describe two events or occasions that you associated with the smell you just described.

When they were finished, we returned to the monastery for our workshop.

Here are some of the adjectives we compiled. (I know there were quite a few more, but I can't think of them and I didn't write them down.)

sweet, gritty, earthy, fresh, dim, pungent, dirty, grey, brown, wet, oaky, natural, musty...

Then I asked each of them to choose two of the adjectives that they thought best captured the smell that they had experienced (i.e. "fresh and gritty," "dim and grey," "musty and sweet").

Adjective combinations are even more fascinating, if that's possible, than adjectives themselves. No two combinations are really the same and each new combination offers a distinct flavor of experience. Take, for instance, "dim and grey" versus "dim and brown" - two different qualities of experience! Or "fresh and earthy" versus "sweet and earthy" - so akin but yet so different! "Musty and autumnal" versus "autumnal and grey." "Fresh and sweet" versus "oaky and sweet."

We compared similes. The leaves smelled like a farm, like alfalfa, like new hay ...

We compared the associations. (Smell is the sense most associated with memory, by the way, especially emotional memory.) Most of these were akin to the similes, and for most of the monks the smell returned them to a fall like environment - jumping in a pile of leaves, hay cutting, warm cider, harvest ...

Finally, I gave a brief lecture on my view of poetry, which included four talking points: the engagement of poetry with the sensual world, the poet's heightened concern for the super-communicative powers of language, the interconnectedness of sound and sense, and the metaphoric making of 'meaning.'

To experience the world poetically is to walk through the world as one samples a fine wine. And the poet's job, I told them, is to capture the superabounding fullness of any experience - its concrete, emotional, psychological and spiritual texture - and communicate that experience with language that sings.

Not an easy task.

While they were working on their adjectives, similes and associations I had composed this short poem with which to close:

Late-fall leaves that somehow survived the winter,
now crushed between my hands in spring
(the sweet, loamy smell of mown alfalfa!)
bring back amidst this green explosion,
days of cider and pumpkin pie,
when we were boys and loved the fall
for different reasons.

It is, as the critics say, 'just a workshop poem,' just a noticing, nothing more.

But I must say that I do like it.

And so did they.

And that's enough.

__________

Second Poetry Workshop