Trethewey and Merrill

My campus hosted two major U.S. poets this week: Natasha Trethewey (current poet laureate) and Christopher Merrill.  They gave a master class for our English majors and faculty and shared some useful ideas and insights.  Some random things I jotted down for future reference/use/reading:

• Trethewey often consults the OED, sometimes looking up every single work she uses in a given poem.  This allows her to consider secondary and tertiary meanings of words, connotations, implications, and etymologies.  Could be a cool assignment for students?
• "Make a house for the reader to inhabit," Trethewey's shorthand for writing reader-based poems.  She stressed the value of accessibility and the need to re-imagine and re-frame experiences so they're relevant to others as well.  Avoid self-indulgence!
• Merrill: Emily Dickinson wrote 400 poems in 1862 and didn't mention the Civil War (explicitly) a single time.
• Both: poets are in conversation with one another, so read widely.  Play with call-and-response.  Merrill talked about a project (that may or may not "go anywhere") where he and a writer-friend send prose-poems back and forth to one another.  A kind of collaboration or mutual inquiry.
• Find the essay "The Display of Mackerel" (?) by Mark Doty.
• Write about everyday objects.  Have students write about everyday objects.  Start with at least 3-4 lines of description before imposing any metaphors, judgments, rhetorical statements, comparisons, etc.  Share Charles Simic's "Fork."  Brilliant piece.
• Trethewey: big fan of writing about a photograph, painting, poem, or film.  Pieces of art are writing prompts.
• Charles Simic's "1938."  Write about your year-of-both.  Just make a series of declarations.  Facts about the year.  See what develops.  Cool idea for class, though it would be a BUNCH of poems about 1995!