About Marc Olmsted
Student Comments
Complete List of Writers.com Classes
Introduction to Poetry (10 weeks)
The desire to express oneself through poetry is the natural urge to be seen and heard. Beyond that, it's articulating this existence - the sense of wonder or sacred view, the one mortal taste of pleasure and pain. It's the bittersweet human quality of the heart, whether broken open, or once-opened, or waiting to open.
This is a ten week class for anyone who has to urge to write poetry but isn't quite sure just how to go about it.
WHAT IS A POEM?
Marshall McLuhan said "art is anything you can get away with." The same could easily be said of poetry.
There are too many forms of poetry and contradictory arguments to present them all here. Song lyrics generally rhyme, modern poetry generally does not. Do we want to make sense, and does it matter? Whom are we speaking to, do we want to communicate?
Journaling into poetry is legitimate. There are no accidents.
Assignment: Submit what you think is a poem, either new or something you've already written.
FIRST THOUGHT, BEST THOUGHT
"First Thought, Best Thought" - Chogyam Trungpa in conversation with Allen Ginsberg
"First thought is best in Art, second in other matters." --William Blake
"If you don't stick with what you first thought, and to the words the thoughts brought, what's the sense of bothering with it anyway, what's the sense of foisting your little lies on others?" - Jack Kerouac
Assignment: Watch an old movie on TV, jot down what you see without much thought. Record snippets of dialog and a couple of striking images. Type it up and submit.
MIND IS SHAPELY, ART IS SHAPELY
"Notice what you notice." - Allen Ginsberg
"Mind is shapely, art is shapely." - Jack Kerouac
"My writing is a picture of the mind moving." - Philip Whalen
Assignment: Try Assignment #2 again. Has it changed with feedback and your new understanding?
NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS
"No ideas but in things" - W.C. Williams
"The natural object is always the adequate symbol" - Ezra Pound
"Observe what's vivid." - Allen Ginsberg
"Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.
He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." - William Blake
"Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better." - Jack Kerouac
Assignment: Try sitting in a park or mall, attention to breath, eyes open as described in lecture. Now describe what you see and hear as you did with the TV.
SURPRISE MIND
"Surprise mind" - Allen Ginsberg
"Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance." — Chogyam Trungpa
Tendrel - Tibetan for "auspicious coincidence"
"There are no accidents" - Carl Jung
Assignment: Sometimes you mean to write one thing and you write
another, like "cell phone" comes out as "self phone." Sometimes
they come from handwriting, sometimes they're typos in typing.
Did any accidents occur in the last few weeks that you might
reconsider using now? Did you write something down that you
didn't understand at the time? Submit your favorite accidents,
either typos or surreal combinations you didn't intend.
Fragments and single lines are fine.
TO COMPOSE IS TO CONDENSE
dichtung=condensare - Basil Bunting, fumbling about with a German-Italian dictionary, found this idea : the German for "poem" was found to be the equivalent of the Italian for "to condense," it became a slogan of Ezra Pound
"Maximum information, minimum number of syllables." -- Allen Ginsberg
Assignment: With this in mind, again try sitting somewhere and observing, like a coffee house window that looks out on the street.
REVISION
"...attempting to record without hesitation, cutting where the mind gets stiff." - Marc Olmsted
"Tailoring" - Gregory Corso
Assignment: Are there things you wrote before this class that might be condensed?
WRITING FOR YOUR FRIENDS AND FRIENDS OF FRIENDS
Film maker Luis Bunuel said he made his films for his friends and his friends of friends. It seems good advice to any artist.
"Review it through several people's eyes." - Allen Ginsberg
{Imagine what your friends will think or appoint an editor you can trust - MO}
Assignment: Appoint an editor you can trust. Incorporate their changes into some poems you've written, especially things you haven't shown us.
TO EASE THE PAIN OF LIVING
"Well while I'm here I'll
do the work -
and what's the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow." - Allen Ginsberg
"To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings." - Gelek Rinpoche
"If I laugh at any mortal thing, Tis that I may not weep." - Lord Byron
Yeats: "Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry."
Ginsberg on Yeats: "Quarrel with yourself. Your quarrels with yourself often make the best poems. Tell yourself your own secrets, and reveal yourself. The purpose of art is to provide relief from your own paranoia and the paranoia of others. You write to relieve the pain of others, to free them from the self-doubt generated by a society where everyone is conniving and manipulating."
Assignment: Do your poems live in the solution, or the problem. Can you adopt the attitude that even admitting you don't have a solution can be helpful? Try on this panoramic attitude and write a poem to be helpful.
SENDING IT OUT
"Candor." - Walt Whitman
"Candor ends paranoia." - Allen Ginsberg
"...poetry can stand out as the one beacon of sanity: a beacon of individual clarity, and lucidity in every direction--whether on the Internet or in coffee houses or university forums or classrooms. Poetry, along with its old companion, music, becomes one mean of communication that is not controlled by the establishment."
- Ginsberg interview by Gloria G. Brame for ELF, Summer 1996
Optional assignment: We fulfill our efforts to communicate by sending out our manuscripts.
About Marc Olmsted
Student Comments
Complete List of Writers.com Classes
Word Flashes & Eye Snapshots: Sketching Your Life Awake(10 weeks)
"Sketching" is Jack Kerouac's term for recording images seen and the associations and memories they invoke with a snapshot-like technique of minute particulars and attention to the words that convey them precisely rather than with "editorial" language (generalities of object and emotion).
Sketching can be done in fiction, journal or poetry. Its form is primarily prose, but is easily adapted to poetry by breaking the line if one chooses. Sketching has a strong, vital application in modern "flash" (brief) fiction and non-fiction. The class aims more toward process than form. So you can use verse, prose poems, flash - maybe also journal entries, letters, scribbles on napkins, letters? Welcome - poets, fiction writers and journal keepers - Word people all!
What winds up happening in paying attention to the "haiku moments" of our existence is a rediscovery of our world with a sense of wonder. By this appreciation without grasping, we come awake in the sacred, present already in the details and images of our lives but generally lost through inattention. We develop a stronger presence and grow new eyes and ears. And, like all great poets and writers, we root of our words in our bodies and senses as well as our spirits.
Lecture 1: Snapshots
Some selections of Ginsberg's American Sentences and haiku.
Assignment: take some eyeball snapshots, either in haiku or word "sketch" of inner and outer "scenery."
Lecture 2: Eye & the Haiku
Kerouac said, "Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better." Snapshot poetics. Excerpts from Williams, Whalen, Basho, Richard Wright, Kerouac, Pound, di Prima, Ginsberg, the 6th Dalai Lama and Ikkyu, with discussion.
Assignment: Here's a Ginsberg exercise: "Stop in tracks once a day, take account of sky, ground & self, write three verses haiku."
Lecture 3: Transforming into Sketching
Excerpts from Pound, Snyder, Kerouac and Burroughs with discussion.
Assignment: Try using "sketching" in capturing day-to-day life and/or nightworld dreams. Really think of it like literally sketching - you are trying to work primarily with images, sounds, smells, and sensations of skin and taste. Avoid "editorial language" or judgment of any kind. No need to comment or be clever or literary.
Lecture 4: Books of Sketches, Haiku Bones, Books of Dreams
Kerouac's Book of Sketches and Book of Haikus were both published after his death, although many of his scattered haiku appeared in other publications. Sketches is exactly that, "Written On the Little Pages in the Notebooks I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952 Summer to 1954 December." The haiku speak for themselves.
Assignment: Given these new influences, continue sketching in whatever direction best suits you.
Lecture 5: Visions of Cody
Kerouac's posthumously published novel is considered by many to be his best. It certainly contains some of his finest and most outrageous sketching - passages of minutely detailed observations of car fender reflections in Times Square, reveries of the Three Stooges, and watching Joan Crawford film an outdoor scene in the fog.
Assignment: Hopefully inspired with these yet-wider (and wilder) examples, again continue sketching in whatever direction best suits you.
Lecture 6: Re-vision
What is the place of revision in a poetics that celebrates "first thought" and spontaneity? How did a master like Ginsberg go about it? Samples of my own work before and after Ginsberg's critique. Discussion.
Assignment: Editing your poems based on samples and suggestions.
Lecture 7: Flashes of Ecology
Interdependence. All sentient beings have been your kitten. Ginsberg's Wales Visitation.
Assignment: Write the most panoramic inclusive poem you can; include as many details of your immediate experience. What is living in front of your eyes? In your body? What's there you can't see?
Lecture 8: Flashing on Death
What happens? One of the greatest itches and subjects of literature. Ginsberg's Kaddish, On Neal's Ashes, Death and Fame, On Cremation of Chogyam Trungpa, Vidyadhara, "What would you do if you lost it?"
Assignment: Write a poem like you're on your deathbed. Who and what do you want to tell?
Lecture 9: The Future & Neo-Beat
Neo-Beat poets and writing for the future. Antler, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Kathleen Wood, Bana Witt, Jim Cohn, Peter Marti, S.A. Griffin, Eliot Katz and others.
Assignment: Look at your collected work this class. Will it be understood in 100 years? 500 years? What may you need to add to make this possible?
Lecture 10: Sending It Out
The manuscript, the chapbook, the webzine.
Assignment: Send it out to the various places listed, including one "impossibility" of your choice. (American Poetry Review, etc.)
About Marc Olmsted
Student Comments
Complete List of Writers.com Classes
:: to top of page ::
Genius All the Time: Advanced Spontaneous Writing Workshop (10 weeks)
All fired up after taking one of Marc Olmsted's courses like Word Flashes & Eye Snapshots, and ready for the next step? Genius All the Time: Advanced Spontaneous Writing builds on Marc's lessons and helps hone and refine the skills that separate beginners from the people publishing their work regularly.
This class will bring together poem, memoir, journal and prose into a record of one's experience, whether during the 10 weeks of the class, or using memories of one's whole life.
During this ten-week course, we'll refine the skills that go into a first-rate piece of writing and critique your work to ready it for publication.
This class is exclusively for those who have finished one of Marc's classes.
Week 1: First Thought/Best Thought (Again)
Ginsberg's teacher Trungpa Rinpoche suggested this phrase as a writing approach. Mindfulness separates art from mediocrity. The Divine Madman and the Void as Great Mother. Excerpts by H.H. Dudjom Lingpa, Robert Bly, Anne Waldman, Lenore Kandel, Aleister Crowley, Ramakrishna and Chogyam Trungpa with discussion.
Assignment: Describe a vivid experience or dream in straightforward language anyone can understand. All references, whether personal or even TV shows, need to be described to a stranger as if they were reading it 100 years in the future.
Week 2: Genius All the Time
Kerouac said "You're a Genius all the time." True or not, what might such an outrageous sacred view do for writer's block and insecurity? Excerpts by Kerouac and Tibetan poet-masters Milarepa and Longchenpa with discussion.
Assignment: Have you ever tried to draw without looking at the page? Try writing in the same manner. As Dylan said, "Don't look back."
Week 3: Breath
How the oral tradition of poetry continues on the written page. Excerpts from Ginsberg, Whitman, Melville, Thomas Wolfe, Neal Cassady and Shelly with discussion.
Assignment: Take a piece of literature you admire and try reading it out loud. Read your own poetry out loud. Did your sense of the material change? Sit for five minutes. Afterward, sit comfortably, eyes open and intone the sound AHHHHH as a single note. After you get a little tired of "chanting," sit quietly for a short time, then write about what you experienced and what you are experiencing now.
Week 4: Love
The manifestation of wisdom Bodhisattva Chenrezig. His visualization and mantra. The Green Automobile, Contest of Bards.
Assignment: Write a love poem, whether past, present or anticipated future. Same instructions as above, grounded in simple physical experience of body and phenomena. No flowery Hallmark card language.
Week 5: Sex
Just the Facts: The Great Passion: Discussion of Buddhist Tantra. The Blues. Howl, Please Master.
Assignment: Rhymed Blues. Take one sentence more or less 10 syllables, rhyme the end word two times more, compose two or three stanzas (see examples in lecture). EXTRA CREDIT: Write a sex poem no one has to see, either experience or fantasy. No editorial language. Submit this only if you want.
Week 6: Candor
The merit of confession. Howl, Ego Confession.
Assignment: 3-Line Poem - 1) What's your neurotic confusion? 2) What do you really want, desire? 3) What do you notice right where you are now? EXTRA CREDIT: Write your worst secret that no one has to see. Make friends with it, forgive yourself and hope to do better if necessary. Submit this only if you want.
Week 7: Politics
The practice of Tong-Len (breathing in other's suffering, exhaling compassion), the Bodhisattva Vow. Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" and Williams' "Impromptu, the Suckers" reprinted in Loka II with Ginsberg's commentary. Wichita Vortex Sutra, Plutonian Ode.
Assignment: Write a political poem without preaching to the choir, grounded in your experience and observation. No editorial (non-image) language.
Week 8: Space
Sacred view. Ginsberg's early Blake vision. Creator God vs. Clear Empty Space. The Lion For Real, Why I Meditate.
Assignment: Consider your most sacred moment. Write a poem about it without any traditional spiritual language. No words like "ineffable."
Week 9: On the Page
Final draft. From the notebook to the page. What arrangements of line might be considered or determined by original notation? Samples of my own work and others with discussion.
Assignment: Make decisions about arrangement on the page according to what has been discussed: length of "breath", mental pause or division of mental ideas, and in particular, conditions of original notation, i.e. what it looked like when you first wrote it.
Week 10: Sending It Out
The manuscript, the chapbook, the webzine. Assignment: Send it out to the various places listed, including one "impossibility" of your choice. (American Poetry Review, etc.)
About Marc Olmsted
Student Comments
Complete List of Writers.com Classes
:: to top of page ::
About Marc Olmsted
Marc Olmsted is the author of three collections of poetry, including What Use Am I a Hungry Ghost? Alan Ginsberg called Olmsted "...one of the few
practitioners post-Kerouac that had picked up on the loose and lucid form that Kerouac had developed." For more on the writer and his work,
visit his Web site.
Cyndry Krey
Marc takes an objectivist approach to his lectures which are delicately draped in poetic lineage, finally picked quotes and excerpts, and wild the out-of-the-box assignments. After finishing both Writing Kerouac/Sitting Buddha and Mind Breaths, I can candidly say that the experience has transformed my love and play for poetry but also has reprogrammed (in a good way) the way I look at literature and life. My mind was stretched in different ways by Marc's clear comments [and] also through lively in-class discussions. It is the perfect class for any poet or student looking to refine their knowledge... I could not be more pleased. It was just an added bonus to have a few poems published at the end of the course.
Chaz Southard
I just wanted to write an email to express my appreciation to writers.com. I just completed Marc Olmsted's "Write like Kerouac, Sit like Buddha"- it was an inspiring and productive 10 weeks. Olmsted served as a well of information and insight, sharing his personal experiences as a friend and student of Ginsberg, a student of buddhism and a practtitioner of spontaneous poetics! The weekly lectures and lessons were lucid, instructive and often, fun! His feedback on work submitted by the class always focused on finding the poem- sometimes through major editing suggestions- he seemed to nail it every time! Thanks!
Genevieve Legacy
I think most of us were pretty clear on this with Marc - Stunningly good. In partcular, the lectures gave me content I could never have gotten elsewhere. I told everybody here about it. The assignments ... allowed us to have wide ranging discussions and get great feedback from Marc. ... Marc is a great poet and a great instructor. I have taken writing courses (though not online) and have gven them up because the one really good teacher I ever found passed away. The rest however never even came close to Marc. Very VERY good. I will definitly sign up for the January course with Marc...I appreciate what you have done here. Quality at a decent price. Thanks
David Tilley
I LOVED this class. I found my voice and the best way to express it. Marc's lectures were inspiring, thought provoking, and sometimes a kick in the rear. His direction and guidance fabulous. I can't wait to take his next class!! I've actually submitted work - and am now awaiting the responses!
Peggy Bell
I took the course with the intention of bettering my understanding of the Beat generation, their aesthetic, the way in which they practiced writing. The class did exactly this. Marc has an intimate understanding of the Beats and practices their principles in his own writing. In addition, his last lecture made the daunting task of sending off material to likely publishers easy--a nice bonus for me!
Lisa McCool-Grime
home:about:classes:enroll:services:instructors:tips:store
writers on the
net/writers.com
© 1995-2012