Exercises in Scaffolding: A Couple of Plagiarisms

Nothin' like lake memories...

My first creative writing class at DMACC has begun! So far, I'm liking the revision-centered format and what it is producing in my students' work. Our first two exercises were language-replacement exercises, along the lines of what Heather Sellers calls "Scaffolding." In the first one, every student was to replace words that appear in Betsy Sholl's "Geneaology," Mad-Lib style. For that, they just chose a set of nouns and verbs related to a happy memory. "Scaffolding" involves replacing language that fulfills a similar purpose, or does something that the poet/writer was doing. The first Mad-Lib idea tends toward creating a poem that looks a little bit like nonsense, but the idea behind the second is to create something more cohesive that imitates the poet/writer's style. "Geneaology" is perfect for the Mad-Lib thing, and in fact a lot of poets have "scaffolded" that work. Below, find my effort:

After Betsy Sholl’s

GENEALOGY

One of my parents was clay the other kelp.
One was a crawfish the other a rubberback turtle.

In the night I’d wake to cottonwood trees and the faint

smell of aluminum dock.

One of my parents was a speedboat, the other pontoon boat.

The splash tattooed on my lower back
is the one for lake water trying to dive.

One of my parents was sand,
the other a lily pad I carried into the night,
convinced it was sun-drenched.

One of my parents I plucked the other I floated.

In the revolving door of my becoming,
one swam, one jumped.
Thus, my troubled birth, my endless raft.

One was a bluegill the other a sunfish.
How they amused each other.

One was a submerged stump, the other a sand castle. I was ashamed
of not diving, embarrassed I couldn’t hold my breath.

I was a garter snake calling across the suntan oil to a swimsuit
I didn’t have.

Not so great, but the idea is that you accidentally come into these very interesting combinations that you could work with in revision. The scaffolding idea actually tends to work really well, and at some point you allow yourself to make fundamental changes in the verse to fit your own purpose. The students had a set of readings to work with, including a poem called af.ter.glow (imagine dots instead of periods), which works in a dictionary definition format. I switched the word "afterglow" with the word "cenotaph" and ended up with this:

cen.o.taph

cen.o.taph\~\n 1. a sepulchral moment esp. on Michigan trees after an ice storm: as in the look of the amethyst sky against my mother's cenotaph. 2. The monument standing after the disappearance of patience, as of an epoch or a glacier, and sometimes regarded as an empty room: this whiskey on the rocks, this bath of granite/ This cocktail of grief and fondness,/ This rumor of endless worry on a mother's forehead/ This Sunday morning, this Christmas night,/ This metronome of my heart,/ This lotion for my soul,/ This tremble from your memory/This frozen cheek, this throne of icicles/Where you dab tissue to my lashes,/ Where we mourn and, before 9 a.m., get back to work/ And I dream, mouth open/ jogging/ On this trail's booby trap of black ice.

 Not bad for twenty minutes of work I suppose. I'll keep posting these as I have in the past, and there will be a lot of them, as I have converted to the "hypoxic" style of creative writing class, in which there is less workshopping and more actual writing. (Ironically, my comp classes are going to be more workshop-focused, as the Iowa workshop model may actually serve those students pretty well.)