As a teenager I was "a poet." Of course just an amateurish scribble who published her works in the highschool magazine. I do not remember clearly when I stopeed writing poems. In my twenties? In spite of the fact that I have always been writing "something" (the journal, letters, reports and theses, essays, short stories, and recently more than anything else "e-mails" to friends on-line), poetry has slipped out of my writing habit. Only once in a while, I feel the desire to express myself in the form of poetry. Publication is out of question. I write short pieces on the back of bills or in the corner of notebooks. I haven't thought of writing poetry seriously for decades.
The reason was not clear but I guess I was afraid of observing the forms and rules which I thought were inseparable from poetry. Perhpas I resisted to indulge myself in the overdose of "sentiment" which I also thought was a significant ingredient of poetry. It is true I was bound with a lot of biases about poetry writing. My life was not quiet enough to give me the chance to sit down to meditate for poetry. In truth deep in my mind I wished I could recover the heart and hand to write poems again.
Margo Figgins, the instructor of the workshop and a real poet, stepped into our classroom with a bunch of handouts. Her long dress was dancing around her legs and her eyes were playfully watching us to ask if we were ready to jump into the world or words. She announced: "Let's play with words!" The participants of the workshop were all adults and teachers in practice. "To play with words" caused a slight disturbance in us. We were just like our students helplessly released and told to play by ourselves in the playground with no toys nor sport equipments. Most of us (of course not all of us) stared at Margo, hanging our jaws open like chicks to wait for being fed with food. I was surely one of them. She gave us a sheet on which lists of words were printed. Margo said, "Choose one of the lists. Use the first word for the title of your poem. Don't forget to use all the owrds in your list. When you finish, share it with other people."
I was astounded and said to myself, "Is this how we are supposed to write a poem? With given words at random? Can it be possible?" Standing at a loss in a kitchen with variety of unfamiliar cooking materials in front of me---that's how I felt. Where was the spice? How should I cut and mix the foods? To my amazement, however, something in me started to move while I was watching words. The following are the pieces that I wrote in this workshop (plus short comments of mine and some references included):