Still Life with Poetry
English major Lauren Capone took ENGL 401: Poetry and Process, and she shares here her writer's perspective on the making of her poem in this experimental class.
Last spring, Professors Cliff Peacock (studio art) and Carol Ann Davis (English) arranged a few meetings between their classes. Each poetry student was paired up with a painting student, who then began a portrait - with the idea of the final product being exhibited in a collaborative show in the student gallery of the Simons Center.
My partner was Maddie Reyna '09, a studio art major. Professor Davis asked the poetry students to write as we sat for the painting students.
It felt odd for me to write in such a social setting: people talking, milling about, laughing and eating donuts, apple slices. Mostly I was writing fragments of conversations, plus specific observations and a few ruminations in my own mind from the morning and the previous night. It was mostly about Captain Richard Phillips, who had safely returned to Vermont. He's the captain who was held hostage by Somali pirates and had offered himself as a hostage to save his crew and was later rescued by the U.S. Navy SEALs.
Beyond the writing, I felt myself responding to Maddie's studio and was keenly aware of being surrounded by her work, which hung on the walls.
After the meeting, I kept working with the raw material, these fragments of language I'd accumulated from the experience. Admittedly it was not going well. It has always been and continues to be a challenge for me to write directly from a specific experience. One of my methods for aiding this type of situation (i.e., poems not going well) is to spend a day or two away, so I left the poem for a few days.
In the interim, I saw Maddie crossing St. Philip Street as she walked toward the arts building. It sounds like an inconsequential event, and at the time I didn't think much of it, but somehow it added a new dimension to the circumstance I was in with the poem and with the portrait experience with Maddie.
When I returned to the poem, something had been illuminated by the sight of Maddie walking toward the arts building and presumably to her studio to work. It felt that I'd discovered something in my world that had been there all along, though had gone unnoticed. There was a happiness in realizing that we were together in something - she went off to work alone just as I do here at my desk. I appreciated the feeling that we could be together in our devotion to this kind of artistic work.
Then I began to piece the fragments from the portrait experience together in light of my new findings. 
Remembering Maddie as I Push Through Tiredness to Write
It's a little after eleven
and we are first to start.
You in a black apron, I begin to wonder
if you've been here for a while,
in the mornings before conversations of bodies
fill a studio where the ceiling
droops a little too low.
Behind me they are talking. We are
quiet, mostly, once a question
then another, perhaps it was
Captain Philips back in Vermont.
Turning to face you, the layers
of faces familiar rise
orchestral behind you
as I ruminate remnants of radio
shows, the bike ride to the studio.
I want the scratch of your pencil
as you make a broad stroke across the page,
then another; to be lulled by the working
calculations as we both sit here. And I meant to tell you
if you ever need this face again