We’re in the thick of it now! The Poetry Postcard Fest has gotten off to a great start, and we’re starting to see the postcards roll in- but for some this is the exact moment when writers block sets in, when the excitement of starting is over and we become unsure if we’re “doing this right.”
Well, we have some inspiration for you to get you fired up. From part of Paul Nelson’s workshop Life As Rehearsal for the Poem- we have the House Poem Still Life exercise. You can find the full version of this exercise and Going Down Singing HERE.
If you are interested in registering for Fall offerings of Life as Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology, registration is available HERE.
House Poem Still Life Exercise:
A thief can’t walk away with your poem if it goes far enough down your throat to reach to the level of personal mythology and deeper. What can you discover—not as you paint — like Sylvia Plimack Mangold — but as you write? Start with your house. Take a few minutes to survey your surroudings. You may want to take notes. Once you’ve taken a few minutes to see what is in your surroundings, take a line from Going Down Singing such as:
So the earth slips away
like water,or
The voice is speech
and breathing, yes,
and yet it’s no oneor
It’s what
the voice does, leaving
footprints in the earor
But a poem is a well,
not a waterjug
Imagine your house is a poem that lives the life of a poet 24/7. Its luminous details are enormous clues into your own personal mythology, but that is not something that needs to be at the top of your consciousness as you write a House Poem Still Life. If you get stuck while writing, look around the room. Associations you have from the stuff in the house could lead you to interesting places. Always steep yourself in luminous details, at least enough to earn what abstractions inevitably come up, but only emotion objectified endures, as Zukofsky tried to tell us and without emotion the poem has little risk.
I like a no rules playbook myself. I’ve had fun with & curious results from taking book reviews and quickly eliminating all but one word per line.
Oddly enough however I find that takes more work than writing off the cuff. Maybe cause my tendency & inclination is to forego editing & elimination pieces seem to always beg for further cuts to hone & crystallize some surprising verbal construct therein. Prose may be more difficult than poetry for needing a lot of editing. In elimination pieces one transforms prose to poetry.
In the kids show Arthur, Buster Baxter the bunny had this great line where he says ‘ I’m good at having opinions but I’m bad at keeping them’
I can see that. I’m very suggestible, willing to consider, but likewise stubborn. I believe I’ve had running philosophical disagreements with Paul about some ideas about writing though by & large on the same side of the spontaneous composition fence. The idea is somehow no idea, as in what will one find in the process of writing. It takes going there to that place but whether real or imagined is I think open. The painter Morandi is prized for modest scaled still life’s of ordinary objects in often muted tones because he endowed them with a kind of living vibration , a searching gaze of the ordinary that makes it extraordinary & marks him as a kind of painters painter. Does it matter that he was fascist leaning? Is that another question?
My opinion is that language is an embodied materiality that it’s our birthright to own, engage and use as we please. A postcard is a fine medium as it’s limited by space so one cannot expound ad Infinitum & as it contains an image it can always be ekphrastic or at least have a ready subject to reference.
None of this is what I’d intended to say which has more to do with logic and illogic. The mind can often get in the way. That’s the logic running amok gumming up the works. A good stratagem is to write on the go while walking or when waking up, awkward times admittedly but often fecund & to the non point of the illogical. I tend to think the poem tells you what to say rather than the reverse.
‘Still trying to select the best/ right postcard from my collection for the addressee. Then once card is selected , I attempt to write to the picture or art on the card connecting to the recipient.
Ideas were flowing for me this Sunday. Perhaps listening to great tunes this morning activated my creativity. “Easy” by the Commodores. Yesterday it was “Come Saturday Morning”.
C’est la vie!
Right or wrong you can’t be in writing poetry . I shoot from the hip, so to speak, and hope it may let the reader know what I mean as they hopefully see the scene that plays out before them through the words I’ve selected, or touch them with a sense of understanding or even in agreement.
Oh, Denny, this sounds just like you, and you know I wander down a path near your woods, and find different clouds. I need to look up Morandi. And what drives the creator? The current belief, the dedication to, the elimination of…and there the fascists gather, confounding this reader. As I read “Cantos” by Ezra Pound, a very famous fascist, I must say, I did not see it as fascist necessity. Still I ponder. And words, and oh, how words are changing right now, and sometimes dipping backward with different meanings. My great grandson’s favorite band, Nirvana. What cycle do we catch, rerun, and then…I sit on the deck as my little dog takes a sunbath. In the shade I look up and the poem comes from tree tops piercing blue. Off to write that poem now, and send you an email. C.J.
*for more about Pound, read “Bughouse”!!!