So I’ve partnered up with a writing friend for another poem-a-day challenge for April’s “National Poetry Month.” We’re a third of the way through as of today, day ten.
Having done this every day for over a year once, you’d think this would be easy for me. It’s not. It really isn’t. Every day begins with that little shiver of anxiety we’ve all felt, that little voice hinting you might have written your last good poem a long time ago. That any spontaneity you possessed was used up long before this moment.
Yet you press on. You write. You create. You poet on.
We’ve talked a little about writing through the wall. If you’re writing a poem or more a day for a full month, really putting the work in, it’s easy to run out of steam. It requires more than five minutes over coffee while you’re waking up. If that’s what your poem-a-day experience is, then you’ve missed the point.
A strategy you can take with your poetry when you’re bogging down is writing to strangeness. A professor in my MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College offered once that we should push our writing deeper into the strangeness of the mind. That a certain disruption of meaning and / or intention in a piece can lift a poem out of the mundane – even if well written – and into something very different and special. But we have to be open to a certain oddness of language and vision in order to get things clearly to the paper (not gibberish, mind you). We also have to trust ourselves to work within what we can call the “blur of inspiration.” That “blur” is something we know right up to the point of clarity, but don’t quite have a full handle on, yet are still confident to try writing to completion.
That “blur” solidifies sometimes from a ten-minute free write. Or from a simple idea prompt. Or from continuing a single line jumping off point. Writing on a theme, perhaps. Other times you’re in the poem and it needs that certain something we’re always striving for. That “umph.” The juice. The perfect volta, that turn. An epiphany. That exhale of satisfaction at the end of a good poem.
Step into oddness, if only for a moment. Switch up your language. Go on a tangent in the margin. Change the subject. Make up a word. Go to the dictionary and incorporate a line based on what you find. Shuffle the lines you’ve written. Take a line and translate it, not into another language, but into what the line REALLY means, three levels down into meaning, lower into another part of your brain you seldom visit. Finish the poem from the perspective of another person, with their voice in your head. Change moods. Write it backwards.
Go strange.
Having done this every day for over a year once, you’d think this would be easy for me. It’s not. It really isn’t. Every day begins with that little shiver of anxiety we’ve all felt, that little voice hinting you might have written your last good poem a long time ago. That any spontaneity you possessed was used up long before this moment.
Yet you press on. You write. You create. You poet on.
We’ve talked a little about writing through the wall. If you’re writing a poem or more a day for a full month, really putting the work in, it’s easy to run out of steam. It requires more than five minutes over coffee while you’re waking up. If that’s what your poem-a-day experience is, then you’ve missed the point.
A strategy you can take with your poetry when you’re bogging down is writing to strangeness. A professor in my MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College offered once that we should push our writing deeper into the strangeness of the mind. That a certain disruption of meaning and / or intention in a piece can lift a poem out of the mundane – even if well written – and into something very different and special. But we have to be open to a certain oddness of language and vision in order to get things clearly to the paper (not gibberish, mind you). We also have to trust ourselves to work within what we can call the “blur of inspiration.” That “blur” is something we know right up to the point of clarity, but don’t quite have a full handle on, yet are still confident to try writing to completion.
That “blur” solidifies sometimes from a ten-minute free write. Or from a simple idea prompt. Or from continuing a single line jumping off point. Writing on a theme, perhaps. Other times you’re in the poem and it needs that certain something we’re always striving for. That “umph.” The juice. The perfect volta, that turn. An epiphany. That exhale of satisfaction at the end of a good poem.
Step into oddness, if only for a moment. Switch up your language. Go on a tangent in the margin. Change the subject. Make up a word. Go to the dictionary and incorporate a line based on what you find. Shuffle the lines you’ve written. Take a line and translate it, not into another language, but into what the line REALLY means, three levels down into meaning, lower into another part of your brain you seldom visit. Finish the poem from the perspective of another person, with their voice in your head. Change moods. Write it backwards.
Go strange.
