Word-doodles
An exercise to spark poetic creativity.
Recently, I’ve created a file on my phone called simply, “poetry freewrites.” I use it to write “poems” quickly with the following rules: don’t put any word next to another that is ordinary or expected, don’t try to “make a logical point,” let words and the imagery take you someplace you weren’t expecting to go, don’t worry about meaning, don’t stop to ponder for too long…. My point is to work to use language as one might take joy in doodling. Word-doodling, I’ll call it, for now. When writers hover their pen tips close to the page, or our fingers above computer keys, about to embark, they are too often overwhelmed with the need to make sense. Writers need to learn and practice how to play with words. And “playing” in this way is not just “fun.” You are targeting and nurturing an essential part of the process.
I take great joy in writing and in reading through the many “things” (I’m not sure I want to call them poems, yet) I’ve created. I can work on one if my wife and I are watching something on TV that I suddenly lose interest in (a terrible line of dialogue, a contrived plot device, a moment of blatant sentimentality breaking my willing suspension of disbelief…), and I pull out my phone and write one or read through the pages of them I’ve written over the course of the past few months. My phone is the perfect medium for these. The screen is small. They are small. There is no stress, since I’m not trying to “make meaning,” not trying to create the next great poem. Ok, but what do they look like? Do I dare share some. Sure, why not. Here’s one that mystifies and satisfies me all at once.
Perhaps nothing can be illuminated
When the night is so patient
And the poor soldiers of dawn have fled.
The empire I seek cannot be opened
Or fed to the gathering masses like wheat.
There are places inside the mountains
That test even the most potent.
A canopy of hands cannot forget tomorrow.
The breath of fingers fails utterly.
When these portents contain flecks of you,
Learn to tremble.
As I write these, I am working from one word to the next. I’m only telling myself to be surprised, yet still to feel as if I’m saying something in a language I don’t quite understand. I’m trying to paint a dream-like sketch that seems in dialogue with itself, that, like a piece of music, is all in one “key” (tone). I don’t think the lines/images/language are “random,” however. I’m trying to really hear the sound/texture of words, of the whole “piece,” and to, as if I’m writing a piece of music, hit a “note” that is both unexpected and necessary and that somehow belongs. I’ve never heard the phrase “soldier of dawn,” and I can’t explain what it “means” or where it came from, but it feels right; it seems to belong in this expressive “thing,” whatever it is. It’s all rather hard to explain, which is good, I think, since I’m going after something that moves past the stock ways we use language. Here’s another:
A ship sits on the water of me.
It is rusting and old as a man who
Sits in the back of the bus, ruminating.
Today, the lost pelicans came again and tried to wake me.
And the eyelashes of sunrise fluttered at me, too.
Out there, upon the sea of me.
Here I only later realized a kind of formal unity was at play— “sits…sits…of me…of me.” None of it was “intended.” It has a simile, but it is elusive, as are the metaphors—probably too elusive to “communicate.” Or maybe not? Maybe this is what Ezra Pound meant when he urged writers to “make it new.” Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein was going for in her wonderfully incoherent prose pieces in Tender Buttons.
All I know for certain is that I find the process invigorating. And maybe I’m starting to do what good creative, poetic writing does—to fashion language in such a way that it allows a reader to experience something akin to the actual pre-language experience. Just seeing a sunrise. Just feeling its immensity. The “lost pelicans” trying “to wake me” is a bit frightening, but I feel as if it’s saying something important, or maybe I’m just pretending that it is. Either way, is ok.
I think of Dickinson’s haunting poem, “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” and how her poetry continuously erupts into utterly new and mystifying, yet wholly grounded and communicative expressions. “And Being but an ear” stands out in that poem. Her “random” capitalizations, even suggest she’s writing in a “language” that follows different rules. Another line that comes to mind is “I could not see to see” from “I Felt a Fly Buzz When I Died.” On the surface this line makes no “sense,” but push a little, enter into the logic of the poem (which is illogical from its first line), and perhaps you will start to “see to see” too.
Writing something powerful and original and poetic doesn’t necessarily require Dickinsonesque turns of phrase or strange, random lines. Hemingway’s incredible first line of the story “Hills Like White Elephants” is a most striking example of this. It reads, simply, “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white.” The rhythm (iambic pentameter?) and simplicity and the way the image shapes and guides the whole story going forward is quite breathtaking to me—but I’ll stop myself before addressing the meaning of this incredible story (look for that elsewhere in these newsletters and in my Hemingway podcast).
I encourage anyone, even if you don’t fashion yourself a writer/poet to try to do something like what I’ve taken to doing just about every day lately. Just play with words, position them in ways that are pleasing and unexpected. Have fun. In literature and creative writing classes, I often tell students something I have thought about a lot. At some moment in history, some man or woman must have looked out at the world and made an utterance in their throat, a sound they correlated to that thing out there—the sun, an animal, a mountain, a spear—they were seeing and wanting to “say.” They started everything. And it was utterly new and pleasing and unexpected and playful. I think writers (and probably all of us) should strive to return to that primal moment of expressive wonder and magic.
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I really like this idea! What a good way to always be thinking!