I’m a sporadic writer. I have a need to go away and come back. I’ll write three or four poems, and then pleased with myself, take off for weeks, even a month or more, until I feel something is missing from my life – that feeling only writing a poem can provide.
Okay, so now I’m ready to sit down and write again, but it’s not that easy. Inevitably, everything I write sounds terrible. I have trouble coming up with a single interesting line. Even though I’ve published several books, I find myself back at square one – starting over.
It’s not actually a bad place to be, and I rather enjoy (sort of) the process of feeling my way back into looking at language from the inside. I have a few simple tricks and techniques that help me; I’m hoping you may also find them of use.
MAKE A CLEARING
For me, an essential part of writing is to make a clearing,
first in my mind, then on the page,
so words can be seen, heard, taste-tested.
A clear ring like one of those pristine sound booths
that will allow the words to resonate.
White space is important.
What’s not said can be as important, possibly more important, than what is.
There are already so many texts, messages, words directed at us each day.
Every inch, every surface, seems covered in words.
But even words need room to breathe—and breed.
Recently, I was delighted when a poet I highly respect said,
“If I want to write, I need lots of time to do nothing. Space out. Sit and stare.”
When I feel inundated by language, I like to take the scenic route
and escape into a more visual mode of thought.
I like to take photographs and study paintings. As I say in one aphorism,
“Pictures can cure us of words.”
For someone else it might be music or nature or yoga or all of the above.
The point is to take a moment to cleanse your literary palate so you can return to words refreshed and eager to hear what they have to say.
CHOOSE A WORD
Or let it choose you.
A single word can be a powerful prompt.
When teaching, I often used to start the semester with this assignment: write a poem that comes from a single word. A word you love. A word you hate. A word you chose at random from the dictionary. It’s surprising how evocative one word can be.
You can delve into all the personal associations the word has for you.
You can look up its etymology and trace its history.
You can approach it sonically – riffing off the sounds of its letters and components,
amplifying them with alliteration and rhyme.
One variation that especially appeals to me is to write a poem using the chosen word in almost every line. Since we’re normally discouraged in creative writing classes from repeating the same word twice in a poem, it’s fun to give yourself the freedom to do the complete opposite.
By way of example, here’s a short poem of mine about “weird,” a word I like very much and use to describe all kinds of things—good and bad.
“Ode To Weird”
Emily Dickinson was weird.
Fernando Pessoa was definitely weird.
All poets are weird
even when their poems
try to appear normal.
Macbeth’s weird sisters
stirring up trouble’s
unsavory soup:
“Just be yourself
and you’ll be king.”
Weird always wins and loses in the end.
KEEP A FRAGMENT DIARY
The beauty of the fragment is its detachment and immediacy.
A fragment diary is just what it sounds like – a collection of scraps of language and stray lines or images that intrigue you and make your mind do a double take. It is also the record of a day or a week or a month in your life told in a unique style of shorthand.
The idea for keeping such a journal came out of a Lit Seminar I was teaching called The Minimalist Mystique. In it, we’d read all kinds of short (mostly poetry) texts and discuss what made them work so well. In addition to critical responses, I’d ask students to engage with some formal aspect of what we were studying. When we read Basho and Issa, they wrote haiku and haibun. When we read Tender Buttons and Paris Spleen, they wrote prose poems. When we read the Objectivists, they wrote serial poems. So when we read 7 Greeks, Guy Davenport’s marvelous translations of ancient Greek poets and philosophers such as Sappho, Herakleitos, and Diogenes, we wrote in fragments.
Even if these texts were not originally written as fragments, the way we experience them today is piecemeal and riddled with gaps. I wanted us to immerse ourselves in that spare, intermittent pattern of thought. Instead of waiting hundreds of years for time to edit and erase our words, we’d do it ourselves.
Thanks to the Futurists, along with Eliot, Pound, H.D., and a host of other modernists, no one would question the validity and relevance of this mode of expression. Also, trained as we are by twitter and other forms of social media, it’s quite natural for us to condense our words.
What I find most appealing about the fragment diary is that it’s a journal where none of your thoughts ever has to be finished–a catalog and celebration of incomplete things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought a good beginning in a book, movie, or essay is destroyed by a tedious middle or forced over-the-top ending. I guess who would want to buy a ticket to see just the great beginning of a movie, although I might actually be that person.
I love that the poet Larry Fagin has a book called Complete Fragments. It’s so perfectly, perversely funny.
Of course, I do like to write things where I have to struggle to develop an idea over time. But that is a task for when I’m feeling more confident. When I find myself back at Square One, I keep a fragment diary to ease me back into the flow of words. I think of it an interim step, on the way to writing – on the way to language as Heidegger says.
I will end here with another short poem of mine collaged from different entries in one of my fragment diaries.
CRAYON
Weather colors the day.
Breath inflates our aches.
Bobbing along the surface.
Why must I always
finish my sentences?
It’s as if
and now can’t stop.
Elaine Equi is the author of many books including Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems, and most recently, The Intangibles. A new collection, Out of the Blank, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. She is also the guest editor of Best American Poetry 2023.