InsaneJournal

Current location:	@ school
Current mood:	jubilant
Current music:	cirque du soleil: ninkou latora
Entry tags:	meta, nonfic

nonfic: process paper
My ten minute paper on how I write poems (and most other things)



step one: get a box.

Every day, I write. Not pages and pages of beautifully crafted work or intricate detailed processions of words and rhymes, that comes much later. I write without thinking, on index cards and the backs of receipts and bright yellow paper and clean window panes. I try not to focus when writing, let my inner literature grammar freak drop aside and write what comes from within my head out onto these varied papers. After the purge of letters, and it is a purging after twenty, thirty minutes of free flow writing, I date the page and put it away in an orange folder in my orange file cabinet. The colours help me organize creative things from academic things, though the older I get, the more these lines blur and shift in the cabinet.

These pages are left for an uncertain period of time. The ones that leave me worn and sore, they stay longer than those that pique my curiousity and wonderment. I look each day at previous pages and poke them as you would healing bruises. Am I ready to play with these thoughts, are they ready for me? This is a daily process, seeing what I am able to confront and handle and begin molding from fragmentary writings. The pages can be weeks, months, sometimes years old by the time I am able to begin working with them. Thankfully, with years worth of pages, I can find some place to start each day. Bruises heal.

step two: put all bad poetry in box.

Each page is read. I take a different colour pen than the one used to write and I go about selecting the lines that haunt me. The good wordings, the neat concepts, the phrases that stick to my tongue with each reading. All these go onto a new page. (Why yes, I do tend to use recycled paper and I picture a giant bonfire at my funeral.) Much like magnetic poetry, I shuffle the lines around, pick resonant words to define what I want from the work. It is a work, not a poem, at this time. The idea is processed much like taffy, pulled into the shape I saw in the first page of roughshod scribblings.

I play for an indeterminate length of time. Many variations happen, shifts in form and mouthing odd sounds and no, I really liked that word, I want it back and what were you thinking using that term there, it goes over in that spot, eesh. Somehow, a poem comes out of this, rough and prickly, but a poem. More tweaking and nudging will occure over time, some outright destruction as well as my tastes and interests in words change over the months and years, but the idea has been set and broken free of its original castmold. I am usually pleased with the result.

step three: burn the box.



And What My Prof Said

you must keep this process paper, maybe work on it some more, because it really could be a prose poem on process. I'm attaching here a poem by Adrienne Rich, which you'll see is a combination of prose and poetry. Your process described here is humorous and also serious, in that it really does speak about how poetry is made. Work on it some more and turn it into a prose-poem of some type. I bet you'd be able to publish it in a literary magazine.

Utter shock and glee.

as for the poem she mentions, I stick here yes.



Adrienne Rich's The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

I was in danger of
verbalizing my moral
impulses out of existence.
– Daniel Berrigan,
on trial in Baltimore.

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. 'The burning of a book,' he said, 'arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book.'


Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Diirer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA. the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue
I think, it is her color

and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often

lave and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn

2 To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music
the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue this slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.

(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure

of it appears
words of a man
no pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through the bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything

burn the texts said Artaud

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of nepalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.