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Friday (At the Cathedral)

January 15, 2010

Because my brain was kind of dull today as I boarded the subway,  I thought simply of writing about “Friday”.

Friday was the day we had Cathedral services when I was in high school.  We wore blue green tweed jackets with a little insignia patch at the breast pocket, which were matched, on cold days, by plaid kilts, or tweedy a-lines; on warmer days, coupled with  seersucker dresses of regulation pink, green, blue, yellow.

It was a private school, with a vague (given that it was Episcopal) ecclesiastical bend.  The most important sign of that was our location, of course, on the grounds of a Cathedral, or, as it was called, the Cathedral “close.”

It was a genuine, or at least authentically copied, gothic cathedral.  Our Friday service was held in the nave.  While most of the high vaulted space was a soaring rebound of grey (stone and huge pillars of air surrounded by stone), the nave was carved from dark shiny wood.  It had an almost cozy, feel, like a breakfast nook in a mansion.  The pews of the knave sat in two or three rows that extended along its sides; hard and high-backed like the banquettes in a diner, they were stiff but comfortable, loungeable despite a design intended to enforce posture, smooth enough to accomodate sliding shifts of position.

It was a school service.  In a girls’ school.  So I can’t say that we were completely quiet.    Talking was was accomplished,  homework sneaked (though white blue-lined paper showed up pretty sharply against that deep dark wood.)  Still, there is something about a cathedral—did I mention the stained glass?—that enforces a hush.  (Even a whisper seems to echo in those tall stone spaces.)

Kids do not have very much of this kind of quiet today.  (Adults either.)  I’m not referring to the religious instruction, but to enforced (more or less) stillness.  No talk, no texting, no digital images, no electronic stimulation, no digital stimulation, no screen.  The primary excitement was the occasional standing hymn, which, due to Episocopal school traditions, was actually quite dramatic if you thought about the words.  We didn’t.  The meaning of all that soldiering and crusading passed us by, though the melodies were rousing enough.

Friday:  the morning began with an hour of drone and contemplation, music and bottom-shuffling, in a place where we could not help but feel small, caught between the heavy gravity of all that stone and wood, and the uplift of  glass-painted light.  Our heads, if not exactly bowed, were also not bombarded.

Afterward, we made our way across a large green lawn, the manic among us half-skipping beside our friends, the youngest holding hands.

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Another Poetry Exercise Sample – Family Finishes

October 24, 2009

In the last couple of posts, I’ve discussed a poetry exercise for the inspirationally-challenged.  (See prior posts for the inspirationally-challenged for detailed instructions.)  The exercise basically involves choosing a craft or occupation, and listing the verbs associated with that craft or occupation.  These tend to be strong, particular, and colorful words and verbs.  These are then used in the drafting of  your exercise poem.

Here is another set of examples, which again, I’ve grouped as a single poem since they were all based on the same exercise.  This one involved the craft of carpentry.  (See e.g. “level,” “sand,” “smooth,” “measure,” “adorn,” “glue,” “hammer,” “file,” “nail,” “shape,” “cut,” “drill,” etc.)   I haven’t been able to locate the list of exercise nouns in my disorganized notebooks, but I know I included certain good generics like “mother”, as well as the nice specific tangible words “tulips” and “stickiness.”

Family Finishes

I.

The perfect mother sands the child down to her image, or
an image, filing away the
unsightly, the angry, the unspeakable.
She drills in a face fit for a pageant, as
smooth as balsam, as modeled as
the keel of a canoe.
Cutting the child to measure, she
ignores the stickness of any unseamed tar.

II.

A family levels itself to just folks with enough distance,
an occasional pageant – picnic or funeral – joins the blood again,
a bienniel application of glue.
The occasions are muddled with the stickiness of the blood, the
mother hammering away at the grandmother, the son
nailing the father, the family portrait gathering a  sullen patina.

III.

Steeped in tradition, the young mother thought
to measure out love in spoonfuls,
smoothing away excess and screwing it into a tied-up sock.

Blasphemy to mount to ecstasy over your child.  No.  Passion
was to be hammered down to fit the furniture, adorn the home,
like a bowl of tulips shaped to
its interval.  But the small white
fist that gripped her finger leveled her training,
proper restraint transmuted from an aged wine to water,
casks burst to loose a stream, river, flow barely banked,
clear, sparkling.

All rights reserved.  Karin  Gustafson

Also, check out the updated page re ManicDDaily.  With a photo!  (Ha.)

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Poetry Exercise For Those “At Sea”

October 23, 2009

Yesterday, I set forth the rules for a somewhat reductive poetry exercise for the inspirationally-challenged.   (https://manicddaily.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/for-the-inspirationally-challenged-writing-exercise-for-harried-poets/)

The exercise mandates the writing of a poem which is really an extended metaphor;  the tension in the poem comes from using a set of physically- charged, action verbs.  These are verbs which describe tasks performed in a particular occupation or craft (and are listed as Column B) .  The poem is put together from a list of these Column B verbs, and a random list of unrelated nouns  (Column A). The poem is put together by making lines which use a word selected from Column A and a word selected from Column B  (and, of course, other words.)

Here is a a poem (a connected pair of poems) which I did a few years ago using this exercise.   Unfortunately, despite spending some time looking through my very disorganized notebooks, I have not been able to find the full Columns A and B that I used;  however, I know that the chosen occupation was “sailor.”  (I’m not sure of the nouns except to be certain that “gutter”, “mother”, and, I believe, “burlap”, and “brick” were among them.)

The “sailor” words went fairly far afield from those that you might at first associate with sailor–they included words like “weigh”  (as in weigh anchor), “spy”, “navigate,” “haul,” “scrub” (as in scrub the deck), “run” (as in run up a flag), “tack”, “man” (as in man the deck), “cast”, “seek”, “spy”, among others.  (If you are doing this exercise, feel free to be similarly wide-ranging in your choices.)

The poem has been edited since the first iteration.  I’m posting it because I like it even though I’m not sure it’s the best illustration of the exercise.  (Tomorrow, I’ll post a less edited poem, that may be a better illustration.)  Still, I hope it gives a taste of how a “set” of verbs chosen as part of an exercise can direct your ideas if you are someone, like me, who is frequently “at sea.”

At Sea

I.  Brother

The boy hauled the roses like burlap sacking
that scrubbed his arms with prickle.
Navigating the bunch through kitchen door which he kicked
to the side for noise value,
he hated his mother.  What he wanted was to man
the road, casting his day by the side
of the long green wood where he
could lurk and spy and brick up
hideouts with clods of dirt and brush and never lean
to any whim or wish except
of sky and guttering stream
to whose wills he’d willingly tack
his whole young life.

II.  Sister

The girl rigged her skirt to
the base of her hips,
tacking the elastic waist
to her pelvis, a convenient gutter
for fabric that would run its own course.
Bottling lips into an appraising O,
she weighed her chances, spying out
navel and the smooth flat skin of her belly
like the long sought shore, distant
yet within reach.

All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson

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For the Inspirationally Challenged – Writing Exercise for Harried Poets

October 22, 2009

For those, like me, who want to write but have limited time and mental space, inspiration can be difficult to come by. 

In large part, this is a “limited mental space” problem.  Your “free” moments may be free of immediate obligation, but your brain may still be tangled in worry, chores, regret, lonliness. 

The problem is that you don’t want to just whine.  Whining in print may offer some relief to the writer, but it’s  a  lot like the relief that vomiting offers to a person who is sick to their stomach.  It’s not all that great for the person doing it;  it’s even less appealing to their audience.

 So how can you make good use of your writing time when inspiration is otherwise engaged? 

 Here’s a trick:  try something that’s both completely arbitrary, and yet carefully defined.  In other words, a writing exercise!  The arbitrariness of the exercise can nudge you out of your over-trod groove, while the structure turns into something like a game, reducing both decisions and ego-involvement.  (It’s only an exercise!)

 In July and August, I wrote about exercises aimed primarily at prose writers.  This one is for the inspirationally-challenged poet.

 Before reading on, please set side aside snobbery.   The exercise below is a bit stupid, but it is offered as a springboard.  It relies on the fact that many poems involve tropes (a wonderful word I hardly ever get to use), that is, metaphors.  The exercise sets up a structure which is intended to turn an extended metaphor into something resembling a poem.  And it’s intended to make you think about verbs. 

 The specifics:

 First, choose an occupation, preferably one that involves some physical craft.  (Carpenter, fisherman, cook, for example, not stock analyst.)  Now, list all of the verbs that are particularly associated with that chosen occupation.  (Usually, “crafty” occupations have strong verbs.  Cook, for example: “braise, broil, boil, peel, sauté, fry, deep-fry, mince, cube, slice, skewer, stab.”)    List at least ten of these verbs.  This list is called Column B.

 Second, make a list of nouns which will be called Column A.   These nouns should be fairly randomly chosen and NOT specifically associated with your Column B verbs.  (For example, if you’ve chosen “cook” as your occupation, you can choose “mother” as a random noun, but not “chef.”) 

 While it’s nice to choose some specific nouns – such as “lilac” rather than “flower”–choose at least a couple that are very flexible  (examples:  “mother,” “father”,  “ocean”.)   You should list at least ten.

 NOW,  imagine you are at a Chinese restaurant ordering a luncheon special in which you are allowed to mix and match items from Column A (egg rolls or dumplings) with items from Column B ( bean curd homestyle or General Tso’s chicken.) 

 And NOW,  write a poem of at least five lines, using a noun from Column A and a verb from Column B in every line.   (Example:  “the ocean braised the shore.”)  (Sorry!) 

 Clarifications:  (i) Verbs from Column B can take any tense;  (ii) you do NOT need to use every word listed in Column A and Column B, just one from each Column in every line;    (iii)  line length is up to you (meaning you can use some long lines with lots of extra  uncolumned words.)

Finally, remember the two most important rules of any writing exercise:

 1.  Follow the rules.   

2.  Cheat.  (Remember that you’re trying to write a poem, not an exercise.)  

And, NOW, get going. 

Tomorrow, I’ll post some samples of my own.

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Niceness – Writing – “Oh Plunge Your Hands In Water”

August 19, 2009

I was thinking today about women from my generation–I don’t quite want to confess what generation that is, let’s just say that we are just old enough to actually remember when President Kennedy was shot–and the internal pressure many of us feel to be “nice.”

We are sometimes accused these days of being overly nice, or artificial or precious in our niceness, or just plain mamby-pamby.   This really is maddening.  Some of us are still too well-trained to get openly mad about these  unfair characterizations, but they are still upsetting.

This piece  deals with that issue indirectly.   It was actually a writing exercise, written with my writing buddy, in a ten or fifteen minute session based on the phrase “Plunge Your Hands in Water” from the poem “As I Walked Out One Evening,” By W.H. Auden.

(The Auden poem is simply wonderful.    Here’s a link to an online copy:  http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-i-walked-out-one-evening-3/.)

The piece has been slightly edited since the original exercise, but it really still is an exercise.   (Sorry.)

(Final point re my Blocking Writer’s Block series – a line from a poem can be a great starting point for a writing exercise.   While your exercise may be quite different from the poem, your work will may still get some depth from such an elevated jumping off point.)

“Plunge Your Hands in Water”   – W.H. Auden

At my elementary school cafeteria, the tiles were blue green grey and the trash cans were an amalgam of ketchup and fishstick skins and small red milk cartons usually half full.  The women were large and wore white stiff dresses like nurses.  They served the food in surgically cut portions on brown cafeteria trays, which were topped with mauve or yellow plates, the colors of everything an illustration of the word “faded.”  Their big rounded hair curved around their heads like the double breast that curved from their fronts, the hips from their sides.  It was good food–we all knew that–good meaning solid.  No one used the word nutrition much back then; what we knew was meat and starch, ketchup and pickle.

We sat at long tables, whose benches folded out;  the tables were cleaned with vinegar water and the whole placed smelled of the Golgotha Christ, his side or head or thirst, a reminder that we were all there, undeservedly, to be saved.

We were supposed to sit still but I dreamt that everyone ran from gorillas who chased us from spot to spot–through the lunch line, inbetween the line and the tables, then from the tables to the garbage cans.  They were big furry gorillas who ran on two legs, their forearms outstretched as they chased, while we ran, ran to do what we were supposed to do, and then sat where we were supposed to.

It was an old-fashioned school;  ice cream did not appear for some years.  When it did, all hell broke loose.  No one would eat anything else and Scott entertained us all with taking the chocolate coating from his ice cream bar and spreading ketchup and mustard on the vanilla ice cream, then re-anointing it with its chocolate sheathe.  The girls squealed in horror, the boys howled and scowled, as he took a big smiling bite, the ketchup/mustard smearing his lips with variegated orange like a fire-eater’s.   The girls pretended to bend over in nausea, and Scott looked like he felt incredibly cool for a time, though he was a troubled boy, a sad boy, a boy on whom I felt somehow that belts had been used, and who, in first grade, sometimes peed in the little classroom bathroom with the door open.   I felt it my duty to always smile at him, and he, in turn, sent me a letter covered in huge slanted writing I LOVE YOU.

I felt sadder than ever for Scott watching him eat that ice cream, thinking of his open-doored pee, and kept my head down, only looking up with the corners of my eyes, and even then trying to focus on the gorillas, the chase, and the fact that if I sat exactly where I was supposed to, they wouldn’t be able to get me, and maybe not anyone, no matter how they circled.

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Poem for a Summer Night

August 10, 2009

This is a poem that I know wrote  as an exercise with my writing buddy, whom I’ll call Agnes.   I don’t remember the requirements of the exercise exactly as it’s an older poem.  I think we had to use verbs associated with butchers – “mince,” “debone,”” weigh,” “haggle,” (we had a list of these) in conjunction with a few random nouns– “leaf”,  “barefoot,” “moon.”

It’s a country poem, though I remembered it tonight, walking sticky city streets.

Summer Night

The frogs mince the night with
keening chants that haggle with the moon
for precedence: whether still, dead, light can outweigh
the cry of living tissue, deboning the memory
of barefoot afternoon in the black green
lurk, a leather  of
heavy leaf and humid longing.

(All rights reserved, as always.)

For something cool and blue, check out the link re 1 Mississippi, available on Amazon.

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Blocking Writer’s Block – First Assignment – Sample “I remember”

August 9, 2009

In yesterday’s post, I suggested “I remember” as a writing exercise.  It’s a place where almost anyone can start writing any time.

I did my exercise in a beauty salon waiting for a hair cut.  I have to confess I cheated a little.  Because I knew I’d assigned it, I started the exercise in my head en route to the salon;  I also had to write down the last few sentences after they finished the haircut.  (They wouldn’t let me hold my notebook once the shampooing began.)

I did try not to erase or cross out when I wrote, or since this is an exercise, to edit, when I typed (though I did change names.)

Finally,  I didn’t intend to make the exercise itself about writing exercises and writing buddies, but because I was thinking about the blog, that’s what came to mind.  Which was fine.   The point of the exercise, if you try it, is to write about what you remember at the moment you sit down.  So here’s what I came up with 1:30 p.m., August 8, 2009.

“I remember”–

I remember when I first started these writing exercises.  It was years ago now;  I was invited into a group, a women’s group; I guess it was inherent back then that it was partly about writing, partly about “empowerment.”

There was Barbara with frizzy black hair and a dark green minivan; Helena who was Finnish, made documentary movies about anti-abortionists, and lived in a heavily subsidized mouth-watering West Village apartment right next to the Hudson.  (I never could figure out how she finagled that one.)  There was Evelyn who had long Auburn hair and a fey Pre-Raphaelite pout to her lips and who already, she told us later, borrowing sunblock, had had a melanoma removed.  There was Carrie, who I think was my original contact and who later came up to my house in the country one summer weekend with new husband in tow.  It was an unusually hot weekend and she insisted on dragging a mattress from the atticky bedroom I’d assigned them, down the stairwell and onto the screened porch that was just outside my window.  It’s an old house; it was an equally old mattress.  Mouse droppings littered the stairwell marking the path the mattress had lumped down.  The next day, still hot, she walked around most of the morning in a loose sweater with no underwear (pants either) making coffee for the new husband.  I’d recently gone through a wrenching separation from my own husband.  Suffice it to say, I never invited Carrie back again.

Then there was Agnes.  Agnes who was slender and small and upright in every sense of the word.  A dancer, an editor, a reader, a disciplined person, her back was straight at all times; her clothes trim and unwrinkled even if somehow vintage, her wavy hair pulled back, sometimes with tortoise shell combs which seemed in my mind to have the authority of reading glasses.

Helena, the one doing the documentaries about anti-abortionists, seemed to me to write about blood;  Evelyn, sex, Carrie, irritations, Barbara, the family life, Agnes, the physical and mental world, accreting images with great precision.  And me, probably pain at that point in my life (wrenching separation, remember?)

It was fun.  We usually met at Carrie’s or Helena’s since they’d managed the best apartments.  We ate chips, but since this was New York and either the West Village or the Upper West Side, they were special chips, like Blue chips (blue organic corn) or vegetable chips (sweet potato or taro), served with, you know, hummus.

Slowly, somehow, I don’t know how long it took–maybe Carrie’s bottomless weekend in the country precipitated it, it ended up being Barbara and Agnes and me.

We met at coffee shops, restaurants, choosing places for their lack of, or low, music;  their lack of, or slow, service; their lack of, or little interest in the fact that every few minutes we would each read aloud.

Barbara died a few years ago.

I remember her writing about braiding her daughters’ hair, the luck that her own was so curly (the girls were half African-American, she wasn’t), what that gave them in common.

I remember her writing about the slap of her feet in her Karate dojo.  There was a host of square shouldered men at her funeral—black belts, I thought.  The sweat that gathered in the crease inside her elbow. The joy of a kyaii.

I remember her writing about sex; her husband coming home too late, proffering her his cock.

You get to know your writing buddies very very well.

You know about the times they fought with their parents, their boyfriends in back seats, the times they lied to themselves and others, the times they told the truth.

I remember a last writing session.  I don’t know what we wrote about.  Barbara made mango-scented green tea.  She was drinking a lot of green tea those days though the cancer was irretrievably advanced.  She dragged equipment behind her around the apartment, black plastic sacking on wheels.  She’d always been someone with dimples.

Agnes and I still write together when we have time.

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Blocking Writer’s Block – First Assignment

August 8, 2009

Since I’ve been writing so much about the value of writer’s exercises, I thought it might be interesting to actually give you one.

The rules are:

  1. Write for a pre-set time.  Ten minutes is a good start.  If you go over, fine, don’t go under.
  2. Don’t stop moving your pen, or stop typing.  If you are using a pen, use a good one, with flow.  If you are typing, try not to read too much as you go.
  3. Don’t cross out.  Don’t erase. Don’t backspace.  If you want to use a different word than the one you’ve just used, just write down the new word.  But keep going.  Don’t stop to judge or evaluate.
  4. Feel free to cheat a little if rules make you feel stuck.

(As noted previously, these rules are derived from Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones.)

The topic is “I remember“.  This is a nice topic for writers who are blocked, for writers who are not blocked but very tired, for people who don’t consider themselves writers but would simply like to write.   Hardly anyone can truly say that they can’t come up with something.

I will post mine tomorrow.

Check out 1 Mississippi, for people who don’t care so much about writing, but want to learn to count.   Link to the side.   On Amazon.

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Blocking Writer’s Block – Part VI – Be Brave – Read Aloud

August 8, 2009

I want to begin with apologies for my last post to those who are not interested in Robert Pattinson’s struggle with paparazzi.  I find the subject fascinating – the part about the struggles with the paparazzi, that is — but I understand it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.  So let’s try blocking writer’s block again:

Rule No. 8   –  Be Brave.  Read Aloud.

If you’ve been following this blog at all, you may remember Blocking Writer’s Block Rule No. 3 –  Get a Friend.

By “friend,” I mean writing buddy, someone that you actually write with, meaning right next to, someone with whom you do writing exercises.  Your writing buddy may also be someone with whom you share finished, or nearly finished work, but the exercises I’m talking about are the ones that you do on the immediate spur of a new topic, the ones that you write for a set period of time (ten to twenty minutes usually) without stopping, erasing or crossing out.

The next step- after your set time for each exercise is finished –is for you and your buddy to read your exercises aloud.

To each other.

Right then and there.

(I’m not joking, and I want to take advantage of this break in the flow to give credit to Natalie Goldberg,  Writing Down the Bones, who originally popularized these types of writing processes.)

Yes, I know.  Reading aloud is a bit like taking off your clothes in a crowded room.  Only worse.  Because the crowd may be so busy, people may not even notice your nakedness.  Okay, they’ll probably notice.  But it’s a crowd, right?  There may be no one that you know, no one that you need ever see again

Your writing buddy is presumably a friend of sorts.  He/she is staring (i.e. listening) right next to you.  At/to just you.  You hope to know each other for a long time to come.

Plus, you’ve just done an exercise that absolutely proves how idiotic you are.

But here’s the trick of it.  Your writing buddy has to read aloud too.  You might even be able to make them read aloud first.  They too have written an exercise that exposes their idiocy.

When you each start removing the clothes… ahem… reading aloud, it’s a tremendous feeling—of freedom, exhilaration, acknowledgement, even if coupled with acute embarrassment.

I don’t know if it helps, but usually my writing buddy and I preface each reading aloud with some well-worn warning such as “this one is so stupid.”  Or “I don’t know where this came from.”  Or a simple heartfelt groan.  This type of introduction is not obligatory, but it does tend to clear the throat.

Natalie Goldberg sets a few ground rules for the listeners of read-aloud exercises.  These include a prohibition against evaluating the work—against saying anything akin to either “I really like that,” or “eeuww.”  In Natalie Goldberg’s workshops, she urges the listeners simply to echo the phrases that they remember from the piece, a practice which encourages closer listening, but also tends to emphasize what was most vivid about the writing.

That’s probably a good idea.  Even praise can be stultifying in the case of exercises;  soon you are distracted, writing your exercise for the praise, and frankly, you can’t always do a good one.  (Then, when you don’t, you feel horrible.)

But for me and my buddy, Natalie’s prohibitions are hard to follow.  We really don’t have the short-term memories anymore to repeat too many phrases  that we’ve just heard.   And we know each other too well not to guffaw, or say “wow” or “whoops!”  So we are usually quite free with our commentary.  This makes our writing time more fun.  I would warn you, however, that beginners at these exercises might want to be a bit more circumspect.

Still, the question of evaluations raises an important point.  One of the greatest things about reading an exercise aloud is that you are putting your work out into the world.  You are exposing your work in a very intimate way;  it’s not just your words you are putting out there, it’s also your voice.  It could hardly be more personal.

But what’s great, what might even make it possible, is that you’re only doing it for a minute or two.  You’re reading aloud, and then you are done.  No one’s taping you.  No one has your printed page to peruse.  You’ve put it out there, then grabbed it back.

Besides, it’s a DRAFT.  You did it in ten minutes, fifteen minutes.

It’s relatively easy under these circumstances to follow the first rule of blocking writer’s block which is simply not to care too much.

Nonetheless, they are your words, it is your voice, it does take courage.  So be brave—read aloud.

You’ll be very glad you did.

(To be continued with Rule No. 9– Don’t be too brave too soon!  Know your limits.)

Also, sometime soon, I’d like to write about the benefits of reading drafts aloud to yourself, and reading at public readings.  But that’s for the future.

For now, please check out the link for 1 Mississippi, my counting book for children who like elephants (and watercolors) on Amazon.  See the link above.

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