The Portable Poetry Workshop Project: General Considerations - Associational Logic

...that which is "the kind of thinking that dreaming uses as logic when our mind moves from one thing to another through an unconscious process of juxtaposition."

Can we recognize it? Do we write and reveal our process or do we edit it out? Sometimes, I don't even know how I got from one place to another and oftentimes, this poses a problem for me during the revision process. Should I just let it be? I don't know how much logic there is in my poetry at times, although I know when I'm writing, it is making sense at that very moment. ;)

Jack concludes this last section of the first chapter with a noteworthy exercise:

Associating from the senses exercise - the following exercise is called "clustering." It uses the five basic physical senses as conduits to describe in a figurative way what something seems to be to the poet. Jack uses the emotion of fear as the subject and makes associations from there using touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight. Below is my example for this exercise:

DOUBT

Touch - like an emerald silk dress with a small snag in the center, like a plum tomato with a moldy soft spot

Smell - week-old bananas, water with too much chlorine

Taste - like a fig that's not sweet enough - your tongue is expects sweetness but settles for the so-so

Sight - green dress above, bleach stain in a towel, a scratch on a camera lens

Sound - a bird that's run into a glass window, an iron steaming

What are you clustering?  I hope it inspires a poem.