The Portable Poetry Workshop: Connecting Content - Triggering Words

"Spring" by Dani via Flickr

Triggering words open up new opportunities for content and direction in our writing. As Jack Myers says, these words can act as "a semantic springboard that uncoils enough upward lift to give the poem new momentum." Such words can elevate theme, create or extend a metaphor's matrix, or even determine and/or lift a plot point.

The many different elements of just one word have the power to transform a poem. Have you ever had a word or series of words act as a spring for your writing? What it the sonic or the connotative quality of the word that set your pen on the page to either write a new piece or revise and old one, or was it something else?

Let's work on one of these exercises today:

From Jack's conclusion of this section for revision: Triggering riff - Choose a detail, image, or action in your poem, and then improvise a series of associated images, details, or actions.

Triggering word - chose a word that appeals to you in your reading today and write down other images, actions, and situations that you can associate with this word. Weave a poem from what you've written and allow the poem to end with the word you've selected.

I've been attracted to the words "safety pin" and "pencil" lately. What about you?

The Unexpected Day Off and Other Good Finds Sunday

Via Public Domain Photos on Flickr

My poem for this week is Alberto Ríos' delightful "We Dogs of a Thursday Off." What do you like to do on an unexpected day off?

Robert Lee Brewer wrote up an inspiring blog post about Twitter as fodder for our creative writing.

Speaking of generating some new writing, Diane Lockward offers an abundance of ideas for "When You Have No Ideas of Your Own." Are there other places you look to for writing inspiration?

Bethany Suckrow shares "Mingus at the Showplace" this week on her blog and reminds us that in our technology-riddled days, "radio hasn't died, and neither has poetry."

Have you heard about Findings? Reading's social side is ready to have a party.

Because I am hungry as I'm writing this blog, and also salivating while thinking of all the yummy things I'll be cooking up in the kitchen for our family night, I thought I'd include this recipe for making brownies out of cake mix. A couple of weeks back, I had a strawberry brownie I've been dreaming of ever since.

What do you have going on? Reading? Writing? Other simple pleasures?



Wishing you joy this week! Andrea

P.S. If you haven't read about the Month of Letters yet, I'd love to send you something through the mail in the month of February. I'm forgoing email for the handwritten note for 24 days.

Month of Letters and Poetry

Via Flickr by pocius

It's rare we receive handwritten letters or postcards through the mail anymore. I try to make an effort to send out hand-written thank-you notes every chance I get. Outside of that, everything is electronic right down to the bills. But I still love the hand-written note...

Yesterday, I came across link to Mary Robinette Kowal's blog via mediabistro featuring a Month of Letters Challenge. I want to participate and invite you to join me! The rules are simple:

1. During the month of February, send one item (letter, postcard, etc.) through the mail each day it runs. (24 items total.)

2. Respond to everyone who sends you something through the mail and this can count as one of your items sent. 

I'm going to mix it up just a little. I'm going to send postcards with favorite poems and a small note in closing.

My friend Rachel Bunting raised her hand to participate and featured this same article on her blog to further the invitation along. She's also included a nice video of PJ Harvey advocating for letter writing.

Who else will I have the pleasure of sending a postcard to? Please say you. :) 

P.S. If you would like to participate, please send me your address via email to drebelle81@gmail.com.

Happy writing, Andrea

Letter to My Writer Self

Photo from Flickr - redcargurl

Back in December, I shared Jodi Picoult's essay "To My 16-year-old Self." I read it again this morning for some inspiration...mainly because I am contemplating a significant change in my life that hinges upon my writing. It got me thinking about composing a letter to my writer self, and I think I am going to make this an annual thing.

--

Dear Me,

Too many times you've stepped away from your writing out of fear. Even when you've had friends and an incredible mentor encouraging you. Even now you wish you could get all that time back. But you can't.

What you can do is focus on today. What can you do today? And what will you do tomorrow? Are you reading not just for fun but to improve your craft? Are you writing even when you don't feel like writing? Are you submitting even though your hand still shakes a little before finally clicking on that "send" or "submit" button? You should be. You'd better be. Because if you aren't, you already know you're going to regret it.

Remember that quote by Paulo Coelho you have etched inside all your journals? "Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams..." Yes, you've written and read it enough that it should be etched in your mind every day.

You've already done so much in a year. You can't stop now. You're barely picking up steam.

Don't let this be something you relate to later on in life: "An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's existence." - Honore de Balzac.

Write, write, then write some more. Read, edit, read, edit, and then write some more. You can do it. One word at a time. With everyone believing in you, you can't not believe in yourself.

--

What would you tell your writer self?

Poem Share and Other Good Finds Sunday/Monday

The poem I've selected for this week is Francisco X. Alarcón's "To Those Who Have Lost Everything" and I'm pairing it with the article below.

"Artists React to Mexico's Drug War With Music and Poetry" by Betty Arcos in NPR. Growing up and now again living in a border city, I feel the issues discussed in this article touch upon a familiar reality: violence on the border remains a mute point in today's media. I'm with Lili Downs in hoping "No evil can last a hundred years."

I posted Perpetual Follies' 2012 Pushcart Prize Rankings last week. Here is an article in Luna Park from Travis Kurowski that offers a different perspective: "Is Something Missing from the Pushcart Prize?" What are your thoughts?

Diane Lockward guides us in deciphering when a poem is ready to send out into the world. When do you feel your writing is ready to submit?

If you read anything this week, please read this touching story about stories "passing back through the heart" by Natalia Sylvester on her blog: "The Difference Between Recording and Remembering."

Come across any good reading this past week? What's on your desk for this week?

Wishing you a week full of wonder, Andrea

Four Comforts After My Husband's Surgery

My husband underwent surgery yesterday morning that will hopefully result in our beginning a family soon. The day was nerve-wracking and I don't know what I was thinking not taking the day off work (you know how Murphy's Law goes) but it ended with my being grateful for many things. Four stand out from the crowd:

1. We always know at some point in our lives, we tend to take the small things for granted. I try not to do this but the demands of work and life in general somehow sometimes overshadow the importance of these small yet essential things. Like how much time you enjoy spending with your husband on a daily basis. And how much he really helps around the house. Quiet time is nice, but too much quiet time, well, it's lonely, and I can't wait to have my husband back to his normal, jovial self.

2. Someone taking the time to come and sit with you at the hospital helps so much. Even though you pack a book or your laptop with you, these activities don't really distract you all that much when trying not to worry. Having someone to talk to, to wait out time with you, and help after surgery means more than most of us realize until we have it happen to us. I promise I will pay it forward. I'm blessed to have Tim's mom as my mother-in-law. The surprise of her face in the waiting room was and always will be a welcome one.

3. Chicken noodle soup is a staple after surgery. For the patient and for the caretaker. Even though I was beyond tired, I didn't want to leave Tim at the house by himself, and thank goodness I go a little crazy with vegetables at the grocery store and always have a surplus of chicken stock, pasta, and wine, because I had just what I needed to make my very first pot of chicken noodle soup. Yes, it was delicious. Tim lapped it up and was happy. I was even happier because after a stressful day, I felt as if I was seven again, sitting at my Grandma's kitchen table, enjoying a steaming hot bowl of feel good without a worry in the world.

4. A book is always a nice little escape from reality. I lost myself in The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins last night. It was past my bedtime, but all I wanted to do was read one chapter. Just one. And then another flew by, and then this paragraph:

In late summer, I was wasting up in a pond when I noticed the plants growing around me. Tall with leaves like arrowheads. Blossoms with three white petals. I knelt down in the water, my fingers digging into the soft mud, and I pulled up handfuls of the roots...

What comforts does today bring you? What small things are your grateful for today?

The Portable Poetry Workshop: Connecting Content - Syntactical Transitions

In this section, Jack Myers presents the poet as architect and illustrates the various methods one can employ in making connections and "building" a poem. There is hypotaxis, in which "the ordering of content proceeds through conventional forms of logic and the conventions of syntax, grammar, and language as a medium, and there is parataxis (or juxtaposition), which is "based more on the unconscious, associative kinds of connections."

More important than the technical descriptions and examples presented in this section is Myers' asking the reader to imagine a sign over the writer's "workshop" engraved with the timeless quote, "Writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration." He then offers a competing quote of John Keats', "If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to the tree then it had better not come at all."

Instead of focusing on the architecture of a poem in this post, I want to focus on the inspiration behind the architect. What does the sign hanging over your "workshop" read? Does a poem/story/work of art build itself in your workshop or do you build it?