Writing is a paradoxical activity, both very alone and very public.
There are doldrums you get into where you just really dry, just can’t move.
What worked for Wah: three twenty minute free writing exercises. Say, today, I will do three twenty minute sessions of free writing. Free writing, if you practice, it literally becomes a part of your writing life. A great source of not so much material but energy and attention.
Meditation, looking for a place where the mind isn’t in the way. So in writing, especially free writing, it’s getting into language and getting out of mind. Writing isn’t thinking. Let the language be, don’t worry about any of it: grammar, punctuation, legibility.
After, don’t even look at it, just let it go. Come back days, weeks, years later. It’s language.
The physicality of writing—types of pencils, paper, journals, etc.
The prose poem is useful because it takes on the sentence as the basic unit of composition. Because it’s poetry it takes liberty with the sentence, playing with it, flipping it around…
We live much of our social life in the anecdote.
Diamond Grill is a lot of recuperating the anecdote. You get into language. It’s about the cadence, how you land at the end of a line or a paragraph or a poem. That’s the place to focus on in terms of, not necessarily play, but the feeling of cadence.
A way of deflecting focus. Letting go of topicality, theme, etc.
Resiting and reciting is an idea of redoing and returning and reiterating through place and language.
I like writing poetry because it’s like writing music.
Poetry advice: no ing’s, no ly’s, make your last stanza your first, the pronoun problem (who is I?)
Making art is solving a problem. Try to figure out what the problem is first. If it isn’t a problem, it won’t be interesting.
“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.” —Blake, introduction to Jerusalem.
Don’t trust intention.
William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem
Interested in the idea of proprioception, awareness of our bodies as organisms.