Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
Every year, for Christmas, I get my mom a calendar. My mom loves miniature things and giant things. I have been trying to find a wall calendar that shows images of miniatures, but when you search “miniature wall calendar,” you get calendars that are scaled down for dollhouses. The closest I’ve come is the Tatsuya Tanaka calendars, but those are 52 pages – weekly calendars – not quite what I need. She needs room! She has things to do! She needs a month at a time!!!
Anyway. Miniatures, as in scale models, are deceptive; if you want to do something tiny, you need to be incredibly patient and be prepared to fail a bunch of times. Scaling down a poem is easier. This week we’re going to craft teeny, tiny micropoems, like the tweet-length ones published by The Lickety~Split (read up if you need inspiration). It takes patience, but far less superglue than dollhouse furniture.
That’s not to say micropoems or short forms are inherently low-effort! Take it from me, a person who has won multiple haiku contests, paring down your lyricism to the most essential parts can be an enormous pain.
However, this week, we are making it easy. We are keeping it low-effort. It is six days til Christmas, dammit, and we are going to do as little as possible.
Exercise: The Week in Poem(s)
You can do this exercise one of two ways, but they start the same.
Every day this week, I want you to set a timer for one minute, and write down what you observe.That can be what you observe amongst your own thoughts, or what you see out your window, or what you see at your desk. It can be scenes from a TV show in the background. It can be the last dregs of a dream you’re still wading through one morning. This is a practice I totally stole from my friend Sondra Carr, who’s a multimedia artist and owner of Weird Sisters Freak Boutique in Oregon.I stole this habit (with her encouragement), taking a minute to observe my thoughts, like they’re a bug or a bit of bacterial something under a microscope. Sondra writes:”I stopped and paid attention to what I was thinking. No affirmations. No deep psychology - just stop, pin it down, watch it wiggle. That's what I did for months - as long as I could stand it, and then went away from and then went back to when I could stand it again for the last few years.”So that’s step one. One minute each day, Monday – Friday. Just look, outward or inward, and write. Write all these little observations, one minute’s worth, in the same document or piece of paper.
On Friday, set a timer for five minutes.During your horrible pre-lunch not-yet-break period or the sluggish slog home on the train or the idle era before your final Amazon package shows up, take a look at what you’ve “collected” over the week. It’s only five minutes’ worth of writing but it should be discrete, identifiable writing.We’re going to create poetry from these observations, and we can do it one of two ways. If you have a lot of text, or if you feel inspired, you can write five little micro-poems. I mean tiny! Experiment with form. Maybe you want to write five haiku about the same tree in your yard that lost its remaining leaves this week. Or maybe you want some free verse (I’ll provide examples in a minute).You can also do one poem, a five-line poem, a quintain. You might’ve also heard the term “cinquain” in school. The first time I encountered a cinquain was a very basic exercise in elementary school, which helped us learn parts of speech as well as poetic form. The very simple template I remember was: noun/two adjectives/three verbs/four-word description/synonym for first noun.In practice that would look like this:DogSoft, brownDozing, snoring, snugglingPressed against my thighsFriend
Again: very basic! Very minimal. I encourage you to think of this as a journal in poems, a very simple way of keeping a record of your days. If you’ve tried bullet journaling, well, this is like that, but *。* ༘✿artsy✿ ༘*。*.
Actually, I did something similar earlier this year, though on a weekly basis, not a daily one. Over the course of April 2021, I wrote one poem a week during National Poetry Writing Month called “A Poet’s Journal.” Then, after I finished the month, I broke them into even smaller poems, and created a week’s worth. Well, okay. Six days.
This one is about reading a book in the car, and getting a little headachey, and writing about the book instead:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedMONDAY letters rest kineticbeveled and deckled indexed scoop punctuation like dry beansbounty, bounty, bounty, plant what you havegrow what is missinglines (from leather) press, parchmentinverseetched, embossed tattooa transverse through what I left in marginalia
This one is about literal trash, scrap paper I kept using instead of a notebook:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedWEDNESDAYcurled in bottoms of pockets,thin strips of timeweave something different into existencewhat is keptis not forgottenI can hear music beloved moons reflected mywhite eyesforgivemy interludeplease excuse meI am dreaming
And this one is about wanting to buy a notebook, but it was 11:00 at night and the TJ Maxx was closed. It is ONE OF TWO POEMS ABOUT TJ MAXX BEING CLOSED that I wrote during this period. Do you see a theme?
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedSATURDAYthey could be good ideas or could become good a chance to empty my heavy selfthe image comes, a beacon pastel covers the interior darkness of some shelves somewherecreamy pale paper blank waitingOh, I can see them
Anyway, all of this to say: write about trash! Write about TJ Maxx! Write about the stuff you should be doing/reading/writing instead of tiny poems. And then, don’t do any of that stuff. Eat twelve cookies and write a tiny poem instead of a gift tag.
Some housekeeping: this Friday’s Dispatch (12/23/22) will be the last newsletter of the year – I’m taking the week off between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Well, okay, I’m not really taking the week off. I’ll still be writing, but I’m actually going to be working on some additional content…which paid subscribers will see in January!
That’s right, starting in mid-January, I plan to add two additional emails each week for paid subscribers. You can expect longer essays, close readings of my favorite poems, and additional fun/excitement.
I’m really excited by the chance to read some poems together after these weeks of writing. But in the meantime, let’s all do as little as possible until next year. I’ll see you Friday!