Prompt #3: Poetry as necessity

How we might write for ourselves

Hi friends,

We’re back with the third Call and Response! 

Our last prompt was about playing with white space, with what’s left out, with silence as simultaneously backgrounding the poem and also being what the poem is about. I wanted to share this poem by Linda Gregg which struck me with the way it holds silence, in a way that doesn’t directly ever mention silence, but simply evokes it.

“Grinding the Lens”

I am pulling myself together. 

Don’t want to go on a trip.

I have painted the living room white

and taken out most of my things.

The room has never been so empty.

Just now a banging thunder

and suddenly falling rain.

I leave the typewriter and run

outside in my nightgown and take

the cotton blanket off the line.

It is summer and I am in the middle

of my life. Alone and happy.

This poem holds all the silences of being alone in a room, of negotiating something with oneself, of blank space. It holds the silence of moments. The cusp of a summer storm. Finding oneself suddenly and completely in the middle of one’s life. I love how simple the images are.

Anyways, without further ado, here’s the prompt for this week. Hope you all are taking care of yourselves. 

Love,

resting faces ft. Cath (left) and Steph (right) because resting is also a necessity in our book

Prompt #3:

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve accumulated a big task list that doesn’t seem to diminish. It seems, rather, to continuously roll over, and over. And because I want to be good, I show up for it. I hold myself accountable. I don’t want to let anyone down. And yet, to actually live the way Mary Oliver describes, feels… really good. When I do it. If I can permit myself to do it. 

This is what Mary Oliver says: “It is 6am and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, and the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written.”

What would it be like, to permit this? Feels a bit like luxury, a bit lackadaisical, a bit slacker-ly. Because some of us have actual shit to do, the toilet will not fix itself. And yet, today I did it. I let some things just go. Crazy, I know.

To declutter, I think, is both a privilege and a responsibility. It requires taking a hard look at what I consider to be necessary. Is it, really? What would it be like to let go here? Who could I be then? 

Today, instead of doing my readings for class or showing up on zoom, I re-potted some plants. Then I read Linda Gregg’s poetry. Then, suddenly moved to tears, I wrote a little story to myself about an image that hurt me and because it hurt me, I understood that I had found something necessary in it. And I understood that what I really need is the necessary thing in that story. What I really need is to be able to give myself that.

In Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle quotes Gaston Bachelard saying: “We begin in admiration and we end by organizing our disappointment… I am afraid there is no way around this. It is the one true inevitable thing.” This inevitability contains all that is necessary, within it: a beginning, an ending. A way of being. We can begin. We can organize our disappointment. Cue Mary Oliver: “It is as it must be.”

Today I understood that what I really need is to feel my life (...begin in admiration). What I really need is the thing I make for myself, out of my hurting, out of my questions (...end by organizing disappointment). What I really need is to begin again and again, making a life for myself. 

This week I want to encourage us to make something, and make it be something we really need. What does it look and feel like, to make from a place of necessity? 

Maybe what you make will be a poem. Maybe it will be a pie. Maybe it will be something we don’t yet have the language to name. How will you know if you’ve done it? I think when it’s necessary, and you’ve made it, you can’t miss it. You will know.

A general technique to get started: link something easy with something creative, such that the easy thing gets you moving into the creative thing.

Some ideas to try:

1. Light a candle. Read a book of poetry until moved/triggered. Write.

2. Pick a noun. List the first ten memories that this noun brings to mind. Pick the most vivid memory and write into it. Draw it. Sing it. Move to it. 

3. Make some 10 second drawings to warm up. (They’re more fun if they’re animals you don’t know how to draw, and also if they’re “bad.”) Then draw a place from your past that you liked. Write about it. 

I suppose this week’s prompt is ambivalent about its own requirements and, in that ambivalence, seeks to offer instead some methods and permissions. This is also, simply, a reminder to myself and to you all: let us remember why we make art. Let us make art from a place of necessity. As in, make for yourself what you need. No matter what. No matter what.

Warmly,

Catherine