Something I’ve been doing in workshops lately is asking business owners to write the haiku of their business. Why do I do this, and why does it matter? With regards to the content – the haiku itself – it doesn’t. The process, however, is another story.

You can read the entire article at Art of Cultivation, a site for business growth.

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ReadWritePoem’s prompt #71 asks to dig on a solid first line, either yours or someone else’s, in order to generate some new work. I offer the following, which is courtesy of me whyfe:

“Can you start early? I have to leave for the funeral soon.”

Granted, that’s two lines, but still it leads to one thought. Of course, she’d originally written it as:

“Can you start early, I have to leave for the funeral soon?”

Which is probably closer to how it would read if you could read words in the moment they flung from a mouth.

This all leads to an April project, in honor what some call “National Poetry Month”. Taking lines that Courtney (the whyfe in question) wrote out this morning, starting with the above “Can you start early…”, I’ll be writing and posting a new short piece every day through the month.

The rules:

1. Must have something new every day
2. Pieces must be at least 30 words (but not necessarily 30 lines)
3. I can deviate from the original line itself, as long as it serves as a prompt for what becomes the final piece.

Feel free to play along, offer feedback, and submit your own work. After all – when a month dedicated to poetry begins with a day dedicated to fools, what could be better than a little foolish work?

The following entry comes courtesy of Alice, a fifth-grade student in SE Portland. I’ve been working with Alice for two years – she’s a heck of a writer and has a great mind.

Below I’ve pasted the original skeletons, followed by Alice’s replies.

It’s ________ __________ “___________ ___________” and it’s ___________ __________ __________ “___________”. This is, __________ it’s _________ ___________ the __________! The _________ ___________ _________ the _________ __________ for __________, which _______, “_______ __________.” This is __________ _________ it is to _____________.

Alice writes:

It’s tomorrow buddy “seven days” and it’s today dear that’s “here”. This is, look it’s Safe Chap the hero! The weird dork from the planet Zuok for $4, which says “Yo dude”. This is how fun it is to dream.

When ______ _________ at ______ _________ of ________ ___________ in the ________ _________. ____________ ___________. I _________, “what are __________ ___________ ___________ ___________ ___________?” I _________ I’ll __________ a ____________ of _________ ____________. Then I __________ ___________ _____________ to ____________ ___________, I ___________ in ____________.

Alice writes:

When I cry at night love of life springs in the dark well. I’m desperate. I scream “what are you on these bleak lands?” I swear I’ll cry a river of salty tears. Then I sink down slowly to my knees, I struggle in vain.

Neruda starts his poem, “The Poet’s Obligation/Deber del poeta”, as follows:

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or dry prison cell,
to him I come, and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a long rumble of thunder adds itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam,
the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,
the star vibrates quickly in its corona
and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.

To me, the obligation of the poet is a matter of discourse that depends on the poet’s own navigation through life, along with his/her desire to attend to the word, to distill a simple truth down to an even simpler form. It begins as a personal obligation to make oneself available as the word flows through; from there it’s a individual journey that unfolds between the poet and the word itself.

I know that the word “poet” throws people. Recently, kids in my Monday workshop were surprised when they heard I write poems. To them, a poet was, among other things, “an old man with no hair and tuna breath who wears shabby clothes and goes around acting snooty to everyone.” I couldn’t help but laugh, knowing of course that somewhere, the very poet they described was opening another can of tuna and putting on a moth-eaten sweater.

It doesn’t matter if I use “writer”, “artist”, or just “person”; I’ll stick with “poet” because it was Neruda’s poem that started the thought this morning. All I know is that my thoughts on the “poet’s obligation”, outlined above, are singular, narrow, and at the mercy of my own limited, Ameri-centric perspective. I’ll never make the case that I know the answers, or that anyone knows the answers. The best I can do, or the best I’ll try to do, is to serve as a channel and let the answers come through from any number of sources.

Which brings me to one of the reasons for this post. Starting Friday – perhaps for those “not listening to the sea”, as Neruda wrote – I’m going to post the first in a series of interviews with poets and writers. While the interview will appear here, I’ll also be posting a selection of the writer’s poems on the Creative page. The interviews will discuss process, form, desire, inspiration, triggers, wells – everything that prompts the word to flow from air to mind to hand to paper to eyes to heart to soul.

In posting the interviews on Friday, I’ll be moving the normal “Guest Writer” feature to Tuesdays, starting tomorrow. That way guest writers will still have the space on the site they deserve before pieces from other writers go up.

Finally, I encourage you to comment on this post, and let me know your thoughts on the poet’s obligation.

Thanks,

Dave

Saturday I had an idea for a story. Then it became a great idea. Soon it became a great idea for a book, and before my mind could stop I had a great book to query an agent about, sell to a publisher and get ready for my reading tour.

The above is classic mind trap. What began as a simple idea from nowhere had now morphed into an ego trip focused on production, delivery, reward. I think it’s good for the ego to come in, but not at the pre-nascent stage when I hadn’t committed a single word to paper, and the entire concept existed in the ether.

Each voice that rocks back and forth in the skull has its place, even the critical ones – at their best, our inner critics offer sound editorial advice; at their worst, they tear you and your work down. Since many writers have a constant click-clack running in their heads, the trick is to corral the stream of chatter and do your best to turn as much as you can into something useful.

Honor the word, but first, honor the idea. Let it form and begin to take its shape before demanding it to be something else. Keep your words liquid, lucid and free.

Normally when someone says, “Jump off” in relation to writing, it conveys images of finding a bridge. Portland, as you may know, is a town of bridges. We don’t need anyone yelling jump off, especially not to the approximately 250,000 writers who live here.

Jumping off is a practice that can be especially useful when your creative piece is in its seedling phase. What it means, essentially, is to take a chunk from your existing narrative, regardless of the draft or version that you’re in, and “jump it over” to another piece of paper, Word document, or whatever your chosen format happens to be. Once you’re away from the structure of your existing narrative, you have the opportunity to poke, prod and explore a dynamic scene as a means of working on dialog, setting, description, what have you.

I encourage – and utilize – jump off exercises for a number of reasons. First, it’s good to get out of the story you’re writing, especially if you find yourself focusing on where the narrative is headed and how your dialog, setting or description will take you there. Working within the structure of your narrative can at best confound and distract you, and at worst could discourage you from going forward. No one needs to be discouraged, especially not at the onset.

Jumping onto a new page will bring more light into the room, give your characters, scene, etc. some fresh air and new opportunities. You’re essentially giving them a second life.

In the end, your jumping off exercise will not only help you find the voice or words you’re looking for, but you may discover that, in pulling something out and running in a slightly different direction, you’ve invented another story, or at least a new idea for another story.

Don’t let the form hold you back. If your two main characters have been locked in a bedroom argument for the past three days of writing and there’s no end in sight for you or them, take them out of there, set them on a new page and see what comes.