What I didn't know before

+ routines and rituals that nurture creativity

Photo by Annie Spratt

What I didn’t know before

by Ada Limón

was how horses simply give birth to other

horses. Not a baby by any means, not

a creature of liminal spaces, but already

a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,

scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way

to another horse and then suddenly there are

two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.

You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying

a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two

computers swinging in it unwieldily at your

side. I remember we broke into laughter

when we saw each other. What was between

us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed

over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

---

Hello, poetry kindreds! ❤️

I got a message this week: So excited to be doing this!! K I’m sure you’re going to say it’s normal and fine but I sat down to write a poem and couldn’t come up with anything good. I don’t know if I’m putting too much pressure on myself, if I was too distracted or tired or if it just wasn’t a good time. I want to participate and write a poem each week, but this is my first time writing poetry that anyone else is going to read. Want you to know I AM here, but my poem isn’t! Have any tips for generating ideas or like how to get in the zone or something?

First! There’s no pressure to produce a poem each week. What we’re doing together here is reading and learning about poetry, and then building skills by getting in a routine of exercising them. Of trying and playing and loosening ourselves up, with no expectation that a finished poem will be the result. Sharing any of it that we want to. Just a tiny weekly dose of do-able practice.

Maybe we should call it something else though, to take the pressure off. Maybe instead of sharing poems in the comments, we can agree we’re sharing poem seeds? Or poem ventures? Make it super clear these are gutsy beginnings. Maybe? If you have any ideas for how to better name our efforts, let’s hear it!

Ok. Now to the how. We all know you can’t force creativity. But most of us really only have small pockets of time to squeeze it into, if that. With the exception of one glorious year, I’m not someone who has ever really managed to maintain a super consistent writing routine. It’s been spurts and dry spells and many seasons of being pulled too many other directions. I’m wanting and working to make it happen now.

The good news? Alongside writers and artists who did/do it full time, there have been and are countless others who manage to create meaningfully in the margins of their lives. So instead of me providing any tips, let’s hear from a few writers who have figured this out. How do they get into “the zone or something”??

Toni Morrison’s routine and ritual:

“I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls.” Same!

“I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.

Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama—and that was always around five in the morning.

Eventually I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down…I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come…And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular…Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.”

It doesn’t have to be 5 in the morning. That’s just what worked for Morrison. She continues that no matter when or what you do to start your writing, the most important thing may be “a posture of openness. It’s that being open—not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you. It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let it in.”¹

Creativity seems to be born out of this partnership with, or access to, something that is not our conscious or rational mind. The muse, or God, or intuition, or flow, or the “wild, silky self”. Or just a part of our brain we aren’t usually in. However we conceive of it, it is absolutely part of the process. And it seems it must be invited. Or attracted. Or allowed in, but cannot be forced. So learning how to find and create conditions where it’s most likely to join us/let us go there, matters.

Mary Oliver found power in reliability:

“When you start to write poems, make a schedule of the times you will work, and adhere to it with careful and steadfast exactitude.” For us, this may be 20 minutes on a Sunday. Or 3x a week at 9:30 pm. Or 10 minutes every morning sitting in the dirveway. “Whenever you work, you (the conscious part of your mind) are summoning it (the much greater, richer subconscious part of your mind) to sit down at the desk, that you might write the poem together. But your subconscious energy works in accordance with waves and tides very different from conscious intent. It needs, in fact, to know when it will be summoned to the actual labor; moreover, it needs to know that you will summon it, and reliably.

If you prove yourself reliable– if you are there at the desk as promised – it will grow strong and more fertile; it will arrive with all kinds of offerings. but the dread of preparing, and arriving and being forsaken, is very real. As in romance, the partnership will flourish with eachexpectation met, or it will wither with each disappointment.”²

Anne Lamott on doubt and letting ourselves romp:

“Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in. You may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you’re doing it right. Just dance.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a polaroid develop. You can’t–and, in fact, you’re not supposed to– know exactly what the picture is goin to look like until it has finished developing.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that noone is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voice and visions come through and onto the page. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last page that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go.”³

Elizabeth Gilbert writes and speaks endlessly about creativity and ways to live a creative life. Along with all the magic and sparkly joy she describes such a life being filled with, she shares “Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done. Most of it is not fairy dust in the least.” ⁴

Kate Baer says she always reads a few pages of beautiful language to begin her writing sessions, to “get her head back in the clouds”, then keeps a book open in her lap while she writes. ⁵ James Joyce wrote on his stomach with a blue pencil. Colette liked to start writing sessions by picking fleas from her pet bulldog. Maya Angelou preferred writing in a rented hotel room with all the pictures taken down.⁶ Sue Monk Kidd says her rituals have evolved and simplified over the years, and now begin with a cup of tea, sitting quietly for a few moments or doing a meditation, and then “clearing out her soul” first, by journaling in a way that lets anything “float up and get out of the way.”⁷

Jennifer Egan advises that what we do outside of our writing time, as well as our willingness to write badly whilst in it, adds up:

• “Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.

• Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If you’re not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If you’re used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. No matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.

• You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly. You can’t write regularly and well. One should accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”⁸

We may not have (or ever get) a room of our own, or nine uninterrupted days in a row to write. And we don’t need elaborate rituals, or to copy anyone else. But we can start with what we have and experiment. We can make commitments to ourselves to create small (or any size) pockets in our week with which to write. And we can perform our own simple rituals of choice to unclench, relax, and signal we are ready.

Some ideas to try out:

• make a special drink

• set a timer, or create a clear start and end signal

• make & use a writing playlist

• hang upside down like Dan Brown :)⁹

• read a poem, quote, or passage

• keep a book open in your lap

• take a walk or do some short physical exercise/movement first

• text a writing buddy to let them know you’re starting

• short meditation

• prayer, intentions, or self pep-talk

• use the same pen & notebook

• clear your desk or space, or designate a regular writing spot

• light a candle

• create a simple mantra

“You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place — you suit yourself, your nature… Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way.”

Bernard Malamud

🧶Craft chat:

“What I didn’t know before” is a great example of one of the most common techniques used in poetry: noticing something, and connecting it to some precise, surprising something else. A fresh connection. The comparison helps make it an endearing and accurate love poem, without being overly sentimental or cliche. All the things we associate with foals, all their potential and liveliness, our surprise and astonishment at their adorable awkwardness, we now see as the way this speaker experienced this love.

Well-chosen similies can “lift the poem from a private experience to a shared one. This is one of the pleasures of both reading and writing poems: the recasting of one thing in terms of another, the revelation of outwardly different experiences can be seen to have a similar core.”¹⁰

Ada Limon is the current U.S. Poet Laureate.

✍️ Try it:

This week’s try it has two parts.

1. Give a new writing ritual a go, and let us know how it went. Or if you have anything you already do that you love, let’s hear it!

2. As you go throughout your days, pay attention to how things are happening around you– in the natural world, in mundane or daily tasks, person to person. As you watch, take note of anything that feels interesting, or reminds you of something else. Make a list or quick description of some. This can help us pay a differnt kind of attention, and remember poems are just as often something we find “out there”, as in us. When it’s time to write, pull out your list (after you’ve done your rituals of course✨) and try out a poem with a simile or metaphor from your lived experience this week. Option 2: “Describe an activity— cleaning the house, fishing, cooking a meal, bathing a child—-which could serve as a metaphor for your life, for how you are in the world.”¹¹

Obviously, examples of simile and metaphor are everywhere in poetry. Here’s a few more examples of how this can be done and how effective it is. It can be a single lovely sentence, or a tiny, shocking comparison. Or, as in the last one, an image and sensory-rich extended metaphor that takes us somewhere.

Fluent

by John O'Donohue¹²

I would love to live

like a river flows,

carried by the surprise

of its own unfolding.

[you fit into me]

by Margaret Atwood

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye¹³

Where you go when she sleeps

What is it when a woman sleeps, her head bright

in your lap, in your hands, her breath easy now as though it had never been

anything else, and you know she is dreaming, her eyelids

jerk, but she is not troubled, it is a dream

that does not include you, but you are not troubled either,

it is too good to hold her while she sleeps, her hair falling

richly on your hands, shining like metal, a color

that when you think of it you cannot name, as though it has just

come into existence, dragging you into the world in the wake

of its creation, out of whatever vacuum you were in before,

and you are like the boy you heard of once who fell

into a silo full of oats, the silo emptying from below, oats

at the top swirling in a gold whirlpool, a bright eddy of grain, the boy

you imagine, leaning over the edge to see it, the noon sun breaking

into the center of the circle he watches, hot on his back, burning

and he forgets his father’s warning, stands on the edge, looks down,

the grain spinning, dizzy, and when he falls his arms go out, too thin

for wings, and he hears his father’s cry somewhere, but is gone

already, down in a gold sea, spun deep in the heart of the silo,

and when they find him, he lies still, not seeing the world

through his body but through the deep rush of grain

where he has gone and can never come back, though they drag him

out, his father’s tears bright on both their faces, the farmhands

standing by blank and amazed—you touch that unnamable

color in her hair and you are gone into what is not fear or joy

but a whirling of sunlight and water and air full of shining dust

that takes you, a dream that is not of you but will let you

into itself if you love enough, and will not, will never let you go.

TR Hummer¹⁴

💌 Writing invite #2: free write

Start with “I’m learning to….” Let whatever comes, come.

Okay, that’s it! Was so fun to read what you came up with last week! If it’s easier/you’d prefer to share your poem venture/poem seeds as a link to a doc, rather than copied into the comments, you are welcome to do so.

The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it. — James Baldwin¹⁵

xo,

brinn

1. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1888/the-art-of-fiction-no-134-toni-morrison

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201217.Rules_For_The_Dance

3. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/bird-by-bird-some-instructions-on-writing-and-life-by-anne-lamott/250013/item/8635794/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=high_vol_frontlist_standard_shopping_retention_21262958110&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=698403107263&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiAy8K8BhCZARIsAKJ8sfSmHs6pALNT8DToG4ZnxZmreka3AYkzqj0xNBMVeczaPzkHr8xE1roaAhxXEALw_wcB#idiq=8635794&edition=2381928

4. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8783283-most-of-my-writing-life-to-be-perfectly-honest-is

5. Joy Sullivan’s Sustenance workshop with Kate Baer

6. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/12/famous-authors-weirdest-writing-habits

7. Interview with Sue Monk Kidd

8. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/09/07/jennifer-egan-on-writing/

9. https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/12/famous-authors-weirdest-writing-habits

10. The Poet’s Companion, by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux

11. The Poet’s Companion, by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux

12. https://www.johnodonohue.com/

13. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151653/you-fit-into-me

14. https://clodandpebble.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/where-you-go-when-she-sleeps-by-t-r-hummer/

15. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/528986-you-write-in-order-to-change-the-world-knowing-perfectly