This last weekend I went to Helsinki. It was my first time in Finland, and it was fabulous. Monumental buildings, a ferry across an icy harbour, friendly locals, a culture devoted to design. The food was fantastic: bright flavours, fresh (and I’d dare to say just about every meal we had there was better than just about every meal we ate in Venice when we went at Christmas: so there, Silvio Berlusconi). We came home with a case full of goodies such as crowberry jelly, sea buckthorn muesli, and lingonberry jam, as well as several heavy rye loaves and some super glass dishes I found in thrift stores. The Finns make beautiful glassware, and I love beautiful glass. The language is fascinating: all those double vowels in combinations I’m unused to.
So Finland was everything I wanted it to be, and more, since I first read Moominsummer Madness some decades ago. It was a dream come true. I’m still processing it, and writing an ongoing ‘I Remember Helsinki’ and having fun with it.
For this week’s experiment, write in whatever form you like about a dream come true, real or otherwise. Use all the senses: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and physical sensations.
I love lists. I have whole spiels on lists in literature. ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. Sections of the Old Testament (all that begetting). Christopher Smart’s ‘For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry’. The lists in Moby-Dick. Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’. Anne Waldman’s ‘Fast-Speaking Woman’. Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’. Contents lists. Lists of illustrations. Indexes; how I loved to copyedit indexes when I worked in-house. When I was about thirteen, I was rarely happier than when I was geekily flicking through The Book of Lists (both volumes).
Lists have life, lists have colour, lists point in many directions nearly all at once. Lists don’t overexplain, or editorialise, or whine (at least the good ones don’t); lists just are. Lists accrete. Their items are not connected by cause and effect, but just sit beside one another with paratactic superpowers. Sometimes life’s like that: wonderfully random, surprising.
I recently read a couple of good articles on lists in literature: ’10 Lists That Read Like Poems’ in Flavorwire (which itself is a site somewhat devoted to the form) and ‘Literary Lists: Proof of Our Existence’ in the Guardian. They mention Umberto Eco, whose beautifully illustrated The Infinity of Lists sits on my shelf. In it he itemises lists both practical and poetic, miraculous and non-normal, and with some fantastic imagery states a case for the presence of lists in visual as well as written arts, and also for the list as a form that aspires to the infinite:
There is, however, another mode of artistic representation, i.e., when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large.
This week, write a list. Or lots of lists. A list a day. Here are some more inspirations or models:
* A list of gratitudes (thanks to Bhanu Kapil for that idea)
* What I will and won’t miss (inspired by Nora Ephron; I love the way in which the tone shifts from the terse itemisation of things she won’t miss to the more open and affectionate style in the list of things that will be missed; and we miss you too, Nora)
* A list of friends (elaborated or not)
* A list of questions without answers (thanks to Jack Collom for that one)
* An ‘I Remember’ on a specific subject, e.g., first times, last times, friends, enemies, people you’ve worked with (that one’s fun), holidays or vacations, places you’ve been, things you’ve eaten, Christmas presents
* A manifesto of reasons (for x, or y maybe – to change the law, to not go to school, to follow advice, to be cheerful)
* An ‘I Remember’ for a character in a novel
* A shopping list for a character
* A bucket list of things a character wants to do before he or she dies
* A list of ingredients
* A menu of desires (seeing your desires through food imagery)
* A pillow book of adorable things
* A list of prayers for weak or fabulous (or whatever else) beings (inspired by ‘Twenty-One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Beings’ by Toby Martinez de las Rivas)
* A classification system for your library
* A bestiary of imagined animals
* The things you carried
* A catalogue of new things, and/or an archive of old things
Gosh, this list-making is addictive. I could go on. One day I’ll teach a whole class on lists. But for now I’ll post this, early in the week for a change. That keen. Maybe some of you have snow days, and need something to do.
This week we’ve had Pancake Day, Chinese New Year and/or Shambhala Day/Tibetan New Year bringing us the Year of the Water Snake, and Valentine’s Day. My friend Indira Ganesan published her book As Sweet As Honey. A pope resigned. Lots of special occasions (and despite more cold, cold weather, this morning was bright and sunny and felt very springy – I even, finally, spied two yellow buds bursting through the green shoots in pots where I’ve planted crocuses).
So: let’s celebrate one of these special occasions (or maybe something else) with an ode, which is a lyric poem or song devoted to the celebration of something specific. This can be something grand (Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead’), or something more ordinary (such as Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to My Socks’).
The ode is an ancient form that can have specific patterns in its stanzas, but as Ron Padgett says in his Handbook of Poetic Forms: ‘Ultimately what has survived of the ode in its 2,500 years is its spontaneity, its expansiveness, and its openness to a wide range of emotions. Perhaps rather than its formal attibutes, these are the qualities that make an ode an ode.’
So: choose a special subject (one of this week’s holidays, your true love, the publication of your book, the retirement of a pope; a city, a tree, water snakes, your bed), and then ground the writing in details that are concrete and specific (‘two socks as soft as rabbits’, ‘Bats are scribbling verse on twilight’, ‘the men with green eyelids’). To help structure your work, you might like to pace your voice and perceptions into simple stanzas or lines, but most of all focus on creating a spontaneous, expansive and open voice that celebrates your chosen subject in ways that evoke emotion.
You might also like to read up and/or sample a few more odes devoted to subjects both elevated and everyday:
So, for all our attempts to invoke spring last week, it’s still winter out there. Sun, some blue skies, but cold. Gets pretty chilly at night. It’s good to draw the curtains, light the fire, hunker down with a book or something good on the telly. Or a notebook and pen.
This week, while the nights are still long and dark, I’m spinning off something Elaine Showalter tells us she recommends to her students in Teaching Literature: writing by candlelight. Turn out the lights, spark up a candle, and write a story or a poem or just anything that comes.
Use a notebook or paper and pen/pencil. No ghostly light from a screen for our low-tech endeavour. Just the flicker of a candle, or candles. (The ones above were in Ely Cathedral, which I visited for the first time on Monday – pretty fabulous: arches, painted ceilings, lantern tower, stained glass glowing on stone, and so well maintained.)
(And if you are reading this in the southern hemisphere: sorry! Stay up late. And be aware of those lengthening nights …)
If you need a prompt, try one of these: blood, ink, handkerchief, mouse, drawl.
Otherwise, consider what happens when you write by candlelight. What sort of intimacy is created between you and the pen and the page within that spell of light? And how might it affect your writing?
I don’t know about you, but it’s felt like a long and cold winter, and according to the calendar we’ve still a ways to go; this is only February the 1st, and we’re closer to Christmas than the official start of spring.
But this week I also felt a certain spring in my step, and a sense of the lengthening days; even if it was bloody cold out there, there was also something different in the light. The sun seems to get higher above that row of houses over the back, and the blackbird has returned, and the robin, and slowly, slowly those crocuses and daffodils and hyacinths are poking up through the soil in those pots in the back garden. Wonder when they’ll flower? Those green shoots have been patient for a few weeks now. The lawn is most definitely mud-luscious. Spring is ever-returning (thanks, Uncle Walt).
So, let’s take a stand against the darkness, and though it’s premature write a poem or an invocation or a gratitude that invites a bit of Just-spring to return to our lives. It’s something of a reach, but sometimes stretching is good for our writing.
Here’s a small sample of Just-springy poems (I nixed a few that refer to later months – that seemed to be rubbing it in too much, or tempting fate to bring back winter). Add others or links or your own in the comments below, if you wish.
