Happy Sunday.

What are you up to this weekend? My brother is visiting and we’ve spent the weekend running around San Diego, in and out of used bookstores and favorite coffee shops.

But today I want to tell you a secret. A love story. A revolution.

I want to tell you about the great, big, beautiful thing that has happened to me.

I enrolled in a course called “Poetry, Performance, and Play”.

The first poem I wrote for the course took me several hours at a local coffee shop for reasons that, looking back upon, I find difficult and embarrassing to articulate. I remember the rigid structure of iambs and meter feeling like exciting challenges, but also like vices that constricted everything I really wanted to say. An avid prose writer from the time that I could hold a pen, my mind flows in paragraphs, not rhythm and rhyme. I was learning that a poet is an architect, mastering blueprints that that I was only just beginning to examine. Working with iambic pentameter stood as the first frontier. From this came “Chocolate Milk”, a short and sweet, rather comically lackluster refiguring of Ron Padgett’s version, composed from your local coffee shop.

Then a change came. And it tasted like candy, like sweet, empty calories dancing arbitrarily on my tongue.

It called itself nonsense.

It came dressed as a limerick.

LEARNING NONSENSE

And all at once, I fell in love with possibility of obscenity. I was learning how to have fun within the parameters of structure for the first time. I wrote several limericks on the margins of my notes, playing with whimsical imagery and nonsensical ideas. Then I met the list poem. The form where your mind spills itself onto the page. It was that diversity and simultaneity that pushed me into a vast pool of what felt like pink lemonade under an orange sky. Anything felt possible. I was using the terminology that once felt restrictive as a set of tools for my own creative liberation. I felt like a child again, released from the purely sensical world of academic writing and diving headfirst into a realm that was shaken out of me long ago. I could dance on Saturn’s rings or eat a lemon on a train to Mars. I was, at once, released from the weight of gravity. I left the stratosphere. I was somewhere else entirely, playing with words from the wrong side of the track, conjuring up images that felt psychedelic. My introduction to nonsense was like a teenager’s introduction to a joint. I felt endless. 

WHEN POETRY FELT LIKE THRIFT SHOPPING

But the fun was only just beginning. Like an eccentric artist, clad in an attire that you would never have put together yourself, the chimera, a poem where you replace nouns, verbs, and adjectives of someone else’s poem with your own, came waltzing in. I was immediately intrigued. This felt like fashion. This felt like piecing together tops, bottoms, and shoes that had no business going together. Sifting through the lines of other writer’s poems felt like thrift shopping. My favorite poems became the jeans that I would stitch my own patchwork onto, swapping out the verbs and nouns with those from my own prose in order to create something original. I picked two of my peer’s poems like a shirt and a skirt from the rack and pieced them together in order to create another. I loved how one poem’s flesh could clothe another poem’s skeleton. I loved varying the amount of muscle and fat that the body of a piece could have, swapping verbs and nouns and adjectives like a plastic surgeon. My poetic toolbox was increasing and it felt like power. 

If the chimera felt like thrift shopping, the lipogram was my budget. The lipogram, a poem that excludes a letter or letters from the alphabet, was the first form that I felt completely and utterly inspired by. I wrote lipograms for hours, lost in the challenge, seeking the thrill of creating a piece that I could never have arrived at otherwise. Language began to feel like fire dancing under my fingertips. I loved how the lipogram seemed expand upon the word games we all knew as children. I experimented with excluding “e” in one and “a” in another.

SPONTANEOUS PROSE!?

In the midst of all of this newness, Jack’s Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” came like a respites. Prose? This I knew I could do.

But after reading his advice, it became clear to me that I had grown somewhat rigid with my writing. I would frequently sit with my journal open, pen hovering above the page, thinking the next sentence to death before ever even giving it life. It was debilitating. It felt like a sickness and Kerouac’s advice was medicine. It reminded me of everything I had ever learned and loved about writing, about Natalie Goldberg and Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath’s words of advice that I had inhaled, but forgotten. I was remembering why I loved this. Combining the spontaneity of prose with the aforementioned lessons in nonsense, I endeavored to compose some of my favorite pieces of the semester. I wrote “Kaleidoscopic Visions” (below) within what felt like a single breath, sitting at my dining room table during a rainstorm. I was staring at a bowl of oranges from my tree, their leaves still attached like my memories of the past, crawling through corners of my mind that the necessity to keep writing brought me to. “If You Cut Me Open” was composed in a similar state of mind. I had no idea where it was going when I started it, only the singular idea of the rings of a tree and how they inform the viewer of the life that that tree lived. I wrote the last piece of prose “How Poppy Petals Fall Like Innocence at My Feet” on a Sunday morning, drinking coffee outside as spring seemed to be suddenly, unavoidably, everywhere. I remember looking at candy-red poppies coming up from the ground and feeling somewhat haunted and tantalized by the memories they triggered.

FOUND POETRY & CREATIVE READING

Still dazed from falling in love with lipograms and spontaneous prose, I arrived at the final frontier: found poetry, or poems that you excavate from random sources of text. It was during these classes that I felt most electrified and amazed at what was being produced by my peers and by my own hands. Reading Ron Padgett write in his book, Creative Reading that creative reading, or taking abstract approaches to dissecting a text, was created for people “who sense a creeping staleness in their reading…” reminded me of the creeping staleness that had plagued my writing before this class. It made complete sense to me. I loved reading his take on how standardized testing and the rigid world of academia sucks all of the individuality and creativity out of humans so that they become robots, operating according to arbitrary rules. I agreed entirely that “there is something lacking: quality of life” when you refuse to push the boundaries that you have been placed inside of like a child in a playpen. When he wrote that “In terms of reading, what is lacking is the warmth of learning about the world, other people, and oneself, of learning to live more fully and variously, with greater understanding, clarity, and compassion, as well as beauty and good humor”, I got chills, for these are the reasons that I am studying literature. They are the reasons that I am constantly compelled to read and write. Yet, they are the ones that are all too easy to stray from when existing within systems that leave little room for self-expression. 

RECLAIMING THE RIGHT TO HAVE FUN

So, through found poetry, I set out to take back that room. Even if just a foot. Even if just an inch. I drew lines all over my books, allowing the ink from my pen to cascade down the pristine page of text like a waterfall of rebellion, washing away the taboo of writing in books. For as Padgett exposed, from the time we are children, we learn that “we are forbidden to efface sacred tablets”. I love how found poetry pushes against this. I love that it urges you to pour yourself all over the pages, to insert your own voice and vision into spaces otherwise sterile and monotone. Not monotone in a negative way, but rather in the sense that there is only one voice on the page. When you read creatively, when you consume the book as food, as Padgett describes, the value of it expands in new and exciting directions. When you take “an aggressive attitude toward the material at hand: the book is there for you to use as you see fit”. And that’s the whole point of reading at all, to take something from it. 

ON HOW WE CRAWL INSIDE OF BOOKS

In practicing this, I realized that I was already in a relationship with found poetry. As a reader and writer, I am constantly mining text. My books are tattooed with pen marks, distinguishing the words and phrases that meant something to me for one reason or another. My defense of this to people who abhor writing in books is always the same thing: I tell them that by reading with a pen, you create a poem that runs throughout the book. It exposes all the parts of the text where you found something of yourself within. It’s like staining the pages with your own blood. I never realized that this was a form of found poetry, that I had, in fact, been creatively reading all of this time.

So I knew exactly which books I wanted to use and how to scan them, how to mine them for pieces of treasure, or, even better, things that perhaps appeared as waste. I grabbed Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty flipped to random pages that I had previously heavily underlined. From there, I erased and stole and recreated. It felt something like scrapbooking and something like medicine. I ended up with a little collection that felt like a series of love letters to all my favorite authors.

THIS CHANGED ME

Looking back, more than anything, I see how this course changed me as a writer. I no longer hover my pen above the page, waiting to have the perfect sentence before even pressing ink into paper. I just write. I find my words along the way. I end up wandering down avenues and back streets that I never would have gone down before, avenues and backstreets that led to me create this blog. So my writing has become less about destination and more about exploration. I’m having fun with it like I did as a child, before the world tried to fit me into a mold.

Throughout this semester I would sit in our classroom and feel electrified by the spontaneity of a given poem or the nonsensical beauty of another. I would leave the room feeling so inspired that I would find myself scribbling poems in the margins of my notes in my next class. I began to think poetically, hearing slant rhymes and rhythm within my own stream of consciousness. I would find myself repeating a line I heard over and over again, in utter love with the sound of it. It became a part of me. It seeped into my bloodstream like nutrients, like the oxygen that I didn’t realize my writing was starved of. Slowly, my words began to pink up until they were fully alive, dancing on the page as beautiful little microcosms of this world as I have experienced it.

My professor knew this. He knew that you have to breathe life into your writing every single day. He told us once that if you are sitting around and waiting for inspiration to come and tap you on the shoulder, you will be waiting for all of your life.

The muse is a neglectful lover, he said.

And this is your love story.

Click here to read about my story with poetry & what it did to me.

A SPONTANEOUS PROSE POEM: “KALEIDOSCOPIC VISIONS”

A storm is screaming through the sky. The door is banging and the chimes are concocting a symphony. A bowl of oranges from my tree rattles on the table, green leaves sprawling outward like tentacles that reach out and yank memories from my mind: picking oranges and scattering poppy seeds, watching and waiting for beautiful things to grow up and out of the cold ground. I wonder if the poppies have bloomed, I wonder if they ever came up like you said they would, I wonder if they are all of my favorite colors and if they look like candy, I hope they do. I hope you get something sweet out of the bitter taste I left in your mouth.

Orange peels litter the table, their flesh devoured, my hands like predators peeling back layers of thick skin that took the earth months to construct, months to nourish. Juice slowly dripping down my forearms like hot candle wax as I rip each sliver from its loveR. Oranges bleed too. I let cold water strip my hands of their deeds, orange pulp falling off my fingers like tears that slide down the drain like secrets I’ll never tell. It’s cannibalistic what we do to fruit, what we do to each other. Spring will never not taste like innocence, where the earth is just beginning to breathe life into the things that we will harvest and devour the first chance that we get.

I only miss moments. Just moments. When i remember the rest, when I remember the truth, the reality, the real world, the planet I am living and breathing on and not the one that I am forever constructing in my mind—the illusion shatters. The pieces of it fall to the floor so that I can barely step anywhere without cutting myself on the shards. They stick to my feet and I feel them with every step.with every step I feel my whole life and everything it has and has not been. one time someone told me that I need to stop living in the past, that I needed to be there in that moment, the one that they were inside of, they wanted me to be there with them.

But what about all the tourists that flock to Rome, what about our cultural obsession with finding beauty in ruins? a part of me is always dancing through ruins, constructing metaphors for worlds I have long since left, my feet are still just getting used to this place. I am still just learning how to keep them both on the ground. sometimes i wish those years looked differently, but they stack inside of me like pieces that I can’t remove without collapsing the whole thing. and I think that the whole thing is kind of beautiful. like a mosaic, where all these broken pieces come together to create something larger than they ever were by themselves, where every person I have ever been is stacked inside of me like a set of Russian nesting dolls that I would not sacrifice for anything. 

JOIN THE FUN

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