Dear SunWinkers:

Years ago, I was struggling with deep depression, divorce, custody battle, blah blah blah. I started writing poetry as a form of therapy. I would usually begin by doing some automatic writing in my journal, just writing the next word that came into my head without thinking about it, and before you know it, there I would be, writing a poem.

Not too long ago, I wrote an experimental poem, just a goof, really, called “Listening In.” The idea was to “record” (not literally, the poem was a deliberate composition) what I heard and saw and what was going through my mind as I watched a Chicago White Sox broadcast with Ken “Hawk” Harrelson and Steve Stone. The poem leaps from inner thought to external action to thought to action to thought to action.

So, in a way, this is what is called stream of consciousness writing. Stream-of-consciousness writing differs from automatic writing in that the author composes the stream of thought that is putatively going through the character’s head. S-o-c writing eschews punctuation and sentence structure, hurtling along from thought to fragmentary thought. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Jack Kerouac are notable practitioners.

Robert Bly has coined the term leaping poetry, for writing which leaps willy-nilly between thought and action, or from the literal scene to the underlying metaphorical or spiritual content of the image. So “Listening In” incorporates that idea as well, not that it’s anything very profound:

 

In such techniques as these, interesting effects result from the juxtaposition of radically different images, subject matter, or points of view. The academicians call these effects associational logic. What I mean to do today is to encourage you to use this sort of technique to free up your writing and discover the poetic effects that can result from

• the rapid free association of disparate images and
• dispensing with the logic of
  • grammar
  • sentence structure
  • overall structure or shape, and
  • denotation or surface meaning of words and sentences.

Here are some more examples.

In Beloved by Toni Morrison, one of the characters has a conversation with two imaginary characters inside her head:

I was going to help you but the clouds got in the way.

There’re no clouds here.

If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away, Beloved.

I will make you a round basket.

You’re back. You’re back.

Will we smile at me?

Can’t you see I’m smiling?

I love your face.

© Toni Morrison

 

Bly, who has published translations of a number of his poems, cites Pablo Neruda as a “leaping poet.” To my mind, this one could be describing a painting by Salvador Dali:

from “Melancholy Inside Families”

I keep a blue bottle.

Inside it an ear and a portrait.

When the night dominates

the feathers of the owl,

when the hoarse cherry tree

rips out its lips and makes menacing gestures

with rinds which the ocean wind often perforates—

then I know that there are immense expanses hidden from us,

quartz in slugs,

ooze,

blue waters for a battle,

much silence, many ore veins

of withdrawals and camphor,

fallen things, medallions, kindnesses,

parachutes, kisses.

[…]

Pablo Neruda

trans. © Robert Bly

 

Bly has also translated (here, with James Wright) the work of lesser-known Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo:

from “Poem To Be Read and Sung”

            I know there is someone

looking for me day and night inside her hand,

and coming upon me, each moment, in her shoes.

Doesn’t she know the night is buried with spurs behind the kitchen?

[…]

Cesar Vallejo

trans. © Robert Bly and James Wright

 

Jack Kerouac is today lumped in with the Beat Poets, but in actuality he precedes them slightly and inspired many of them:

from “Mexico City Blues, 211th Chorus”

[…]

Vast boars and huge gigantic bull

Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,

Pones and Porcupines and Pills—

All the endless conception of living beings

Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness

Throughout the ten directions of space

Occupying all the quarters in & out,

From supermicroscopic no-bug

To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell

Illuminating the sky of one Mind—

Poor! I wish I was free

of that slaving meat wheel

and safe in heaven dead.

 © Jack Kerouac

 

One final note: our Aussie friend and colleague Irina Dmitric-Stojic tried to respond to my Cut and Shuffle prompt of last week. What flowed out of her pen was something quite different, and that’s terrific. That’s the way it works! The delightful result, as it happens, has much of the flavor of the stream-of-consciousness and leaping poetry we’ve been looking at: “A Poem Is Like An Orange”

 

The Prompt

Read the examples and let them inspire you to write something in a similarly improvisatory vein. If you’re having trouble getting started, start by doing some automatic writing. Write the next word that pops into your head, and the next, and the next. Don’t think about what you’re writing. At some point, the first line of your poem will hopefully pop out of your pencil and rap you on the head, the second line will write itself, and you’re off and running.

Alternate Prompt

Find a painting by Salvador Dali, such as “The Persistence of Memory” (Google it), in a book or on the web. Make up a little story about or involving what you see. Then write it up as a short short story or a poem. Or write the story and chop it up into a poem. Or write the story, chop it into 4-6-word chunks, then eliminate every other line, and make that your poem.

 

And don’t just read me! (Heaven forbid!) Look up the authors mentioned and read more of their work. Google the terms italicized above.

Post your response on your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. If you don’t have a blog, put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to.

Then comment to this post with the link to your response.

I reblog this column at WritingEssentialGroup.com (you should be following that blog, too) and will post the links to your responses there. I will also comment on all responses.

Please don’t put your responses in a comment here on the SunWinks! blog. It won’t travel to the WEG group along with the post. (Okay, I confess, if you simply must put it in a comment, if it’s just not worth the trouble otherwise, I can link to it in a pinch. But it’s much preferable if clicking the link takes the reader to your blog.)

Finally, if you enjoy this, please be a good citizen and share this with your own friends and poetry circles.

Love,

Doug

 

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.