poetry, daily: 4

Writing exercise: What is the particular geography of the place you love? What are its most intimate, actual, physical, material details?

This time, play with the physical largeness of the poem. Make yourself use lines that go all the way across the page (with or without breaks in the middle). Use the white space to create meaning. Start lines from both margins. For example.

Create a picture of this place you love, including the things you can't say or that are too big to say. These things might take the place of narrative or imagistic gaps, formal play with white space, punctuation, etc.

See you tomorrow!

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

poetry, daily: 3

Writing exercise: imagine you've come home and someone has moved all your furniture.

A beautiful poem: "Sweet Habit of the Blood" by Sarah Gridley in Cerise Press 1.3.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

poetry, daily: 2

A poem can be just a moment. It doesn't have to tell a grandiose story, or travel vast distances. Mostly the things close to home, the physical things we know and can touch, are what will touch others (and ourselves on rereading).

Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Métro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

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Writing exercise:

Take public transport this weekend. While you're waiting for it (or while riding it, or after you alight), take note of the things you see. Write a short poem from this experience.

See you Monday!

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.

poetry, daily: 1

What is a writing exercise?

A writing exercise is a suggestion from outside the writer for a direction, image, form, or prompt for writing. It is not rule-bound. It is not prescriptive. In the best of times, the writing exercise may be best served by the writer's ignorance of it, transgression of its boundaries, or contradiction of its instructions.

What is a writing exercise for?

A writing exercise is not only to train the writer to respond in the moment to a particular stimulus which interrupts and then disappears from or is integrated into the flow of the unnoticed daily, but to train the writer to see the processes, projects, anticipations, exaggerations, possibilities, disappointments, and travels of everyday life as a continual source of that sort of stimulation; to transform the parts of life which we regularly overlook into instances of the surreal, the poignant, the bizarre, the beautiful. In short, the writing exercise exists to train the writer in attentiveness to the moment and openness to all the linguistic, imagistic, and relational possibilities inherent in it.

See you tomorrow.

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All work here © 2010 and onward to me, Eireann Lorsung. Please do not reproduce my words in any form in print or online. If you wish to excerpt parts from the month of poetry featured here, please contact me: ohbara at gmail dot com.