Monday Poetry Post: Textbook Example

Sit down, class. Open up your textbooks to page 42.

Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.

If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.

AHHH one of those “writing is magic” things happened! Oh yay, oh no! Always so weird when my Writing Brain¹ allows another person’s creativity to brush against and infiltrate its surface.

My friend Tara primed this to happen. She and I spent the weekend working on our writing, talking about different projects, swapping pages, discussing our processes, and also eating a coffee crumb cake. On Sunday, we both tuned in to a virtual workshop led by Melissa Broder, author of novels Milkfed and The Pisces. You may also know Melissa from her book of essays (and her Twitter account), So Sad Today. The first hour of the workshop was dedicated to discussing the drafting process, while the second hour touched on editing and eventually publishing your work.

At one point in her discussion of generative practices, Melissa, who has a background as a poet, talked about ekphrasis. That’s where you write a poem about a different piece of visual art – a painting or a movie, say. But Melissa expanded that idea further (something that always makes me happy!!!) – she encouraged us to use “anything within our sensory periphery” as fodder for ekphrastic exercises, giving a prose example with a scene from Milkfed.

Then, she pointed us toward a portion of her provided list of companion texts that included a word I’d never seen: stichomancy. As a divination practice, stichomancy is picking up a text and turning to a page, trusting that the page you turn to will answer the question you ask. As a writing² practice, stichomancy is doing that, then writing your way into answering the question. Maybe you pick up a book of short stories and write something inspired by whatever’s on page 33. Or you pick up a dictionary and you choose a letter, a word, a definition at random, and there it is, your inspiration.

Here’s where the weird brain-blurry thing happens. This is what I had planned to write about. Stichomancy. Before Tara and I tuned into this workshop on Sunday, I was going to write about picking up a dictionary and turning to a word and writing a poem with it. Then Melissa Broder taught me this thing I liked to do has a name. Of course, I had to come back and adjust this newsletter to tell you that.

I’ve noticed that these brain-meldy things occur more frequently when I’m collaborating (this sounds like a duh but hold on). When I center my life around creativity, regardless of “where” I’m creating, every aspect of my life becomes more creative.

Let me use my originally-scheduled anecdote to tell you what I mean. For almost two years now, I’ve been part of a small writers’ group, born of a novel workshop at 92Y that reduced down, over time, into more intimate, biweekly page exchanges. In September of 2021, these friends – who I had not yet met in person – came over to my apartment (except Danny, who lives in Kansas City, and Zoomed in). We ate vegan appetizers, and cake and wine and Mountain Dew, and sat in my living room for hours and talked with my cat.

There’s an enormous dictionary in my apartment, which I keep on a special stand, the kind of affectation you stubbornly wedge into your life until it just becomes a facet of your personality. When people come over, I like to ask them to open the dictionary to a spread and pick a word. Then, I try to guess which word they chose.

On this day, I had everyone open the book and pick a word at random. My idea was that I would write all the words on my whiteboard and then write a poem with them later. The people in this group are primarily novelists, not poets, but it seemed like a fun new way to bridge my writing worlds. My friend Cole was first, and he went to the dictionary, and he picked a word. He picked incarnadine./

I froze in my seat, and then I stood up, went to my bedroom, and brought back Incarnadine, a book of poems by Mary Szybist which happens to be one of my favorites. In fact, when I wrote the first draft of my novel, I placed a poem from Incarnadine as an epigraph within the text. But none of these friends knew that.

Something did, though, some creative force that rewarded me for having willing friends and an overweight dictionary and stacks of poetry books all in my apartment at once.

Exercise: Stichomancy Isn’t Dead

OooooooOoooooh, for this poetry prompt you’ll need a poetry PROP!

Grab a book. Any book. Better yet grab two. Or eight! I mean, I don’t know, how picky are you, how restless? This one’s straightforward. You don’t even really need a timer, but it could be fun for variety.

• Choose a number X (the ceiling can vary based on the length of the book nearest you, but if you want a general rule, something between 1 – 100 should work).

• Open your book to that page number. Choose another number X (for you rule-followers, make this one between 1 and 20). Find the Xth line on the page.

• Look at that line and take what you need. Maybe you need to borrow a phrase, or maybe there’s a description of something, an image you’d like to write toward – a little bit of ekphrasis, if you will. You can erase parts of the line. You can lift it wholesale or chop it up. You can just take the punctuation if the punctuation is something that might help you.

• You can simply write a poem with whatever you find on that page, but if you want more direction…well!

• Grab your timer. Set it for one minute.

  • Choose a number. Open a book to page number X, then write down a word or phrase from that page. Keep writing once you’ve exhausted the provided text – keep going, free-association style, until your timer goes off.

  • Repeat four more times, for a total of five minutes, with different pages (same book or different).

• Grab your timer. Set it for five minutes.

  • Over these five minutes, take your “bank” of language and use all these lines to create a poem. Maybe you’ll end up using none of the lines you lifted with stichomancy, or maybe you’ll create a shockingly cohesive poem based on five lines from five books. Maybe none of the phrases you came up with in the generative section will make it into the draft, but whatever you write was inspired by what you read.

To make things easier on you, I grabbed some books I had immediately at hand (or open in Libby/Kindle/Apple Books) and copied down random lines/phrases. Because I am a child, they are all from page 69.

• “Hardened as they had become, they had small albeit real joys…” – The Best American Essays 2022, from Jung Hae Chae’s essay The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’Etat, and the Small Dreamers

• “Permit me this reprieve/ allow – / bestow –+ / That dying may earn the look” – Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems

• “Before I go for my quick coffee-scald and to the corral…” – Rattlesnake Country, Robert Penn Warren, from The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

• “…she imagined a snowstorm, something that kept everyone in their homes for three days, that during the lulls, everyone would open their windows to talk, and you could hear every voice as though it were inches away…” – my own novel draft

• “He must do it for love, I think.” – School for Love, Olivia Manning, which I’m reading as part of Kim McNeill’s #NYRBWomen23 quest on Twitter.

  Kim McNeill •📚🌿☕️ @joiedevivre9

  One of my 2023 reading projects is to read at least two @nyrbclassics written by women per month. Here’s my stack & schedule. Anyone is welcome to join for whichever books are of interest. Let me know if you want me to add you to the list. First up is Olivia Manning. #NYRBWomen23

  

  

Hey! Thanks for reading. Thanks Tara and my novel workshop friends and Melissa Broder for massaging my brain.

If you have time this week, could you please do me a favor? Could you fill out this Google Survey and tell me what you think about this newsletter – what’s working, what’s not, what you want more of, what has resonated the most with you so far? It’d be a big help for me as I plan the next several months of content.

Whether you have the time for a feedback form or not this week – I’ll see you on Friday with a brand-new dispatch. Have a great week ahead!

1. My Writing Brain is a larger, looser creature than the Doing Brain that deploys most of my daily tasks. My Writing Brain is a huge jellyfish, maybe the lion’s mane jellyfish, absorbent and amorphous, dragging long tentacles of sensation in its wake. My Doing Brain is a kangaroo rat, or a very small shrew. It would like to get everything done and go back to the hole.

2. What is poetry if not inefficient, incomprehensible divination?