Monday Poetry Post: Gesture Drawing

Poetry lessons from a sculptor

Hi, and thanks for reading my Substack! 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.

Hi! Hello. This is my first real newsletter. It’s also my first time leading a poetry exercise via text, not live and in person, so please, if anything is hard to follow, reach out and let me know.

One of the best parts of being a writer is having friends who aren’t writers, or who haven’t dumped all their creative eggs into the writing basket. Did you know people can draw? Actually draw! And do a good job!!! Earlier this year I spent some time with a couple low-key, laid-back drawing groups. It was fun. But my drawings? Bad! And the whole time, I just wanted to be writing instead of drawing. When I try to write a sentence, I get a sentence. When I try to draw a horse, I get a mangled deer and an urge to write about it.

Trying any other art form just makes me want to write. Being a poet magnifies this effect. Over the past two years or so, I’ve given myself permission to think of myself as a poet instead of a person who has, unfortunately, written poems. It’s made my writing better, I think, and in some ways, more difficult. Even though my day job requires me to write in clear, concise, complete sentences, my brain puts everything through a fine sieve before it reaches the page, to remove all the Poem Chunks.

But this is not the reality for everyone. Some people aren’t poets, in the same way I’m not a painter. My friend Rebecca, for example, is a sculptor and an art teacher, and we find each other’s creative processes fascinating. During one of our conversations, she told me about gesture drawing, a way that visual artists practice capturing the human body accurately.

Loosely, it goes like this: you have a model. You take fifteen seconds, and you draw them. Obviously that fifteen-second drawing is going to be pretty sparse, but then, in the next step, you take thirty seconds and draw the model again. This time the drawing has more detail. You can repeat this process, Rebecca said, over and over again, adding more time to the process with each step, even reaching a full hour-long portrait sitting. And then at the end of it, you’ve practiced, and you’ve built a lot of different drawing muscles.

That’s when I had the idea for this exercise.

In a stroke of very good and Hattie-esque luck, shortly after I figured out the parameters of this activity, I got to put it into action. My friend Aleshia asked if I could teach a poetry workshop for a community group she leads in Arizona. It would be over Zoom, with people I didn’t know, who possessed a wide range of experience levels in writing and in poetry. Was I interested?

I was, and I came prepared with my own version of Gesture Drawing for Poetry. And guess what! At the end of our workshop, everyone had written a poem. Everyone, even me. This is a very easy way to write a whole poem, but you can also use it to generate ideas if an existing draft of a poem is giving you trouble. Actually, I used this exercise the other day, when I was working on a poem that needed one little piece to bridge two disparate sections. It worked beautifully for me and I hope you find it useful.

You’ll need something to write with/on (good news – you’re already on your computer or phone!). You’ll also need a timer. If you don’t have a novelty timer, more good news; your phone has tools for that too.

Recently, I came into possession of two novelty kitchen timers* that are shaped like a bee and a frog. Keri Bertino leads an excellent “Writing for Fuck-Ups” class that introduces dozens of ways to improve your writing practice. My experience has taught me that I will hew really, really close to a new accountability/focus/productivity method for up to five whole days before it becomes useless for six weeks. There are a few exceptions that work consistently. Timed writing sessions are one of them.

I bought the bee as a reward for having a spare $7 in my bank account. Before I left for my writing residency with Sundress Publications earlier this year, I received a package from my friend Tara. After consulting our mutual friends for feedback, she assembled a thoughtful care package to keep me on track during my time away. Among the gifts she sent was my little frog timer, which is both sturdier than my bee and a darling reminder of our quirky friend group. Now I have a “travel” timer and an “at-home” timer to keep things really interesting.

Exercise: The Gesture Drawing

Think about a “scene.” I’d prefer that this be a scene from your day. It can be a task you completed, or a walk/drive you went on, or a conversation you had. Boring is fine. In fact, boring is great.

If you did nothing today – like, really nothing, sat in bed with your eyes closed and earplugs in and a completely placid interior – maybe call a doctor? And if they say it’s okay to keep writing poetry, then think about a scene from a movie. Ideally, a movie you know by heart. One that feels like you’ve lived it.

Remember the physical experience of that scene. What did you notice during that time? What stood out to you? What received your attention?

In the next step, we’re going to generate a series of words and phrases.

You’ll see that I’ve divided this exercise into two halves. In the generative half, we’re focused on capturing what was in your scene. In the creative half, we’re re-organizing that scene – that experience you had – and constructing a poem with it.

You’ll set your timer four times in the capturing half.

• Set your timer for 1 minute.
  Using just nouns, list the things you saw/heard/smelled/felt/tasted in your scene.
      EX: the dishwasher, a Ford Focus, a dog

• Set your timer for 1 minute.
  Using nouns and adjectives, describe the things you saw/heard/smelled/felt/tasted.
      EX: the noisy dishwasher, a white 2016 Ford Focus with a missing bumper, your neighbor’s brown Labrador puppy

• Set your timer for 1 minute.
  Using nouns and verbs, describe the things you saw/heard/smelled/felt/tasted.
      EX: the dishwasher clanged, a Ford Focus drove by, the dog yipped and jumped

• Set your timer for 2 minutes.
  Using imagery, metaphors, and similes, describe the things you saw/heard/smelled/felt/tasted. These should be comparative statements.
      EX: the dishwasher clanged like a steam train, the white Ford Focus glided vampire-silent, the neighbor’s adolescent Labrador celebrated

Hi, and welcome to the halfway mark of writing a poem! Here is your Junior Pulitzer. You may print it out and tape it on your desk.

Now, this is the constructing half of the exercise. It’s time to write a poem.

• Set your timer for 5 minutes.
  Using the descriptions from the first half of this activity, describe your “scene” in a poem. That's not as tall an order as it sounds, I promise.
  Add in other “connecting” language as needed, and feel free to tweak the words and phrases you banked.

  • Don’t worry about form too much. If you want this to rhyme, rhyme. If you don’t care about that, don’t force it.

  • Experiment with lines and time. Maybe a brief moment from your “scene” gets a shorter line than an experience that took longer. Or maybe you draw out a tiny moment so we feel its significance.

  • Can you strip this poem to its very bare bones? Can you create a rhythm with the syllables to keep us moving through tiny glimpses of your day?

Depending on how you feel about your “scene,” your poem could look very different than someone else’s poem on the same subject. Here’s a good example of that.

The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Compare that poem to this, uh, similar one.

Red, Mary Ruefle

I fucking depended on you and
you left the fucking wheelbarrow
out and it’s fucking raining
and now the white chickens
are fucking filthy

Those are just two very short examples of extremely short, extremely valid, extremely well-regarded poems that are just A Thing That Happened To Me Today.

Okay. Set your timer. Write. When the timer goes off, congratulations! You wrote a poem. It doesn’t need to be a good poem, though it might be. When I first lead this exercise in a workshop I was amazed at the quality of work it produced, especially by first-time poets in the group.

I’ve written great poems and terrible poems through this exercise. The important thing is, I wrote those poems in ten minutes. That means, if I wanted to, I could devote one whole hour a week to doing this exercise and come away with six poems.

If I divided that hour up across my week, it would only take me ten minutes each day. That gives me one full day of doing ZERO writing and eating ALL the cheese fries I want. Pretty good!

(I am getting hungry enough that it’s time to stop writing this newsletter.)

My next post will go out at the end of the week – the Friday Dispatch. We’ll be talking about a fragrance I didn’t buy, a purse I accidentally did, and the grammar of music. Plus, you’ll receive a playlist to see you through the rest of November.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss out (please), or forward this email to someone who may enjoy it (thank you).

*I own three novelty kitchen timers. My chicken-shaped timer has lost its grip on time, rendering it a purely sentimental object. Happens to the best of us!