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.
Did you ever play the game Heads Up, Seven Up in school? It’s a classic rainy-day recess activity. Seven students go to the front of the classroom while everyone else closes their eyes and puts their heads down on their desks. Each of the seven students who are "it" go around the room, and tap one of the students at their desks. Then, after the teacher calls "Heads Up, Seven Up!" all the kids raise their heads and the seven who were touched have to guess who tapped them. It's very fun/devastating if you have a crush on someone in your class.
It’s also weirdly prudent preparation for adult life. Sometimes, you have your head down, totally in the dark and absolutely clueless, but you’re still expected to make decisions and guesses with pretty much no helpful input. At least in Heads Up, Seven Up, you can sort of peek at people’s shoes if you’re sneaky. Even then, though, you have to guess at so much. What are people’s motivations? Who, among this group, would want to choose me for anything? What does it mean when they do (or don’t)?
Also, the comment section in that YouTube video about this game is…so funny.
Today’s exercise is a little bit similar to this game, but also, no it isn’t. It’s ekphrasis in absentia, or a Magic Eye painting, or one of those illusion drawings that textbooks use to explain gestalt psychology. Instead of writing what we know, today, we will write what we don’t.
Exercise: Write What You Don’t Know
This exercise is a combination of two other exercises. One of them comes from the brilliant Wendy Wimmer, who lead a similar worskshop during a virtual conference from Barrelhouse (y’all should look into the in-person conference this April!). The other is pulled from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by CAConrad.
For this one, you’re going to need a random image. I encourage you to try Randm Flickr Pickr, which can give you a whole host of photos to choose from, a random selection from Wikimedia Commons, or Random Classic Art Gallery. More complicated photos might give you better results; searching the internet for “accidental Renaissance paintings” is a neat hack.
First, grab your timer, and pick a random image. The less familiar it is to you, the better.
Set the timer for 30 seconds and study the image in front of you. Pay close attention to the details: colors, composition, movement, characters, moods, any possible sources of sensory input. Look at it for 30 seconds and then, when the time is up, stop. You can cover your screen, or turn the image away from you.
Set the timer for one minute. While it counts down, write everything you remember from your image on a piece of paper. No detail is too big or too small!
When a minute is up, set the timer for 30 seconds again. We’re going to repeat the first step of this exercise. Stare at that image for 30 whole seconds!
Now, again, set the timer for one minute, and write out everything you remember. If you recall additional details about certain things in the image, add them to your existing entries. If you noticed anything new, write it down.
Set your timer for two minutes. Start a new list. For two minutes, look at your image and write down everything you forgot about it. Which details left your mind the moment you looked away? What did you get wrong? Are there any things you remembered that aren’t actually in the image?
Set your timer for five minutes. Using only the things you forgot or misremembered, compose a poem. If you must reference the parts of the image you remembered, try to do it obliquely, in a parenthetical or an aside. You can write to the people in the image; you can write in-character as the things or the people in the image; you can write about the feelings the image brings you; you can write about circumstances you imagine the image was created in. The biggest priority is that you focus your writing around the things that did not stand out to you the first time.
If you somehow remembered every single thing about the image you studied, try it with a new one. Or, hone in on details you left out of your initial description (particularly sensory ones!) which could be fodder for a poem.
In a poem, we convey attention, and that attention imbues things with meaning. This exercise will, I hope, help you find meaning where you least expect it, or create it where you never anticipated you would.