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.
Yay! Hi! I missed you! I know I’ve been emailing you every business day for a full month, but I missed doing this. Coming up with a prompt, showing it to you, hoping it’s helpful, and – often – getting a text or email days later with a poem attached.
Today’s poetry exercise is inspired, in part, by last week’s essay on my fear of flying. One of the countless anti-anxiety methods I tried during Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Flights was a classic “grounding exercise.” Some people call it the 54321 technique or the five-senses technique. You name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. It's a great way to ground yourself during a panic attack.
Of course, when you’re scared of flying, you want the PILOTS to be doing the GROUNDING! Hey-oh!!!!
Anyway, it didn’t work. It turns out using this technique on a plane just reminded me I was…on a plane. The things I could feel were usually “uncomfortable airplane seat,” “plane bumping around,” “person’s hand I have in a vice grip,” and “my own heartbeat throbbing so hard it rattles my brain stem.” I’ve successfully used this technique in other scenarios, though, and I think I know how we can adapt it for writing.
So, when you’re using this exercise to stop or stave off anxiety, you’re reminding yourself to be present, and focusing on what is real and tangible, not the hypothetical worst-case scenarios you’re fixating on. For poetry reasons, we will be breaking this tool. Instead, we’ll be “grounding” ourselves in imagined places. Maybe they’re remembered, maybe they’re totally manufactured. Maybe it’s even a sitcom house you know by heart (sometimes I walk myself through Mary Richards’ apartment building to fall asleep). But the idea is to ground yourself in those spaces, through language.
Not to be super, super woo, but let’s take it a step further. What if you want to write a poem about a place, and use it as a mantra? Let’s say you write a “grounding exercise” poem about your dream writing desk, then recite it before you sit down to write anywhere. It’s a little ritual to put yourself in the imaginary “perfect desk,” even if you’re trying to work from a hotel room, or your incredibly messy living room table. Or, if you want, you can write some grounding poems about a place you miss. You can even write several poems about one place, at different times. I could easily write different grounding poems about my Gram Cracker’s house at Christmas, Fourth of July, Halloween, and a Monday afternoon. You can write one, or a series - it’s up to you. And maybe next time you fly, you can recite your poem to distract from the turbulence and ground yourself in a friendlier memory.
Exercise: Grounding Yourself
Grab a sheet of paper or a word processor or, heck, a text message to yourself. I’ve gotten more and more lax about where I write my drafts, and I think that’s a good thing.
Go into your imagination. Put yourself in a specific place – it doesn’t have to be “real” but a strong, detailed image is best. If you have reference photos, use them.
List five things you can “see” from where you’re sitting in your imagined place. They can be objects, people, the view from the window, specific titles on a bookshelf, anything. You can be as detailed or as limited as you want. I personally like to do a mix. A juxtaposition like “a small blob of pearlescent white nail polish dried on the edge of the glass table” and “Joan’s favorite shoes” is interesting.
Take a few deep breaths between each step. It will help “reset” your senses.
List four things you can feel.
List three things you can hear.
List two things you can smell.
List one thing you can taste.
When you finish, take a look at your list. Add in or tweak any descriptions that might boost the imagery here – maybe you notice “the smell of salt air” and “a rainbow fish dress” both appear, so you decide to create a more aquatic throughline. My one structural recommendation is to keep this “narrowing” order of senses. I think it’s powerful to move down to a sharp point, so if you need to swap where taste and sound go in the order, that’s fine; just keep that 54321 structure because it will render the final image in more vibrant detail.
You can get wild with the format, too. Maybe you want a long, single paragraph, a prose poem of sorts. Or maybe you want lists/columns, or an actual triangle shape. Now is the time to get creative!
Hey! Good to be back. I’m going to keep writing this week, even if it’s not a poem each day, and I hope you do too. Happy Monday and thanks for tuning in, dear readers.