Nouns and verbs

Wednesday, December 9, 2020

“When you’re writing a song, nouns and verbs will carry you right through.”
—Chuck Berry

The first exercise in Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song is called a “Word Ladder.” (Not Lewis Carroll’s word game.) It goes like this:

Make a list of ten verbs related to some profession. (He uses a physician, I used a construction worker.)
Write down ten nouns within your field of vision.
Connect the words that don’t usually go together.

Here’s how it worked when I tried it:

Nothing that great, but that’s not the point. The point is to loosen up and play with language to get your brain going. Tweedy writes:

“I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities…. I find it almost always works when I’m feeling a need to break out of my normal, well-worn paths of language.”

“Nouns and verbs” is also the really basic advice I give to people who are trying out blackout poetry for the first time.

For example, here’s one I started by just underlining nouns and verbs that popped out at me:

And that led to this:

And seeing that, I realized with a little Photoshop cheat (is it cheating if there ain’t no rules?) I could “fix” it to this:

Not my best work, but, again, not the point. Plus, it only took me 10-15 minutes. (By the way, exercise #2 in Tweedy’s book is called “Stealing Words From A Book.” Stealing has, of course, always worked for me!) Give it a try next time you’re stuck.

Nouns and verbs, y’all. They’ll take you right through.

Related reading: “A bag of words” & “We are verbs, not nouns”

Scraps into poetry

Friday, May 8, 2020

While many writers are turning to the calm of collage as an escape from needing words, Hanif Abdurraqib is turning to self-collage and assembling his leftover scraps into poetry:

[I am] recycling my way toward a feeling of productivity. I copy and paste email responses that work across multiple inquiries. If I don’t feel up for making a morale-boosting lunch, I pile some leftovers into a bowl and hope for the best. I’ve found myself doing this with poems, as well. Piling leftovers onto the page and seeing what makes sense. I don’t throw away drafts of my poems. I keep them all in a folder on my computer. If I cared for something enough to write it, I care for it enough to imagine that it might be useful later.

About once a week, I’ve been digging through my folder of misfit poems and constructing new ones out of them. It’s like a joyful puzzle. The work of writing is already done. The work of arrangement is where the excitement is.

This is a fine method for artists of all kinds. A little hoarding goes a long way. You never know when a discarded scrap from something can be turned into something new. (Keep Going contains a whole section that didn’t fit into Show Your Work!)

Language made special

Wednesday, April 29, 2020

I like this description of poetry from John Carey in his book, A Little History of Poetry.

I’ve been thinking about another thing I love about poetry: its ability to change meaning, depending on the time and place and the person reading it. A poem that seems ho-hum one moment, seems perfect the next.

For example, here is a blackout I made in 2016:

I had completely forgotten that one. I shivered a little when I read it. (Burroughs thought writing could be a kind of time travel or crystal ball reading.)

Here’s another blackout I came across that was cut from the final manuscript of Keep Going, made in 2013, but made quite new on day 50 of our family’s quarantine:

And finally, via this morning’s POME newsletter, here is a page from Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit:

I also like how the demand for poetry changes depending on the times we’re in: You think you don’t need it… until you do.

To wonder rather than know

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Mary Ruefle, in a wonderful conversation with David Naimon:

I would rather wonder than know. It makes it more and more difficult to be alive on earth in these times, when your inclination is to wonder rather than to know.

I suppose the example that comes to mind is: it used to be if you were having dinner with people and someone said, “Who’s the fastest animal on earth?” An amazing conversation would ensue. And now someone pops their phone out and looks up the answer. And it breaks my heart….

I really, really don’t like it when people look things up on their iPhones…. I mean, sometimes, of course, I’m no idiot. The encyclopedic nature of the information that’s available is fantastic, but I would still rather wonder than know.

I think wondering is a way of inhabiting and lingering. There seems to be more dwelling. To dwell, inhabit, and linger. I’m interested in those things. And you can do that when you don’t know.

We tend to, as human beings, our impulse is, once we know, once we have the answer, we move on. So we’re constantly moving from one thing to the other. I would rather inhabit the question, or dwell. For me, that is the place I want to live in.

I have an encyclopedia at home. It never occurred to me there was ever anything wrong with it until my friend pointed out it was an Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1910 and it might be a little outdated. I still look things up in it! […]

My oldest son used to ask me questions and when I said I didn’t know the answer, he’d say, “Look it up on the Goggle!” It takes discipline, now, not to look things up immediately, but to sit and wonder…

Then again, when you do look things up, you find more things to wonder about.

Mary Ruefle on the joy of blackout poetry

Monday, March 23, 2020

I love, love, love this part of Mary Ruefle’s long conversation with Ron Charles when she talks about A Little White Shadow and how she makes her erasure poems. (Basically the White Out version of blackout poetry.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon)

Here’s how she says she gets started:

All the words rise up and they hover a quarter inch above the page. It’s like a field, and they’re hovering. I don’t actually read the page. I read the words, which is different. So I’m looking, and I see all the words. And I go in and I pick a phrase or a word that’s delicious that I really love.

On how much she loves doing them:

I find it meditative and I find it infuriating sometimes and challenging and I like the smell of the White Out — dreadfully toxic! Really toxic…. I love it. Oh, I love it so much. There is nothing like it on Earth. I’m crazy about it.

Despite the haters: