Invented, borrowed, and combined forms 🦴 / lyric threads lab: week 5 of 7
Writing in form and anti-form, and writing with other people's language bits
Follow along for the next 3 weeks as the first lyric threads lab discusses, writes, examines, and de-constellates lyric poetry and lyric essays. We will practice writing in new ways. We will offer transformative responses to one another in an intimate container. Here, on Substack, I (the guide, the host, the gardener) will detail what we discuss for you and share our generative writing activities.
🌩️ lyric threads lab [the cloud cohort] 🌩️ Week Four:
This week, we’re looking closely at poetic forms and how the shape of a poem allows for lyrical threads within it. Our book of inspiration is OBIT by Victoria Chang.
In the last winter quarter of my MFA, I focused on finding the motor and the container for my poems. I was clear on my impetus and on my process which seemed to be the same: much of my writing begins as a channeling experience.
For me, the language often is not consciously delivered, and the sensation of that possibly-mystical experience is what brought me to writing most of the time.
This clarity was deepened while I was in independent study with Feminist lit scholar Dr. Logan Greene where we focused on close study of women’s voices in Medieval literature, most of which were visionary or mystical texts. In that quarter, I wrote visionary poems and explications in the style of medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. At that time, weekly discussions with Dr. Greene and my office-mate Claire Poshusta paired with William Stafford’s assertions that poetry is best when it is full of surprise for the writer in the process helped me feel confident that my entirely not-conscious experience with first drafting wasn’t working against me.
So, receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses. — William Stafford, A Way of Writing
So, that quarter I sought ways to revise my freely drafted language into containers, or by using a filter. At the beginning of the quarter, I focused much of my writing on a longform narrative that might be called a novel written in prose poems (still in process, and very close to completion as I type this). It was once I found the container, or filter, of a narrative, the prose poems flew out of me. I drafted over 80 passages in 10 weeks and I found them as clear as they were exciting in their use of language. This hasn’t happened for my poetry before. I wonder if this is because I have a background in writing long form narrative: almost 10 years of writing screenplays, plays, and novels. The motor in my comfort zone is that of the 3-Act structure or Syd Field’s narrative arc for screenwriters.
Even today, I taught first year college students about the monomyth and approaching writing academic essays inside this framework. A very screenwriter way to instruct young people on how to write academically, no?
So, how do I find a motor or container for a single poem?
How do I create a clarity of rhetorical structure in a “revelatory distillation of experience,” as Audre Lorde describes the poetic form?