I just noticed that I commented on the same persons journal two weeks in a row, so I thought I had better look through all the journals again a little more closely.
Michael writes this wonderful piece about what he loves in week 2 free write
I remember the girl on our team,
messy brown hair halfway down her back,
missing teeth she could whistle through.
She wasn't the best player-that was the older boy
whose brother got his nose broken by a stray grounder-
she played right field by default.
We'd make faces at each other across the green.
Michael I really liked the ease an colloquial nature of this whole poem, but when revising I would hone in on these two very vivid characters. I really like the way the older boy is characterized in relation to what happens to his brother, Looking over the chapters in writing poetry about expansion and chapter two in the writing experience about a person / character in action, one probably would find another excellent poem just on these two vivid characters alone. I appreciate your sensible whimsical approach. Something I wish I could capture.
Everything I write seems to move towards death and war and pretentiousness of all sorts. Even when I used the listings exercises from the first chapters of writing poetry, and my own children's cute sayings, I still wound up with a poem about world war II, talk about done to death prentense. The familiar is far more interesting for me to read. I just can't seem to write that way-yet.
What works for me is starting very small. This is literally cut from something that happened to me-I played baseball, I wasn't good at it, we had a cute girl on the team. Literally that was it. As I wrote on this, I started pulling in some real details as I remembered them-like the older boy and his brother, and some fake ones to keep it away from the urge to do justice to the source material (like Hugo says). My dad really never yelled at me, but plenty of other kids' dads did, right? And our generation all got trophies for participating.
ReplyDeleteI might be digressing here though.
I try to keep the language in a place where if I were telling you the story here's how it would go. Memories are funny because they are spotty-you remember stuff in bursts and during the retelling you might break chronological order and logistic sense to make the point or connections you would want to make. And you remember little details you missed, too.
The last part is in the jargon you use-I threw in stray grounder, right and left field, dugout, etc. because that is baseball lingo, it puts you there immediately without every saying "this is baseball (Although I started with this is Baseball, didn't I?)"
So I would say to you to take a memory and just tell us the story surrounding it first (and be spotty and disconnected and make as little narrative sense as possible), then get in there and poeticize it.
And I very much appreciate the nod.
Great conversation, you two. Jeff, I would say, write about the war, if you like. But don't WRITE ABOUT THE WAR. That is, let your interests color the work, but keep the work away from that subject. Remember that we spoke about that dynamic last week. If you just won a million dollars, then a drab, muggy day will seem absolutely lovely to you. If you were traumatized while fighting in a war, watching Sunday morning cartoons--that are often quite violent--will seen awful, horrible.
ReplyDeleteSee how your emotional state colors the way you look at the world. Poetry often tries to capture that coloring.