Broken-down Poetry | The personal blog of Lauren Deidra Sawyer

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

, I hear.

In Prose Style with Dr. Allison, we learned the importance of imitation writing. Three of the essays we wrote that semester were imitation pieces. I wrote a short story imitating As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, for example. It was about the death of the president and switched points of view all the time. It had the potential of being awesome.

Anyway, when you imitate someone’s writing, it’s not just about form. You aren’t just trying to use the same words as they or the same sentence structures. You’re taking on the mind of the writer. You adapt her philosophy.

It’s a lot of fun to do this, I tell you.

I’m trying it again right now with e.e. cummings/William Carlos Williams. I’m imitating both of them in a poem I’m writing. It’s very imagistic. Short. Lots of odd punctuation.

Why bother? Well, I realized that my best and favorite poems are ones that are different than how I usually write. I would never have written them if I were so stuck in my ways. You can’t be stuck in your ways. It’s great to have your own writing voice, but don’t let your devotion to it keep you from trying something new.

Scriptwriting Archive:
Broken-down Poetry, and what it means
The strenuous marriage of writing
Poetry as Therapy, pt. II
Imagination
Sh*tty First Drafts
Cross-train
Go get a life
Wishing writing could change me
Install me in any profession
Tell all the truth but tell it slant–
Poetry to creative nonfiction and back again

April 21, 2011 1 Comment

Poetry to creative nonfiction and back again

I read an essay earlier this semester in Creative Nonfiction about how you should write a poem before you write a CNF piece, to get all your thoughts out. Interesting. I’ve never tried it before–usually I do the opposite–but I’m trying it today. For my CNF portfolio, I’m basically starting fresh on a piece, except for this poem and a 300-word journal entry I wrote.

The essay I’m writing is about how I got to where I am in my poem. It’s going to open up with the scene in the poem, then go through and set up the how. I don’t know how this CNF piece is going to come out, but hey, it could be something.

—

(The line spacing is a little screwed up. So it goes.)

I should have stayed home

Five beers and fourteen cigarettes later:
“You’re the best girl.” I kiss the back of your
ear and pretend that I am.

You light your
fifteenth and watch me turn away. I smile
only to avoid that scrunched-face look you
give to me and, “Are you alright?” Of course.

You find my lie convincing enough to
turn your attention back to your friends. You
explicate your theology.

“Jesus
was not God of God, light of light.” A friend
responds, “I think he’d a’ smoked weed.” You laugh.
I cough. You squeeze my hand. I ignore you.

I attempt to contribute to the slurred
conversation of a couple of drunk
girls. (I laugh—it is all I know to do.)

But really I want you to notice how
uncomfortable I am without having
to ask. “I’m fine,” I say. I’m never fine.

—

April 16, 2011 Leave a comment

Tell all the truth but tell it slant–

When it comes to writing news stories, you need to tell the whole truth clearly, precisely.

When it comes to writing reports, you do the same.

When it comes to writing creative nonfiction, you tell all the Truth but tell it slant.

—

I’ve been working on a poem for a few weeks, but have been wary about posting it because it’s personal, messy, rant-ish. But it’s True.

Like most normal families, mine is going through a crisis of some sort. I write in order to process it. I feel the need to post it, maybe for my own release or maybe to help others. Who knows.

All I know is that, like creative nonfiction, when you write poetry, it’s best to tell the truth slant-ly.

—

The broken law, w/t

Step-motherhood has few rules—keep the kids alive
is one and you nearly broke it that time
you picked me and my brother and my best friend
up from youth group drunk and laughing
and you told me to drive
I was fifteen but I did it because you weren’t hitting
the brakes when you should have and
it scared me.

I loved you when I was seven and you always kept your candy
bowl full of Whoppers and you’d convince Dad to take us out
for lunch and you’d let me and my brother go on adventures
without parents whenever you were around
we had fun.

You loved my writing and I let you read it more than I let
my mother which made her cry once but you thought
I was the best and you didn’t know enough to correct
my grammar or call my writing “religious” like my mother
did because you knew how much I hated that word—
religious.

I used to sit on your bed and ask you
what the Bible said about dinosaurs or what it said about pride
the good kind like for America
you taught me Christianity was a relationship
when you used the name Jesus so affectionately
(which I later grew to hate because it sounded cheaper
that way but at the time I loved it because it sounded like
he was your best friend and I wanted a Jesus best friend too—
not a religion).

And one of those days you called my sister an atheist
because she was unsure of what she believed and
you told her how our mother is going to hell because she’s
a Jew and God no longer loves Jews the way he used to
so we need to pray for her
and me—I need to pray for my sister
because if she keeps this up she’s going to hell along
with the rest of my friends who don’t go to church anymore
I asked you what grace is and you said
you didn’t know.

Sometimes my roommate smells like you or wears her lipstick
like you do and it gives me a sick feeling in my stomach
because I don’t want to be around you I don’t want to
answer your calls or listen to your voicemails because it
reminds me how I stopped caring about you and your
problems.

I know I should be sad that you’re leaving us but
I’m not really that sad more like relieved
because my dad can drink his beer again
and my sister can be an agnostic again
and I can call Jesus affectionate names without feeling like
I’m cheapening him.

—

April 14, 2011 Leave a comment

an e.e. cummings prayer (“i thank You God for most this amazing”)

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any–lifted from the no

of all nothing–human merely being

doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

—

Happy first 80 degree day of the year!

April 10, 2011 Leave a comment

Bird by bird by bird

“… Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was a at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.

“Then my father sat down beside him, but his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'” – p. 19 Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

—

Dear friends, we’re going to make it through this semester.

March 28, 2011 Leave a comment

Install me in any profession….

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.
– Ezra Pound’s “The Lake Isle”

—

No kiddin’, Ezra.

—

It’s getting to that point in the semester when I’m looking at my to-do list and most of it involves writing. I have an explication essay for American Poetry due soon. I have a news script to write for Tuesday. I have a big research paper I haven’t started, and another I’m not even going to attempt until a few days before it’s due.

My brain is fried.

But, I keep chugging on. Sometimes all you gotta do is write anyway — whether it turns into a masterpiece or just an Anne Lamott-style shitty first draft.

Here’s to writing.

Lauren

March 27, 2011 Leave a comment

Wishing writing could change me

Sometimes I think my writing can change me. And it always can, but only to a certain extent.

I want writing to bring me peace about a situation, but it’s only temporary. I think of my smoking poem from last month. I used it to implore my boyfriend to stop smoking. He still smokes, and I no longer have peace.

It’s not that I wanted the poem to change him. (I mean, yeah, a little.) I wanted it to make me feel better about the situation because at least I understood why I felt the way I did.

I want writing to revive my dry faith. I want to write a poem about how I feel about God (see “Eli, Eli“) and get myself out of my rut.

But, it doesn’t work like that. Writing helps, but it’s not a world changer.

Still, I wish it were.

—

Everything I Am

love&hate

together

bid farewell

to sanity

adieu, adieu—

here’s everything I am

It’s yours or fire

—

Scriptwriting Archive:
Broken-down Poetry, and what it means
The strenuous marriage of writing
Poetry as Therapy, pt. II
Imagination
Sh*tty First Drafts
Cross-train
Go get a life

March 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Go get a life

At a panel discussion with top literary magazine editors at the College Media Advisers NYC conference Monday, a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke came up. You’ve heard it before: “Write what you know.” One of the editors pointed out that Rilke didn’t stop there. He said, right what you know, but if you don’t have anything to write about – go get a life.

Let’s be honest here: I don’t have much of a “life.” Forgetting my Iraqi escapade, I’ve lived my whole life in the Midwest, I have a normal family, I go to college. I don’t have a lot of interesting things to write about.

So. What do I do?

I get a life. I find adventures to write about.

But I don’t think that means I have to travel abroad every summer either. I think I can find adventure here (okay, I’m in New York as I write this. Here as in Marion). I think that if I look hard enough (or broad enough) I can find adventure wherever I am.

I just need to find the excitement in the ordinary, everyday.

It’s not that I have to lie and pretend something’s exciting like I do on Twitter. (Whoa! #awesome sandwich I’m eating! #yummy!) I can just have a different perspective on something.

This trip I’m on, for example, has been quite the adventure. School trips are, in theory, supposed to be kind of lame. Or typical.

Well, we’re staying at a church in a rougher part of Brooklyn with the kindest church members taking care of us. We’re a group of students with very diverse personality traits. We have gotten lost who knows how many times. Our internet is shoddy, so we’ve been improvising with our homework. (I’ve had to dictate an email to my boyfriend over the phone so he could write and send it for me.)

It’s been an adventure.
And it’s something to write about.

So, in response to the Rilke quote, I’d say, yes. Find adventure. But don’t assume adventure only involves foreign countries, passionate romances or danger.

Adventure could be right in front of you.

Scriptwriting Archive:
Broken-down Poetry, and what it means
The strenuous marriage of writing
Poetry as Therapy, pt. II
Imagination
Sh*tty First Drafts
Cross-train

March 17, 2011 Leave a comment

Screaming alongside us

Eli, Eli

My God, my God,
why do I forsake you

while I hang on the cross
of my screw-you, my hell-no,

my let’s-just-get-this-over-with,
my it-couldn’t-get-worse-than-this,

my lies, my leanings and inclinations
toward the better-for-me-worse-for-you?

You’re the only one who gets it.
You scream alongside me—

but I can’t hear you.

—

“Isn’t it wonderful? It makes all the difference to know there’s someone else screaming alongside you — and that’s the point of the incarnation. I can see that so clearly now. God came into the world and screamed alongside us.” — Drops Like Stars, p. 68

March 1, 2011 2 Comments

Cross-train

So I write a lot — go figure, I’m a writing major. But, I don’t spend a lot of time writing for fun. As outlined in my last Scriptwriting blog post, I do a lot of everything for my classes, but I don’t have a lot of time or energy to write for fun.

Last Sunday I got to. I got most of my homework done for Monday and Tuesday, so I spent the day writing poetry. Some of it turned out interesting.

I’m not entirely finished with the following poem. I think its metaphor was lost a little. But I’ll let you read it. (You’re welcome.) Ha.

—

Like the birds

You pointed up at a bird perched and

showed me how

its feathery neck moves in          jerks—

sharp, decisive

on a pivot

because its eyes are stationary

without periphery.

You pointed back at us and

said the same thing

about human eyes:

how they move like a bird’s neck, in          jerks—

always trying to focus.

I find this particularly entertaining

that as you tell me this,

I do whatever I can to avoid          you—

I look every which way in jerks,

sharply, decisively

to avoid your glance.

I dream of flying away.

—

As I began writing this post, I wanted to pose a goal for myself: write a poem a day. As I thought about it, I decided to shorten that to a poem a week. Then, I gave up on the goal completely. Do I have time?

I should make time.

Like anything else, writing gets better with practice. And like anything, variety is key. When you exercise your body, you don’t spend all your energy on one set of muscles. Even those training for marathons cross-train.

I need to cross-train my writing. That may mean putting aside my homework to slave over a poem — but that’s okay. (I’d probably rather being doing that anyway.)

Lauren

Scriptwriting Archive:
Broken-down Poetry, and what it means
The strenuous marriage of writing
Poetry as Therapy, pt. II
Imagination
Sh*tty First Drafts

February 28, 2011 Leave a comment

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