The Process: The improv prompt

I keep daybooks as primary source material for making. In this case the image below shows most of the raw material that become the poem below, “SOFTEN:DAMPEN::HEARTEN:AMPLIFY”.  I use a daybook from Lihit Labs and Jet Pens that is refillable.  When I have filled a notebook, I mark with highlights what I think is noteworthy.  In this case I created an affirmation in the form of a blank playing card with the title in the form of an analogy from one of the items. I do loves me some calligraphy and the plastic-y surface of the card that I trace in pencil and follow with permanent black ink from my super cool pen, the indyGraph.  I follow that with a wash of food coloring ink (yes, you can do that).

The Process:  Yes…and

I follow up by aggregating and consolidating the various bits and bobs you see below.

These are in my “Morning Muse” notebook and are in a rough improvised italic calligraphy done with a Pelikan Script 1.5 nib and DeArgentis mint turquoise green ink. I glued the card into place a la Lynda Barry.  She inspires.

The Product: the drafted poem.

SOFTEN:DAMPEN::HEARTEN:AMPLIFY

The Voice: 

    How can I help you, World?

The World: 

    Help often.

    Make it about others not us.

    Your song,

    that is the offer

    you make the world.

    Let us know

    what you offer.

    It ain’t how great thou art,

    nor how great your art is

    or how much you have to offer,

    instead it’s that

    you have it to offer:

    your way of making,

    your why of taking note.

    Imagine the bigger world

    your song occupies, 

    its context,

    and have a problem live inside that song.

    Aware of how skeptical

    you should be,

    keep it brief,,,

    no, keep it right 

    and put handles on the pot.

    

The Voice:

          Life is shorter than you think.

         Even the worst day alive is …

         I suspect you know the rest of that cliche,

         but have you ever heard this analogy:

             As “soften” 

             is to “dampen”

             so

            “hearten”

             is to “amplify”

             Does that help, World? 

    The World:

        No.

        Don’t make foolproof statements.

        Come to grips with me

        without all the grammar and logic.

        Renegotiate the sacred liminal  

        spark between

        your thumb and pointer finger,

        or, really,

        just fuck off if you don’t need me,

        and chalk it up 

        to the calligraphy 

        of misunderstanding.

The Process: read and make connections with Ted Hughes’ quote below:

 

It’s possible, occasionally, for words to unlock our mind’s doors and your mind’s doors, to express some but not, to be honest, much.

Hughes describes this “crush of information”  as often as not is just a shard of something, the way a crow flies or a man’s gait, that represents a deeper complexity.  I think he gives us a concrete example, three in fact, of this shard:  something of the inaudible music in our bodies, something of the snowflake melting in the river, something of the ‘fleetingness’ and the ‘utter meaninglessness’ and the ‘almighty importance’.  The passage above bears witness to the work of poetry and writing in general so…we should bear witness to the words there over and over.  It is Frost’s secret in the middle.

When words work so well as these in a moment in time, they are a signature not to the many things, but to the one thing– being human.

Hughes defines this as poetry.  The closest metaphor I can think of is the asymptote.  The closest myth is Sisyphus.  We are constantly approaching the goal, but we never quite manage it.  Good enough, right?  Hughes implies it is not. Why?   Because sometimes words can manage something of a balance of chaos and insignificance and almighty importance.  That is what I am trying to do every time I pull a poem out of  my hat.  Sometimes we crash through the crush of information, across the threshhold of chaos and entropy, and we pull one whole and glorious something out of that hat, tattered and dusty as it might seem.

You must know by now I am a shepherd. That makes me a midwife and a husband.  Lambing is a messy business, full of amniotic fluid, blood, bleating, and goo.  All I can say is that even after 40 years of being this shepherd (and of course I also mean poet), I have broken through the asymptote a few times. I come clean and clear of the afterbirth never knowing whether I am the lamb or not.  I do know this: when my hand hits the gate and chain and I walk through to the lambing pasture I look up at the velvet sweet fabric of the heavens and I say every time, “I don’t have to do this, I get to do this.”