Dictionary

This week, I put the suitcase away for the month of May.  Which is pretty dazzling and exciting.  I have been looking forward to having a Saturday to myself to read and write and drink coffee and move slowly, the way I can only when I know there will be another unclaimed Saturday on the horizon.  I have a stack of books to annotate, and a stack of books to read.  I have my big, heavy, old, dictionary–how its weightless pages add up to such heft is a mystery. I have things to think about, and I’m standing at the edge of a poem I can’t wait to dive into.

I’ve been reading Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split this week, order it. I came across an interview with her, and this was what I needed:

You talk a lot about writing in the “in between,” being impartial without standing on a soapbox. How do you do that, especially when writing about such horrific events?

Because rage doesn’t make poetry. And I think that if you’re a poet and you’re an artist, you know this—that rage makes rage. Nobody wants to hear your rant. If you want to rant and if you want to be full of rage, you can put that in your journal book. Art is about the provocative, but it is also about the beautiful. I never forget that. They go hand in hand for me.

I know what it takes, having done this for as long as I have, that sometimes you have to wait it out. You have to go for a walk, you have to go for a bike ride; you have to wait 48 hours for something to pass. I call it sometimes finding a window instead of a door. You know a door is right in front of you and it’s got the wall, and all you do is open it and walk through, but a window is over there, and it has a certain plan of life, and sometimes you have to climb up on something to get through it. There’s a little more task involved. So I’m always looking for a window in terms of writing things and figuring out what I want to say about them.

I’ve been feeling rushed and impatient in my writing for some weeks now. There have been a bunch of things that I need to write because of deadlines, and then there have been a bunch of thoughts stewing that I hadn’t found the right words or access point for. I’ve been jotting down notes the entire month of April and finally yesterday the window appeared. I got a kind of nasty look (plus a snide remark) from a yoga teacher because I sat up from half-pigeon and wrote the thoughts down. Ask me if I give a fuck whether this dude thinks I’m relaxed enough. If I don’t respect these poems nobody else will.

Make some time to listen to your thoughts this week.  That’s all.  Pick a word–open up the dictionary, and pick the first word that resonates with you, then write what you know about that word. Maybe start with copying out the dictionary definition. Then write down all of the things you know about that topic. Then stop. Go for a walk, run your errands. Send your thoughts back to the word, to the ideas. Look for the window or the door, keep looking. See what happens.