How to Write pt. 2

[luka]

To steer the craft



An exercise. If you allow your attention to float freely, undirected but alert, just note what impinges upon your consciousness, and write it down. Red curtain. Night behind the window.



What we want, is the sense of delight and surprise Fernando Pessoa speaks about in his poem, the startling reality of things.


The startling reality of things

Is my discovery every single day

Every thing is what it is

And its hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me

And suffices me.


At this stage we will limit ourselves to what comes in through eye and ear, through these sense portals, so we will orient ourselves outwards, attention moving beyond and away from us, and we will keep a light touch, not burrowing down into any given impression, but moving, quite quickly, from one to the next.

But be precise and concise. Don’t sketch the impression. Don’t look for poetic language. No metaphor. No folorn, lonely trees, no broken skies. Look for precise, descriptive language, concrete, definite language that can convey what you perceive to a reader. Don’t invent anything. and at this stage we don’t want our moods and emotions to colour the scene. Don’t be creative, whatever you do. These precepts from the Imagist Manifesto are helpful



To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact

word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.




we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in
vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous.

To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor
indefinite.

concentration is of the very essence of poetry.


Peel your eyes away from the screen and look around the room, or, if it’s still light where you are, look out of the window. Move the camera of your binocular vision as much as you want, not looking for anything, but just allowing the eye to be snagged on this or that object.

Do register colour and the irreducible facticity of colour. Red. The experience of red. How red vibrates. The temperature of red upon the eye.

Get a sense of the light and the cloud it is filtered through if it is filtered through cloud, and how the light affects the colours you can see, how vivid or how dull they appear. How sharp and distinct the outline of objects are at this moment. Whether there is clarity or whether there is a kind of haze or murkiness. Is the window clean or is the light interrupted by smeared and dusty glass?

Do register form, curves, straight lines, hollows and bulges, creases and ridges, folds and valleys.

 

[luka]

Do register texture. Materials. Hard or soft. Pliable or brittle. Do register mass.

The play of light and shadow among the leaves of a pot plant. Dust gathering on the bookshelves.


Use the chat function to enter a line you are pleased with, where you have achieved accuracy, concreteness and concision. A local habitation and a name.


Even if you know the space very well you might notice things you had been unaware of. Ragged webs drooping from the ceiling.

Or stop looking, even close your eyes, and move from visual space into acoustic space, surround sound, and tune into what the ears are picking up, again, without straining, just wait till a sound rises up to meet you and impinges upon your consciousness, keeping the focus outward towards the traffic and the aeroplanes and the toucans and the parakeets. Metal creaking as the brakes take hold. Fan in the bathroom biting the air.

Do register distance and direction. Sound mapping out immersive 3 dimensional space and you in the centre of that space, the fountainhead, the central point at which all the radial roads converge, from which all the radial roads depart. Tyres crunching gravel. A yell from across the street.

The intimacy of sound. Sound dampened as it passes through wall or window. Low, drawn out drones. Sighs and groans. Yawning. The hum. Abrupt interjections. Car horn honking. Door slamming. Gasps. Coughs. Cracks. Barks. Yelps.

Collisions. A clap. Heel toe against paving stone. Tyres crunching gravel. The materiality of sound. Water gurgling in the pipes. Pipe metal heat expansion. Wind in the throat and mouth. Saliva in the teeth.


IMMANENCE! THE MANIFEST UNIVERSE! THE MIRACLE OF INCARNATION!

I think here we can assemble a poem, a very good poem, by taking a line from each person.

One clear, precise, carefully worded observation each, your favourite one. And that will make a very good, very important and significant poem we can be very, very proud of.

What I’ve noticed from doing exercises like this with other people is that we vary a great deal from one another in terms of where our attention is ordinarily directed. For people like myself who are fairly introverted I think this is particularly useful, just to remind us that the world is there and that it’s quite real and infinitely detailed. That it really repays attention, if you give it attention. It’s not just wallpaper, or a kind of variegated blur. Giving the world back its independent existence, allowing it to be real and actualized. Very useful and important.

And the other thing is, that for all of us, our ability to contact the environment also varies, how clean and vivid that connection is varies. Sometimes our own windows are dusty and smeared with fingerprints. Sometimes it’s very difficult to slow down enough or to be calm enough. To let the sight reach out toward the eye instead of straining toward it and staring at it.

 

[luka]

One thing you will have noticed while doing this exercise is that it is predicated on a highly truncated instant. And now and now and now and now, but if we stretch out that instant we switch from a fixed view, a snapshot, to moving footage. Another way of figuring is to say we move from substance to process, or from noun to verb. We start to gain awareness of sequence and sequence as cause and effect chains.

So let’s say, for example, blackbird alights on branch, water droplets cascade from oscillating branch.

Or the noise of a helicopter might scare the pigeons from their perches. Or, if we switch the focus to our own selves, a we will a little later, we might catch a glance of what we take to be disapproval on another person’s face, and feel ourselves shrink in response and become inhibited or defensive.



How we are tweaked and pinched and pulled and shaped by the responses we receive and by the responses we anticipate receiving. Locked into these teaching machines, something within us very, very alert to praise and scolding. The basic compass of pleasure and pain.

At one end of the spectrum you have time as a discontinuous, fractured series of isolated sherds, in which effect is severed from cause, at the other you have an unbroken, breathing continuum, connected, part to part.



It’s worth thinking about how this distinction operates in writing and in the ways we model our reality, to think of ruptures and continuities, peaks and plateaus, flows and blockages. To think of the time-spans we are describing and to consider the time-spans our poems take place in.

The other thing we can do is we can switch from free-floating attention to focused attention and interrogate a specific object. I say object as objects tend not to disappear or to change into something else in the way a sensation might.



We want the red brick wall to open out and show itself in all its fine gradations of colour, the whole range of its palette from near black to palest peach. Magenta and apricot and umber.

So we will take a moment to do precisely that, to choose an object and to interrogate that object and to describe that object in writing. We will look closely of course, and we will pick up detail that would otherwise escape us, but the other thing we will do is to adopt different attitudes and approaches to the object and to see how that changes our sense of it. If, for instance, we soften our gaze, and try to allow it to come to us, and then we allow our eyes to become colder, predatory, acquisitive.

This is something you will have to experiment by yourself but as a reference point if you think back to being young and being stoned and listening to music and the way you can deliberately foreground different aspects of that multifaceted sound-object and sound-sequence, isolate drum track and lock in to that sound pattern, or focus on the emotional content of the voice, each time revealing a dimension that had previously remained hidden, that will help you as you look and as you turn that seeing into word.

 

[luka]

Use your eye to feel, extend the feeling eye, use your eye to pick the object up or push against it and feel it’s weight, to get a sense of its texture and the strength of its materials and construction, how the atoms of it are knitted together, how dense or how loosely woven. How the light is absorbed into it or ricochets off it. Use your eye to sound it, to hear how it responds to being hit as if it were a gong or cymbal.



Sense the passage of its energies as contour, the line of it, be it straight or curved, abrupt or meandering, jagged or smooth. If it has been warped by exterior pressures or if it has maintained its integrity.



If it bears upon it, on it’s noun-surface, the marks of verbs, event-memories, finger prints, scratches, brushwork. Inscriptions of a movement, and perhaps we can sense that movement, reconstruct it, in its haste or it’s care, inadvertent or deliberate and considered.



Can we sense and recreate in the imagination that sweep of the arm? Or the repeated contacts, skin to surface, that left behind that rim of grime?



And you will notice, I suppose, the artificiality of the exercise, of all the things we have to bracket and blot out, so let those in too, if you want to. How does it make me feel? What memories does it provoke? What associations does it carry with it? What way of life is it associated with? What time period? What economic and social order? Trade networks. Patterns of distribution. What might it be made a symbol of?



FRANCIS PONGE SOAP

What I hope begins to intrude, if it hasn’t already, in the course of that exercise, is our own selves, obtruding, nagging, whinging, disrupting, distracting. A kind of pulling away from the object or infusing it with our own substance and fantasies.

And this too is part of the matter of poetry. This is part of what we write with and of and from. We record these slippages and transitions, one thing shading seamlessly into something else, sliding into daydream mid-sentence and the stars floated down to earth thistledown.

We record these intrusions from outside headline scandal minister and the child laughing all in the orbit of the page our awareness and our experience.

So if you turn your attention away from the scenery and stage sets we live among, the cardboard walls, fibreglass rocks and animatronic birds

You can get a very visceral sense of what conditions you are presently operating under.



Being. Moment to moment.



Again, how clean the contact. If the window is dusty and smudged. If the sensations are lively and easily differentiated.

The degree of tension or slackness, how taut the wires of the self are pulled. How easily the breath comes and how much space is available in head and chest. Do you feel hemmed in? Clenched? Trapped? How much anxiety is carried in the stomach now. How twisted and tensed our limb and muscles are and what emotional tension this muscular tension might correspond to. How aroused, how excited, how engaged we feel, or, how blank, how unreceptive, how blocked, how bored.

 

[luka]

Sometimes it feels there is a grotty film over everything, as if everything was contaminated, the auric egg itself contaminated. We are not trying to be perfect and rest in the pure white light but write out of the position we find ourselves in.

What I want you to do is to write this process of turning inward, and the attempt to open up and enter that space. That includes any resistance you encounter. You might come up against a wall, something very solid barring your way, or you might come across actual voices, people, faces, jeering, ridiculing, belittling you, telling you you can’t do it, or that you shouldn’t or mustn’t do it. Maybe you feel you can’t take yourself seriously enough, or perhaps you can’t take the task seriously enough, or me seriously enough.

Write it, as it happens, find the words that fit. Perhaps near the entrance there’s some noise, fuzziness, static, maybe words or phrases, maybe visual information or sensations or sound. I very often start a poem with this verbal static that meets me at the portal Tesco Clubcard Mixed Biscuits.

Avarice in leather.

So write it, and take care to get the very grain of your experience, how it is with you, in the present and alive. What interplay of stimuli and response, event and interpretation, projection and anticipation, fact and perception of fact? What are the component forces which combine and clash to comprise this moment, this balance of power that determines the shape and substance of this instant - always in the process, being always lopsided, of teetering and toppling into some other provisional form?



Where are you? What inner landscape are you situated within? What conditions are you being subjected to?....



I pause to record that I am in extraordinary form, delirium perhaps. (Malone Dies)

And once you have words on the page then of course you set a chain of events in motion. Guilty deposit. We let those words resonate and spark associations, conceptual associations, visual associations, sound associations, memories, desires. The coin tumbling down the well.



All history starts with that crack in the lens fly in the ointment hair in the soap.

So enter that space, or approach it, and try and to enter, and you might find you catch some propulsive energy, some forward driving energy, which you can catch, and hitch your words to and then it becomes a question of keeping up with that surge forward, and catching its dips and kicks and twists as you go with it, notating those changes in trajectory and speed, marking them with the flow of the words.



Think of those old stories of magical pursuit, fleeing we turn into sparrow so our pursuer turns into a hawk we turn into a salmon he turns into pike we turn into frog he turns into a heron we turn into hare he turns into a fox. Onward through this series of metamorphoses, tracking and notating the changes in real time.

Or you may well find a voice, if you set yourself to listen, very carefully, very poised and alert in the silence of the self, you may well hear a voice and it will set up, from the first line, the dimensions of its character, it’s feeling tone, its map of tensions, and it will keep speaking to you and through you, and again, it’s a question of keeping up, and transcribing what you hear.

 

[luka]

Think about these implied characters as you see the voice upon the page. Who’s voice is it?

communication-

between the constituent parts of self

and between self and not-self,

the inside and the outside

conscious and unconscious

criss-crossing those permeable boundaries constantly.



What attitude towards the world at large does it connote? What basic orientation of self-to-world and self-to-others and self-to-oneself is communicated? What is the situation it speaks out of? Falstaff Hamlet Prospero what fools these mortals be.



There are laments there are exultations there is grumbling and fussing and there are the displacements of anxiety.



If we can sensitise ourselves to this sense of character, in its broad and bold outlines, we can later modulate it and play with it in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Listen to tone. To register. To diction. To pacing. To how fastidious or careless the language is and what that conveys, consciously or otherwise.



Irreverent, solemn, kindly, belligerent, defiant, furtive, timid, trusting, cynical, cautious, cunning, secretive, generous, ironic. What energies are you working with here? Can you see the entire outline of the person there, sense the way they move, the way they stand? The angle of the neck and chin? If the gaze is soft or hard. If there is light dancing in the eye or if it’s dull and lustreless.

Ourselves, this cast of characters, we play every part in the whole pageant ourselves, changing out of one costume and into the next.



What emotional pitch are we operating at? We can feel the tensions as they abut their limits, this caged pacing back and forth, fierce energies pent up within the confines of the breath, within the confines of the margins. The line under huge stress and strain, buckling and pitching under the pressures.

Or verse can be very languid, post-coital, or lying indolent in the summer meadow, bees drowsy amongst the flowers and the green grass gone golden.

You can have the hurly burly wind or the playful breeze about you. And this is something I hope you can relate to your psychedelic experiences, your ascent up the rock face to peak, and the fierce buffeting energies there. The achieved plateau. The extended plain, the champaign. These different stages of the journey and the things we encounter as we push forward into it and through it. Up and across and over it.



Think about how your own speech varies according to what drug you are on,assuming you are always on drugs that is, drunk, stoned, wired. According to any number of factors. Emotional disturbance. Spiritual inflation or torpor. Panic. Bliss beyond measure.

I hope we’re getting a sense for how we extrapolate outward from that kernel of feeling, from that situation we are embedded in and confront or shrink from, how that becomes character, landscape, weather, becomes rock or river bustling air.



How timidity and caution becomes, in the poem, a field mouse amid the corn stalks, poised and alert, heart racing, ears twitching, nose interrogating the air and eyes scanning the cloud-scape, exquisitely aware of your own vulnerability and exposure.



We feel ourselves into that physicality, that body and situation. Nerves as fleet as those and as finely tuned. As small as that, quick, furred, pulsing life.



Or consider the crocodile.

that great indolent armoured bulk. Write the crocodiles eye. That green reptilian orb.



And when we face it on the page, we become crocodile, or we confront crocodile, and fear it. Two basic acts of the reading imagination.



There is a kind of vocabulary here, a vocabulary of affect and of our human modes of being and experience, that a desert gets pressed into service in very specific ways

 

[sus]

are lynch's red curtains the back of the eyelids? I'd never thot o that before

 

[luka]

I didn't say that but why not, yes! They are!

 

[luka]

I meant to call it how to write part two but I was tired and confused