I feed my poems to my poems

My favorite childhood game involved sorting my grandma's buttons. Her father had been a tailor, and she inherited an array of them: bright and dull-colored, many-shaped, pearlescent, cloth-covered, even tiddlywinks game discs in which he’d punched holes when materials were scarce. I sorted and shaped the buttons into a design on the canvas of my grandmother’s ancient brown carpet, imagining them as characters in stories—warring clans, couples at a dance. Colors, textures, shapes, and patterns that conveyed emotion and narrative. Meanwhile, my grandmother crocheted in her recliner, often falling asleep with the needles still nodding in her hands. It's occurred to me that a formal process (whether button-sorting, crocheting, or word-arranging) is a way to keep one's hands busy so that one's mind may more freely wander.

I’ve accumulated a bag of words to correspond with my box of buttons. I gather scraps of language: words on signs, a phrase in a recipe, journal entries, and many lines from drafts of my poems. If I catch hold of an absent-minded thought, it will likely be tossed in with the other scraps of paper. I play at arranging these paper scraps as I played with the buttons, and this play keeps me open to starting over: when a line isn’t working, I don’t hesitate to cut it out (literally) and add it to the bag where it may live in a future poem (or not). When an entire poem isn’t working, I will grab a handful of lines from the bag, and see if any provide illumination.

This method serves my overall creative practice: I seek to allow my poems room to play, space in which they may assert their own associations and trajectories. My poems want to take up space, so I grant them physical space (on the floor, wall, sofa, whiteboard). Eventually, I can move around in them. I then create a series of rituals to slow down the writing process. Examples: assigning intuitively chosen words as touchstones to which I must return; writing while performing a physical activity like skating, running, or stretching; returning to the poem at regular intervals or while wearing specific clothes; writing in a confined space. While the connection is not always obvious, the rituals resonate with the fledgling poem's mysterious energy.

Extending the writing process, I spend more time in uncertainty, and I can explore. If I decide that the large object against the wall is a refrigerator, then the room will quickly begin to feel like a kitchen, and maybe it's not a kitchen at all. Leaving a question mark on the large object, I spend more time in the room to feel into its corners. A survival exercise, even: experiencing how the poem unfolds dynamically nourishes my own sense of mutability and hope. Hungry and mysterious, alive and unpredictable. We are in play together, as equals.