Happy 2018, friends in BAP-land! Like many of you, I'm sure, I have resolved to create more in 2018. For me that means going back to time-tested tools like morning pages, crazy exercises like copying random lines from someone else's books and writing my own lines around them, and even (gasp) collaboration.
So far the plan has not been going well, due to a three-stop, five-state Family Holiday Auto Tour extravaganza, and a three-day recovery period during which Younger Kid refused to fall asleep before 2 a.m. and thus missed the bus and had to be driven to school.
Then, the Polar Bomb Cyclone or whatever-the-hell arrived in all its bombasticity….my overtaxed brain was nearly frozen to a halt.
Never fear, 'tis Friday, and that means I got a groovy email in my inbox from Austin Kleon. He's the author of Steal Like an Artist, so I'm sure he will understand my shamelessly poaching one of the links from his newsletter for my post. This article, from Inc. of all places, is a bit of a mishmash but has some nuggets we can take into our daily practice. News flash: constraints are good for creativity.
We poets already knew that the strictures of line, rhyme, and meter, the rules of word-games like anagrams and abcedarians, all can forge a spark and pop up some language we might otherwise not have brought forth in quite that way. How many of you have written a sestina or villanelle that surprised you and took you beyond the "control zone"?
It occurs to me that the CDC Poetry Project offers an incredible opportunity to tap into this principle, requiring as it does poems using 7 particular words. Hundreds of poets all over the world are giving it a try. In our inaugural week we've published Kathrine Varnes, Patricia Spears Jones, Lesley Wheeler, Lisa Fay Coutley, Margot Douaihy, and Bri Hermanson (whose word poem/illustration graces this post). All of these pieces were composed within 10 days of our putting out the call; my co-editor Sarah Freligh and I have marveled not only at the volume of submissions but at the variety and vigor of the poems, all of which adhere to our constraints.
"Innovation is [the] creative person's response to limitation," according to the Inc. article. Put in a box? The better to think outside it, the cliche goes. Freedom is not Slavery, as Orwell's Big Brother would have it. But a little bit of restraint can loosen the mind to break through barriers, literal or metaphorical, and allow the poem to sing, clear and free.