by tim bellows shabda@juno.com

First, use crunchy verbs and nouns! Concrete, vivid, interesting, even outrageous verbs and nouns. Writing with spice means gently emphasizing these kinds of words. (Verbs like swagger, twist, glide, peck, parachute! And nouns like stove, root, staircase, shovel, funnel. These put physical motion and strong pictures into the writing—and attract readers, convincing them that your description and concepts are real.

Second, learn structures, the forms others have used to contain a message. But keep a simple approach. In your notes, in margins, in taverns, in your self-talk, describe the forms of poems and stories you meet. Note how a poem’s couplets are used, how stanzas are arranged (and how build-up, climax, and resolution relate in great stories). Which one of these fits the mood best?:

ONE MEMORY (Version 1)

She's that same way now
in me she's all long brave
arms and legs but all they
speak is roundness as if she's

a harbor in a body
and across from the docks it
has the windows of business
near the water it has
dance hall lamps strung on wires

and up the shoreline it
has mud banks with prickly
flowers violet flowers
of no name that I know

ONE MEMORY (Version 2)

She's that same way now
in me she's all long brave

arms and legs but all they
speak is roundness as if she's

a harbor in a body
and across from the docks it

as the windows of business
near the water it has

dance hall lamps strung on wires
and up the shoreline it

has mud banks with prickly
flowers violet flowers

of no name that I know

And how do poets handle line length and the number of stresses per line? Observe! Put in your study time! What does Amy Tan say about this? And Faulkner? Eudora Welty? Take a course or two. You’ll come to invent structures for yourself the way Mozart did in his music: he knew the classical forms, but continually played with them. This is mastery.

Woven through all these is the third—crucial--law of creative work: write your truth from the heart, or, as Robert Bly put it, from the center of yourself. A key to bringing this off comes with listening--in effortless effort--to daily sounds and the refined sounds that arise within you. As you do this, you become receptive; you cease to put out mind chatter; you accept what the Universe, the "wholeness of things" can give you. Yeats, one of the great world poets, had a few words about opening the hearing and heart: "The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart." (Collected Letters, vol. 1, ed. by John Kelly, 1986). Then the writing falls into line: we practice economy of words, avoid mental tricks like over-elaborate descriptions and long strands of ideas. We even let the sounds of the words form the way they should. We stand aside and let our eternal selves write. This is our "ceaseless obeisance to the heart."

In fact the Chinese poet Chin calls poetry "a sudden cry from the heart. . . " (from Liu’s The Art of Chinese Poetry, page 74). There's no figuring it out in the mental sense because writing draws together too many factors in a single moment: the writer's inner attitude, the reader's attitude, the sound of the words (they call to each other), their connotations, the "crunchiness" (or "mushiness") of the nouns, the denotations, the connotations, and the swish (or droop) in every verb. So give it to the heart, and let the mind tag along later to tweak the verbs and nouns, to buttress the form.

And so it is: dynamic, out-of-the-ordinary verbs and nouns; tough-minded yet relaxed study of forms; and writing from the center, the heart of yourself.

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Copyright © 1996, 1997 tim bellows All Rights Reserved shabda@juno.com

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