ROLLING UP SLEEVES BY THE DICTIONARY

by tim p bellows Click to send Tim mail

ROLLING UP SLEEVES BY THE DICTIONARY

Look over these lines I pulled from my Webster's, struck by their beauty and primary quality. (Can you guess what word they help define?) * feathers, silk, papier-mâché….
* a frame or sticks of ivory, wood folded and opened at will....
* a small vane... a sail
* to keep the large sails of a windmill always at right angles to the wind....
* the velocity of light machinery....

The word is fan, and this kind of pure, physical writing can be neatly folded into a poem. If it's exactly right! When you add vitality and daring to such words, the winds of insight pick up! Try to expand the above dictionary discovery into a poem. Add your own concretions, verbs of motion, and high spirits. Look over these other gems from the dictionary. Try massaging these into a poem, or scout around for your own sequence:

QUINTESSENCE

The fifth or last and highest substance in ancient and medieval philosophy above fire, air, water, and earth that permeates nature and is the constituent matter of the celestial bodies.

What could you add here to make this a poem? How would you break the lines?

When you discover a germ of truth anywhere, take it into your awareness and make it even greater. Take the spirit of the moment and go. Be calm. Be reckless.

FIVE SOLUTIONS FOR WORDS THAT LOSE THEIR WAY

Tips from a near-fantast poet about how to clarify a confused poem-in-progress, how to discover that golden thread of unity that must run through any strong writing.

ONE: Try a favorite move of mine: make the poem into a paragraph. Yes!, dissolve the line breaks and look only at the sense of the words as they travel along. Look at their delicate-or awkward--breaks with sense. Their sound associations. Their pure impact apart from the rhythm and look of the lines.

If nothing else, this is a way to re-view the words, in a new, clear light. Then you can--with a fresh eye--recast it into lines, always cutting fat and gristle away, always watching for opportunities to drop an abstract noun or sleepy verb and splice in a prime cut of concrete noun or a verb that's a good dancer.

ROLLING UP SLEEVES: TO GET THE WORDS RIGHT….

Take a doubtful poem of yours and cast it into paragraph form. As an example, look over what I did with this piece:

he wears a hat in the two-room cabin wide fire hovers through legs balls guts heart along his ribs up and out the hair tips out the eyes out of the low thump as he rolls cut wood into the woodstove

she hears the squeak and clank of that door reads the lines and color of his iris fine as stars and hair-thin stripes pointing to the middle waterway of sight taking on all available light

the two of them are whirls in rivers up their spines it is all travel it is all late night dreams drifting up free of the covers and made for evening silence that stops by with its stream of unidentified singers this is certain and they don't know or say how the ever-present destination is starless quiet its light shedding meaning a warm hand pressing the one cabin wall with first light

Let's see how my process makes its changes as I work the piece into lines and change it as needed:

TWO: A related technique for focusing a wandering poem: I cast it into a new style. This allows me to see it in a cleaner light. For example I might set it up with no caps and no punctuation and use the & symbol instead of and.

Or I could set it down in couplets, or use dropped lines, or just split it in half. Thus, a whole new attitude.

With these kinds of moves I get to re-view the delicate logic and illogic that a poem rides on. It works!

Then I might re-cast the piece in the original form, but with a sharper view of what it's really trying to be. As I re-cast and re-view, I'm sure to adjust the wording in healthy ways. It strikes me that we have to give the poem and ourselves great flexibility and freedom, being willing to play with it, to stumble on that special shape that the current of meaning wants to take on, working from a healthy, relaxed state.

THREE: I divide troubled, tangled poems into sections--to find the clear gems trapped in those drunken, wandering words! By letting the piece become what it wants, I'm bound to bring it into the light. Maybe it's trying to be a series of short poems. Or maybe there is only one five-line gem in the whole mess!

I have to have the guts to say, "This series only has two lean poems in it. As for the rest. . .off to the ash heap."

If I'm in the mood I'll save the potent lines in a "HOT LINES" file in the laptop. Rummaging through this file can yield miracles if I have the right energy going. Here are a few choice bits I pulled out of poems that crashed and burned up in their own confusion:

"Like my death
I remember so well"
"Fires
set by summer lightening."
"Words that press pools of light
against your eye."
Something like the dictionary technique, this grabbing up of a stranded but lively phrase can be just the new spin a poem needs.

FOUR: This solution can be tricky--I might get through a fiery poem and realize that it doesn't carry a unified mood or message. It just follows itself through adventurous twists and turns, but they aren't directed. The last lines spill out on the floor with no relation to the beginning--or to the middle for that matter, even though it's all very entertaining and full of special language.

At these times I might write--on an old envelope?--a summary of the central meaning in the words. Or a stab at a meaning. Then I alter the glob of words in question to work them toward that unity, a progression from dark to light, or whatever wholeness is showing itself. Usually I need to know the underlying message in the work--or it won't fly. Let your poem teach you its message, and sacrifice a few minutes to write it down.

FIVE: You can rescue a poem if you write notes to yourself about the attitude of the speaker, the tone of voice. I just scratched this out concerning a piece called "Driving into Heaven": "Actually it's quite a flip, happy attitude. . . surprised, amused, joyful, experienced. . . expecting anything. Not worried about outcomes.. . ."

This gave me confidence and awareness of how the poem should move, the level of diction, and even the kind of conclusion it could come to. So write your characterizing notes to yourself and discover what tone your poem is striving for!

by Tim Bellows, college instructor, poet, and listener into the natural worlds, seen and unseen.
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Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998 tim bellows All Rights Reserved

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