Tuesday evening I attended a Dharma gathering at Shambhala NYC. It was pleasant to meditate in a group setting and listen to David Nichtern speak, especially since I haven’t attended Shambhala in a while. I got the opportunity to ask David Nichtern a question about meditation and creative pursuits (including writing) and had a great conversation with him about spontaneity and creativity. He signed a copy of his new book Awakening from the Daydream, and inside it he wrote a koan of sorts “Spontaneous means being properly prepared.” What a fascinating concept!

So how can we prepare ourselves to be ready for the muse, to be spontaneous in our writing? By practicing daily, or as often as we can. Natalie Goldberg describes an exercise in her book on creative writing, Writing Down the Bones, where you do a free write for a certain length of time on a regular basis, just writing the first thing that comes to mind, and keeping the pen moving on the page. My prompt for you this week is to try this exercise for at least 15 minutes. Maybe even try doing it once a day for week! Some of what you write may not be worth revision later, but sometimes you will generate seeds which you can develop further. The important thing is to turn off the judge or the editor during the free writing session, and just allow your thoughts to flow.

This time of year we commonly reflect on the past and think of the future. Let’s take a look at Tina Chang’s poem The Future is an Animal. In the poem, the speaker is both reflecting on the past (by mentioning the origin story of man) and also dreaming about the future. Can you do both in a poem, both reflection and prediction? Perhaps you want to start by creating an unusual metaphor for the future. Title your poem “The Future is ___.” Make sure to pick something concrete, like a boat or a spoon, and have fun with it!

Think of a group of people with specialized knowledge, like cooks or chemists. Think of what advice they might give us about life, and how their knowledge might influence what they say. Write a poem in the voice of the people you have chosen, and allow their knowledge to extend past what you’d usually consider their domain to be. Title the poem What the ___ Know, filling in the blank with your group of people. For inspiration, read Robert Polito’s What the Dead Know. 

While the left side of the brain is typically considered to be the language center, some scientific research claims that understanding simile and metaphor, the building blocks of poetry, is done primarily in the right side of the brain. Let’s use some randomly generated similes to write poems today, to challenge our right brains (see the simile generator). For further reading on poetry and the brain, read Julie Kane’s Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language, and Poetry Magazine’s conversation between Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist This is Your Brain on Poetry. Also read the fun poem An Exercise For Limbering Up the Right Brain, by David Henson.

How do you envision the future of our world? Whether you have children or not, I want you to write a letter to our children, to the future of the species. What wisdom do you have to share? For inspiration, read Good Bones by Maggie Smith.Pay attention to the techniques she uses, such as anaphora (repetition). Of particular interest is the metaphor of a realtor trying to “sell the world” to the children. Does this metaphor ring true to you? Can you come up with a metaphor of your own about what you want to communicate to our children?

Can you allow another voice other than the speaker’s to enter the poem and influence it? Study the poem of Emilia Phillips, Reading Ovid at the Plastic Surgeon’s, with a quotation from Ovid, and the voice of another character named David. How do these quotations interact with what is happening in the poem? In your poem today, allow one quote of literature and one voice of another character to enter the poem and steer it in new directions.

I got the chance to see Carl Dennis read his poem The God Who Loves You on Thursday night, at the Pulitzer Prize winners’ poetry celebration at Cooper Union. In this poem, we learn that one person has other potential futures which God can see. Listen to the poem and study it. What kind of God is this? What is the attitude of the “you” in the poem toward the alternate life, and what is the attitude of the seemingly omniscient narrator? How might you imagine an alternate future of your own, either for yourself or another persona? How might knowing about the alternative change the way your life is today?

How do you infuse a realistic tale with strands of fantasy? You may be familiar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. This week, I want you to explore writing a magical realist poem, where you offer some elements of fantasy without explanation, that only hint at meanings which your readers will discover. Maybe you’re writing about an office worker who ends up transforming into a philodendron that curls along the walls. Maybe a giraffe lowers its head to you at a zoo and tells you that it’s going to rain on your wedding day. For an example of this technique in a poem, read Alberto Rios’ A Man Then Suddenly Stops Moving.