Thanks to everyone who joined me for the last CRAFT session of the year on Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil! After spending time with this month’s read, in addition to coming up with the prompts I shared when we gathered, I also put together the month-long craft challenge below. As I return to the page after a season of not writing, I’ll be working through this challenge in January (and will hopefully be writing about that process here). I’m also hoping to plan new things for the CRAFT session series next year. More details soon!
It’s the end of the year, and I’m finding myself trying to return to poetry—both reading and writing it. For the past handful of months, I’ve (ironically) set poetry aside to focus on getting my MFA applications together (yes, I am outing myself as an aspiring grad student, more on this in a future post), and now that apps are in, I no longer have an excuse to avoid poetry. Lately, I’ve been stuck in the feeling that I can’t bear poetry. Most days, when I get off work, I reach for what’s easiest—a I used to watch in middle school sitcom, a 12-minute YouTube video: I want simple comfort. But in reading, Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, I’m reminded that poetry, like love, “is not consolation but light.” When I read poetry, I encounter myself, or the version of myself that exceeds what I do during the 8 hours of the work day. Myself in my most initimately hopeful form, the one that aspires beyond that current conditions of my life and lives that are not my own.
Anne Carson describes Weil’s decreation (the concept and her own Weil’s own deployment of it) as “a dislodging of herself from a centre where she cannot stay because staying there blocks God.”1 I most immediately understand this idea through a quote elsewhere in Gravity and Grace in which Weil writes, “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there. But when I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.” This sentiment reminds me of the urge I’ve sometimes felt to turn everything around me into a line in a poem and the way this urge redacts from the experience of moving through the world. I’m also thinking of something Ada Limón once said about not falling into the trap of fetishizing nature:
“. . . a big mission of my work, is to remember that we are animals, too, and so to come at the animal as another animal, as opposed to a colonizer. As opposed to, someone who is going to harm the animal or has the power. But also to caretake with subject matter, to say, okay, does this bird want to be in this poem today? Maybe it doesn’t. You know, we always want to turn the animal into something else, right? And sometimes, I want to let the animal be. Of course animals are symbols, of course they turn into our metaphors. I mean, that happens. But I also think there are moments when you just think, okay, the birds aren’t going to save me.”2
Weil says, “We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.” How, then, can we participate in the creation of a poem by removing our “poet egos” from the page? When I think about what a poetics of decreation might look like, I’m imagining a poem that holds a landscape without the visible presence of a speaker. I’m imagining poems that are approached by animals, rather than the other way around.
Craft Challenge
Attention as the Tool of the Poet (based on Linda Gregg’s prompt and essay, “The Art of Finding.”)3
Weil writes, “Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me.” How can one disappear the ego of the “I” while still putting forth a voice that is singularly one’s own?
Part I
The poet Linda Gregg writes that her students “have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes.” What they lack, Gregg writes, is a noticing of the physical world—an attention that makes the viewer available to what surrounds them.
- Try adapting Gregg’s “Art of Finding” exercise: For one month, make a list of 6 things—”not beautiful or remarkable things, just things”—you have seen each day. Each week, write a one-sentence reflection, observing what you notice about your lists and/or any blocks you faced in creating your lists.
Part II
According to Gregg, prior to beginning this exercise, there are three ways writers notice things: “artistically, deliberately, or not at all.” She explains this, stating:
“Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become ‘old men with snow on their shoulders,’ or the lake looks like a ‘giant eye.’ The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck.”
- Identify what kind of noticer you are. As your write your lists, if you find yourself falling into any of the patterns of (faulty) attention described by Gregg, imagine how another item anywhere in your lists would observe the subject of your view.
Part III
When your month of making lists of noticing has concluded, choose one of the following options:
- Look over your lists as pick 6 noticings to revise. After you’ve revised them, pick 1 noticing from each week (for a total of 4 noticings). Imagine a field or room containing these noticings, and then write toward what/who else is in the field/room.
- Read the poem “Passing” by Victoria Chang (below).
- Inspired by the final line of the poem, choose 1 noticing from your list. Using your chosen noticing, write a poem that begins with the first line “____ have/has begun to notice me.”