Fishing the River Styx

I firmly believe in the freewrite. It's been the foundation of my own creative practice, insofar as I have a “practice.”

What is freewriting? Well, for anyone who wasn't forced to do this exercise by some zealous Language Arts teacher in junior high, it's when you take a pen to paper (that's right, you have to write longhand!), and you just keep writing down whatever comes into your head, not bothering to finish a sentence if some new thought (or bit of nonsense) elbows its way onto your page. You just keep going, and if you can't think of anything, you write, “I can't think of anything” until some different words show up. You stop when you get to a pre-determined number of pages, or when you've written for a certain length of time.

I like to freewrite for half an hour, preferably soon after waking in the morning.

I've read a lot of eloquent justifications for different methods of doing freewriting, which I don't feel like summarizing or adjudicating between, so I'm just going to leave it at this: however you choose to do it, freewriting is like fishing the Styx.

You never know what bizarre things you're going to dredge up from your subconcsious, but I can guarantee you it won't be the same-old, same-old. Except when it is, and that will tell you something, too.

Best of all, there are lots of nifty things you can do with these gifts from your subconscious mind. Without further ado, here's one:

After you're done freewriting, you can read over what you've put down, highlighter in hand, marking anything that jumps out at you. It might be a word, or an odd juxtaposition of images, or a phrase you really like. Then you rearrange these highlighted bits to make a poem. This is a type of “found” art: your subconscious gives you a bunch of random stuff to wade through; then you riffle through the junk to find some sparkly bits; then you make a word-collage out of what you've discovered on your page.

Here's what I highlighted in this morning's freewrite (arranged in the order the thoughts first appeared):

my thin blueberry skin, the frozen berry rasp of it

static & discomfit

camphor

plate I mean, rimmed with sugar

the swagger of the mind

I wish –

the spoon of lovingkindness

missives from beyond the barrier reef

scrunched-up

wiffle

I'm a peacock, really

How will I ever underline what seems relevant or sounds mighty?

Princess 'n' pea

impersonating myself

applique'd heart of calico

See, I even have painted fingernails!

face down in the lilies

keep yourself dry of it

your cracker crumbs of propriety

grandest gander

cringing smidgen

raucous outside

I'm looking for the Chinese fortune cookie, something that sounds good

I am a blueberry crumb

something to round out the beggar's meal

coming on a boat

the rosepetal I wanted for a bed

the pea-pod boat

appeal

pearls & paisley

autumnal death of the possible

holding it together with pieces

the voodoo doll of my attention

tenderly

Here are a couple of short poems I “found” in the list above:

I. I am a blueberry crumb,

a fortune cookie rimmed with sugar,

the spoon of lovingkindness –

something to round out the beggar's meal.

II. I'm a peacock, really,

raucous outside, in pearls and paisley,

my calico heart an appliqué.