Week 2

Have the following up above your writing space all week: “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.” --Ezra Pound

In the various themes for this week, you might try a variety of strategies. Try forming a theme from lists of things that build in intensity. Place objects in suprising juxtaposition and see what flows from that.  Try writing one theme that deals with an object, so that the description or meditation you offer builds and builds, accruing details and specificity, all contained within just one long sentence fastened together out of commas and semi-colons, dashes and ellipses, as well as all those conjunctions that bind and hold things together, in such a way that it feels like the whole thought gains energy and intensity and momentum, word tumbling over word, until it is relieved by the final period.

 

Restriction: Do not write any of the following from the point of view of an object.

1.  This theme is a still life: a painting—in words—of a set of objects.  The arrangement can be found or composed.  Bring these things to life with precise description.  Describe rather than analyze (or rather, analyze by describing).  Do not use the first person.  
2. Narrate an incident in which an object stands as a representation for a host of complex emotions.  See Hass’s “Story of the Body” as an example.  
3. Following James Tate’s lead, write a description of a famous person’s possession (either real or invented). Show its relevant and how it sheds new or a surprising light on the owner.
4.  Take an object and describe it in a series of discrete sentences, separating aspects of its essence. For example:  “The orange is round.  It is called an orange but is really yellow,” and so forth. Think of it as a cubist still life. Perhaps let the sentences become more and more metaphoric rather than strictly observational.
5. Find a way to be invited into the room of someone you don’t know well (or really much at all). Note some small keepsake (a stone, a poster, a playing card, a ribbon, a Star Wars action figure) and ask them where they got it, but don’t ask anything more.  Then write a theme about what you might extrapolate from that object, just as a detective might.