Day 16 of NaPoWriMo is upon us! We are technically over the hump—fewer days this month lie before us than behind. We can do this!
NaPoWriMo: April is National Poetry Writing Month!
Today’s prompt comes from The Practice of Poetry (pp. 29-30). It’s given to us by Ann Lauterbach, who calls it “The Free-Lance Muse.”
Imagine you are a free-lance muse, looking for work. In recent years you have had to supplement your life with various odd jobs—inspiring an ad executive at Nissan in Japan, writing political manifestos for East German dissidents [TPoP was published in 1992], and typing numerous grant proposals. You’re tired and sad, and want a real poet. Write a job description for the poet you want to inspire.
This assignment was simply an attempt to get a sense of how students think about what it means to be a poet. Since I think of poets and poetry as increasingly outside mainstream culture, the desire, however inchoate, to write poems and then, perhaps, to become a poet must be predicated on something other than usual ambitions. That is, I wanted to provide a way for students to begin to explore the social, cultural, and political implications of being a poet, to notice that to be a poet is not just a matter of mastering technique.
Many of the responses were witty, some predictable; most, it seemed to me, were self-limiting. One young man stressed technical proficiency above all else—he saw a poem as a well-oiled machine having only to do with precision. Nothing could persuade him of the legitimacy of open forms, nor that poems might do something other than describe. Nevertheless, the discussion that resulted had the desired effect: to allow the students to begin to think about and examine what the role of the poet (and of poetry) might be in a consumer-driven economy. The precarious life of the “free-lance muse” gave them an opportunity to think about the life of a poet as other than a professional career. We had a very lively discussion.
I’m drawn back to what Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town had to say about what force ultimately drives the poem:
When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the justification for creative-writing programs. So you can take that attitude if you want, but you are jeopardizing my livelihood as well as your chances of writing a good poem.
I quoted this way back on Day 5, but it’s newly relevant here. Surely poetry is more than about technical precision…! But maybe that’s the idealist in me. If you feel that metronomic execution is the prevailing factor, please put that in your ad. This exercise is about your standards, what you value as you turn to the page.
You can approach this as a freewrite, or feel free to craft it into verse! Whatever form helps you get next to your muse and discover what makes her tick.
Fun fact: the artistic muse was once known as a daimon, sort of a controlling mind/spirit. You know when you get into what some call “flow”? That’s when the daimon has grabbed you. Such a state can lead to something akin to automatic writing.
Happy writing!
➡ IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM:
- National Poetry Writing Month: an invitation | NaPoWriMo: a short exercise
- NaPoWriMo, Day 2: Telling a Secret | NaPoWriMo, Day 3: Still Life
- NaPoWriMo, Day 4: One out of many | NaPoWriMo, Day 5: Hanging together
- NaPoWriMo, Day 6: Home and introspection | NaPoWriMo, Day 7: Like this or that...
- NaPoWriMo, Day 8: No more short shrift | NaPoWriMo, Day 9: Poem as voicebox
- NaPoWriMo, Day 10: Caught between the horns
- NaPoWriMo, Day 11: Living in the spaces in-between
- NaPoWriMo, Day 12: What’s the occasion?
- NaPoWriMo, Day 13: They say it’s all about timing | NaPoWriMo, Day 14: Mad Libs
- NaPoWriMo, Day 15: The bizarro world next door