First, news:
Poetry chart prints and products
Two of my nerdy poetry charts are now available for purchase as high-resolution, 18” x 24” fancy digital downloads over at www.lullabiesalarms.com.
And at the new L&A shop on Society6, you can get fine art prints, posters, a clock, a mug, etc! They’re educational and make great gifts.
…and now on to today’s topic: poetry sketchbooking!
Gathering is transformative.
Like gleaning fruits and berries from the wild, then baking a pie, keeping a poet’s sketchbook is key—you can pluck the world’s many curious ingredients and use the best bits as materials for your poems.
And besides procuring material, the practice itself trains your mind to think in expansive, observant ways that will inform and augment your writing practice.
“Sketchbook” vs. “journal”
My choice of terminology is partly just a matter of semantics. Potato, potata. But I also prefer the word “sketchbook” because it carries with it a reminder to maintain a multidisciplinary—and multisensory—openness.
Poetry, like journalism or fiction, is not a niche art. Poetry is an art of everything. And so everything is potential material.
Here are two examples of how to gather material for a poetry sketchbook, and how to use what you’ve gathered.
1. The Overheard
A coffee shop, an outdoor park, or waiting with a bunch of other people for something ( a doctor, your kids’ school to get out, the baseball game to begin, the line at the store, etc): these times and places are ripe with bright plumage ready for the scavenging.
There are many reasons to enjoy overheard conversations and statements. What I love about them most is the quirky way in which they arrive stripped of their contexts.
Spoken language is complex and baffling, tone is suggestive and flexible, and we can often only hear parts of what someone says, or one side of a conversation. Consequently, collecting tiny clippings of spoken words can be fascinating, funny, or profound.
Plus it’s a great excuse to go sit or walk somewhere with attention and curiosity—to actively engage in a place. Try a cafe, grocery store, beach, mall, or any place where people congregate or pass by. Note down what you hear.
Try doing it without judgment or censoring/choosing. Just pick stuff up (from the world) and put it down (into the sketchbook) automatically. Don’t worry about whether it’s good or bad material. It’s material!
Determinations of good/bad (if we must use those words) should be left till the revision/editing process anyhow. For the gathering stage, just take whatever happens to come your way. It can be quite relaxing!
How to use this practice in your poetry:
Build a story around overheard statements/comments.
Use the practice of collecting as a way to heighten your familiarity with spoken language—all its stops and starts, its bristles and tufts—in order to write better monologues and dialogues (if voices appear anywhere in your poetry).
Use it for a material bank—collect 10 overheard snippets and challenge yourself to use at least half of them in a single poem.
Use the practice of gathering overheard fragments as a method of honing your attention, so that you begin to notice more fragments in general—tiny shadows, single notes of music, quick micro-expressions on someone’s face. This will ultimately strengthen your abilities to describe, and to use imagery and sensory details.
2. The Learned
When we stop going to school, many of us forget to make time for active learning. We engage in everyday passive learning in spades—learning from our mistakes, from our relationships, from our conversations with others.
And these days we’re all scrolling through oodles of articles on our phones, passively learning whatever an AI bot or news editor drops our way. But active learning, which I’ll define here as deliberately seeking out new knowledge and experiences and consciously processing them, is often something we neglect.
A poetry sketchbook can be the mode through which we can engage in deliberate, active learning. Watch a documentary, visit a museum, visit an art gallery, attend a public lecture, presentation, concert, town meeting. Seek out artifacts or ideas that strike you. Seek out new information or new points of view that rock or augment your typical way of seeing the world. And engage with it all through your sketchbook—take notes, make sketches, write down quotes.
Once again, the benefits are twofold. First, active learning helps us avoid ruts and helps us with inspiration—you’re gathering materials you might use in your poetry.
But there’s a second, longer-term benefit: When you actively learn, you’re growing your own mind. Rather than simply maintaining your mind, you’re coaxing it to expand. If you make a practice of active learning, it will inevitably cause subtle but noticeable and positive shifts in your writing process and creativity.
How to use this practice in your poetry:
Write a topical or topic-based poem about something you learned
Use discipline-specific jargon in your poems (once you learn what it means and how it’s used). Every area of work and sport and discovery has its own lingo and it can be super fun to cleverly wield it in poetry. (Three examples: sailing, airplane, and astronaut jargon.)
Devise new methods of rhetorical comparison and identification that draw from processes or transformations you learned. Any topic that you delve meaningfully into—the formation of snow crystals, or the way a given culture builds structures to reckon with local climate, or the ways insects relate to each other—will hold gorgeous potential for your to create new similes, metaphors, and all manner of symbols.
More approaches
Learn more approaches in part 2!