Sketchbooking Toward Poetry (part III)

Poetry as an art of everything.

Dec 17, 2023

BRIEF PREAMBLE

First, I’m starting a poetry journal. It focuses on comparing one’s earliest poetic efforts with one’s most recent, and discusses what happened in between. It’s also a Substack. Maybe you’d like to submit?

Ways Poetry - Inaugural Call for Submissions

Next: I’m a pretty neglectful sales lady, but given it’s a gift-oriented season, I wanted to point the way to a few things:

My book, because God loves the wasp, a poetry memoir about the troubled teen industry.

cover of my book, "because god loves the wasp" - hot pink font on a scribbly background

My online courses:

Our Liminal Minds: Writing From Our Own Galactic Outer Rims $100 — Learn how to access slightly altered mind states and quirky areas of your subconscious, and pick up helpful tips for pushing past writer’s block.
Life After Birth: How to Mentor a Newborn Poem — Try a multitude of approaches for revising a poem, and receive detailed feedback from me.
- LITE VERSION $200 (All course materials & feedback for 5 poems)
- FULL version $475 (All course materials & feedback for 14 poems)

I also maintain a waitlist for funded spots, and I welcome donations to cover costs for those who can’t afford the courses.

Products:

You can purchase and download high-resolution fancy versions of two of my nerdy charts—the volta, and the intentions chart—to print yourself.

Or check out a variety of products featuring the charts over on Society6.

four product pictures - a mug, pillow, clock, and poster

Now, on to the less marketable but much more valuable creative ideas!

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I wrote about three approaches to keeping a poetry sketchbook:

The Overheard
The Learned
The Felt

Today I’ll wax affectionately about another approach to this creative and generative practice.

The Seen

If you are a person with vision impairment or low vision, everything I’m about to say can be translated from “the seen” to “the encountered.” (Spoiler: My emphasis is not on visual stuff, but rather on the act of collecting, the encounter itself, and the relationship we have with the world—so it could be a collection of any sensory encounters).

4. The Seen

a list of names, all identical (Mary Evans) along with their various ages, locations, and vocations (house servant, servant nurse, at home, school mistress, general servant, dressmaker, etc) — This microfiche film had been digitized and was no longer needed by the library holding it; I bought it for £1 from a sidewalk sales cart. It’s an excerpt from an 1860s Welsh census. I see you, Mary-Evans-times-infinity.

Decades ago, I had a brilliant teacher who taught a class on mass media literacy. As part of her course, she demanded we each keep a “visual diary.” We all groaned. What a bother—and she wanted to check in with us every week to see what we’d collected.

And yet. And yet! This assignment changed my life in many ways. I was already an avid journal-keeper and sometime doodler at the time, but the challenge of this assignment was much more specific. We were to find things we saw in any area of daily life, stick them somehow into the notebook (physically glue them in, or provide a photo or description of them), and then comment thoughtfully on them.

Because I had to fill her weekly quota of seen-and-commented-on stuff, I began to look more carefully at everything—advertisements on buses, pages in magazine, drawings that rogue kids had made in wet cement 10 years prior, secret graffiti low on a church wall, the juxtaposition of garbage piled together in an alley, the red-outlined and red-fonted cable TV news.

This was the era when physical photos were still common, and a surprising number of them would end up tattered and fluttering along the sidewalks in the big city where I lived. I especially treasured the discarded photos that hinted at a dramatic backstory—torn-up ones. Happy couples torn in half, movie-cliché style. Or photos ripped into so many pieces they became puzzles to solve (after a windy chase to find them all).

When I visited museums or galleries, I began to marvel not just at the object in the case or the painting behind the glass, but the curious way that protective glass reflected the world before it, blending real-life colours and dynamics with the visual presentation of the displayed item. Then I noticed the same phenomenon in fast food restaurants, malls, bathroom windows.

a color photo of a vintage manikin wearing a vintage hat, both items being displayed in a shopfront window on a small town's street. half the photo is a reflection on the glass window of the street scene itself. — I think I’ve used this photo before, but oh my, it’s so weird it deserves more air time. Taken in a small town in Nebraska.

The world, it turned out, was visually fascinating. And since I had to “comment” on everything I collected, I had to sit and think about why these things were engaging. Some were easier to explain than others. Torn-up photos? Intriguing mystery-histories. News channels’ red-centric presentation? Emotionally manipulative.

But… why exactly did I like the grubby envelope of 50 passport-style photos of exchange students that had been thrown out by a university?

Could I put words to the symbolism of leaves which, having lain wet on cement, left perfect photo-like outlines?

a photo taken of dead leaves on cement. there are shadowy marks, outlines of leaves that used to be sitting there, and that got wet, and stained the concrete with their forms

Challenge

Poets, I propose you try to keep a visual diary—in its own notebook, or within your poetry sketchbook. Focus mostly on non-screen-based visuals.

Here’s why:

It will make you look at the physical world, in an age when most of us are looking increasingly away from it (and at the digital world).
It will help you develop a subtler language around the what, the how, the why of your world. It’s not just a tracker of stuff you saw; the practice asks you to contemplate how you feel and think about the stuff you saw. How does it affect you? How does it bore, excite, enthrall you? And why? What does it mean?
You’ll start to rapidly recognize consonance and cacophony—and all the uncertain states in between. Poetry thrives especially on that in-between stuff.
It will expand your palette. You’ll write about things outside of yourself and your immediate personal experience.
It’ll slow you down. It’s hard not to slow down when reflecting—in words—on whether that umbrella on top of a woodpile which you passed on the way to the corner shop is—or isn’t—engaging, thought-provoking, symbolic (and if so, symbolic of what??).