I’m adding a new layer to my writing practice and wondered if you want to try it with me. You don’t have to be a writer to do this daily exercise. It will be meaningful to non-writers too, especially right now. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, since before my mom died. But while my mom was dying, I couldn’t face it. And after my mom died, I couldn’t face it. This project was too hard for those moments, and I think you know why.
A couple years ago, I tweeted:
I love how musicians warm up with scales before practice. My kid is so mindful when she does this. She really really listens to each note. Writers need something like this. And I don’t think it’s journaling. We need something more repetitive, instinctual, in/of the body.
This was back in the day when Twitter was still alive, when the writing community would engage. I received a wide range of replies. Some have disappeared as people left Twitter, which is a shame. I regret not noting all the suggestions before they evaporated. People brainstormed all sorts of wonderful ideas: swirling paint on a canvas, warm-up writing prompts, crossword puzzles, playing Tetris, stand-up comedy, yodeling (!!), twenty lines of trochaic dimeter, free-writing, haikus, reading the dictionary aloud, writing verbs over and over. Sara Marchant cheekily suggested throwing in some laundry! Alyssa Harad asked, “Yes, what is the writing equivalent of swatching paint?”
These answers helped me arrive to what I finally decided to do myself. No single reply alone felt like what I was getting at, but a combination of suggestions resonated with me: to recite or read poetry, to do handwriting exercises, and to meditate. Blending these elements, I began the simple daily practice of copying a poem by hand before writing. This would allow a certain physicality like that of moving the bow. It would also allow the deep concentration, listening, and meditative elements of practicing scales. It would bring with it a close connection to words and sounds. But it would be somewhat automatic or instinctive, meaning, I would not have to “think” in the same way that a writing prompt or journaling would force me to. It would be an easy way to start.
Every day for the last few weeks, I’ve copied someone else’s poem by hand into an unlined notebook I bought for this purpose. It’s hand-painted and evokes Alyssa Harad’s swatch-painting. I copied “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne. I copied Mary Ruefle’s “Standing Furthest” and Audre Lorde’s “The Fallen.” Yesterday, it was “Love Poem XIII” by Adrienne Rich, today Franny Choi’s “we used our words we used what words we had.”
I’m interested to see what this project will do to my brain. To my life. It’s early days so there will be more to come from this project. But here are some things it’s done to me so far:
- Hurt my hand. Yeah, I have hand arthritis. It’s because of this weird disease called hemochromatosis that coats my insides with iron. I have to donate a lot of blood, pints of the stuff, to cleanse my organs, to dump the iron—which is positively medieval but mostly works. Except it doesn’t work on the tiny finger joints. I picture little necklaces, chains, twisting through my thumbs, my indexes. The joints still hurt is what I’m saying. My handwriting has gotten really bad as a result. Unkempt. I have to write very very big. The lines stretch out across the page like they are going for a very long walk, a longer walk than they have ever been made to take. I think the pain is part of the point. I don’t think typing would give that same connection to the slope and loop, the dip and sway of letters and words.
- It’s made me feel the heat. In every poem, there has one line or phrase that holds the whole system together, that is the reason for the poem, for this thing I’m doing. Yeats’ “Bee-loud glade.” O’Hara’s “you don’t refuse to breathe do you.” Donne’s “Like gold to airy thinness beat.” Rich’s “the maps they gave us were out of date / by years.” Armantrout’s “solving and dissolving.” When you write the poem down, these lines find you. They are different from the lines you would underline if you simply read the poem with your eyes. You have to feel them in your hands. Trust me. Now these lines are in my brain and in my hands, deep in there with the iron laces, doing stuff to the way I feel and experience language.
- It’s made me focus. My daughter’s violin teacher, Chelsea Smith, once asked her students to notice what she does when she plays the scales. She tilted her ear toward her instrument and explained, “I’m very focused. Sometimes I like to close my eyes and listen to the pitch.” This made me think of Jennifer Savran Kelly’s reply to my tweet: “I find that when I meditate before I write, it’s similar to the way you describe the careful listening your kid does with the notes. It opens me up to the world around me, makes me more keyed in and observant.” Yes, copying poems has made me listen carefully, it has made me more “present.” I must confess that I kind of hate this “be more present” concept. It must be part of end-stage capitalism or something bad that we feel the need to ever tell ourselves to “be present.” Gag me, gag us, right? I’m sorry. But this exercise does make me more present. The feeling of the pen, of the paper, of the words. It also shows me when I’m not present, when my brain leaves the room. Because sometimes, when I copy the poem, I realize I’ve switched to autopilot. My hand is writing, but my brain is not absorbing or doing the work. So I have to go back and reread and think about why these lines lost my mind.
- It has me searching for poems. Searching for poems is a very very good exercise in and of itself. You can always find one to match your mood. Always. This is one of the greatest truths and treasures of life. I’ve been gathering from books in my house. But if you don’t have poems at home to copy or don’t know where to begin, The Paris Review has just started a morning poetry newsletter that sends a poem to your inbox daily. Poem-a-Day also does this. Or you could get one of Stephanie Burt’s anthologies where she has already selected fifty or sixty fantastic poems (and explains them to you). Her most recent book, Super Gay Poems, is wonderful and I’ve been tempted to handwrite many of these poems. (You don’t have to follow the book’s order when copying; you can choose your own path.)
- This practice has stoked a surprising feeling of creation. If I use my hand to put a poem down on a page, I am very literally writing it. This process grants me a feeling, an illusion, of creation, of being the author of something glorious. Even though, obviously I did not create these words, I almost feel as if I did, as if they are coming from inside me. It is a way of practicing at being a writer. I sometimes even feel myself wanting to change a phrase or comma. Imagine the audacity of changing John Donne’s or Adrienne Rich’s words! At the end of the week these poems feel “mine.” I own them in a new way. They take on new significance for me. I think about them when I am crossing the street, cooking dinner. I can look back on them as they accumulate for inspiration and significance and a story about myself. The process places me in the great history, the great continuum of other writers. It is an affirmation that I am one of them. I am situating myself in their canon. (Again, the audacity!) I am in their home and they are in mine. Like a violinist, I am using a common system of notes. Being part of something larger than myself is reassuring.
- It has helped me remember. I have read so many poems in my life. Hundreds and hundreds. They are like a flood that has washed over me, and I cannot seem to hold a single molecule, a lone drop. In undergrad as an English major, we had to identify quotes from poems on exams. This was always tricky for me, because I have a hard time remembering. But writing poems down lodges them in the brain in a new way. (I believe there is scientific data on this, though I won’t go searching for it now.) I’ve been looking back over the poems each week, which also helps me store them in my mind. I am quite sure I will call on some of these lines or rhythms when I write my own work.
- It made me write a poem. Yeah, I wrote a poem last week, for the first time in a month. It was a poem I wrote by listening. I’ll explain that when I publish it. Maybe doing this copying makes us hear things we couldn’t hear before. We are more attuned to language, not just in the moment of copying the poem, but throughout our day.
- I found the key to a story I’m writing about the devil. I wrote its first draft when hopped up on steroids with Covid pneumonia back in 2022. I could not breathe. I could not fucking breathe. My chest was tight. But the steroids loosened everything and made me crazy. They kept me up all night writing about the devil. But after that wild first draft, I could not figure this story out. There were not enough steroids. So it just sat in my files, waiting for me. I had to get to that place where I could copy poems every day, when my brain would unlock from where it had been stuck since 2022, since soon after my mother was diagnosed with this awful satanic thing called cancer. This completes the last story in a collection I’ve also been trying to finish for years. It’s a story whose meaning I cannot fully explain. And I’m pretty sure that is a very good thing.
- Yep, this exercise has let me let go of meaning. Just a bit. I can write these poems down and I have mastered them, in a way, a satisfying way, even if I don’t understand them. Many poems I do not understand. And there is beauty in that. We don’t have to understand the poem.
So, join me. Do this thing with me. We will find communion in copying poems together every day during this time of darkness. Of fascism and failure of empathy. Of small men doing terrible things. Find poems and write them down. Make them big. Feel a connection to our common humanity. Look back through them at the end of the week. Think about why you chose to copy these particular poems at this particular moment. The choosing is very important. The choice is yours. Or as Stephanie Burt once titled a book, The Poem Is You.
The next poem I will meet on my painted notebook is Martha Silano’s “Self-Elegies,” though it is long and I might not get through it without a tear or two. Fare thee well, Martha…
