Writing the Day

I started a new daily writing practice for 2014 that I call WRITING THE DAY.

The idea is simple – and not totally original – to write a poem each day.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.  I wanted to do shorter poems and I thought about the many Japanese forms that I enjoy reading and writing. The haiku is the form most people are familiar with, and it is a form that gets far too little respect in the Western world,

People know that form as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that’s an English interpretation, since Japanese doesn’t have syllables.

The main inspiration for me is the tanka form which consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. Even in that short form, the tanka has two parts. The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (“upper phrase”) and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (“lower phrase”).

For my invented form, ronka, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like the tanka there is no rhyme.

My own ronka will focus on observations of the day as seen in the outside world and the inside worlds of dwellings and the mind.

From the haiku form I will try to use techniques like having seasonal words to show rather than tell – cherry blossoms, rather than “spring” or April.  Haiku also don’t include the poet or people as frequently as we do in Western poetry.

I am calling the form ronka – obviously a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the most for me. Stafford wrote every morning from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.” He used sheets of yellow or white paper and sometimes spiral-bound reporters’ steno pads.

I already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning, he replied, “I lower my standards.”  I like that answer, but I know that phrase “lowering standards” has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

Read the poem, “Mindful,” by Mary Oliver and you’ll get a nice explanation of at least part of the motivation for doing this daily poetry practice – the joy I find every day in some thing, perhaps rather small, that I feel some need to record so that I will remember it in times when things seem less joyful. The poem comes her collection, Why I Wake Early, whose title fits right into the William Stafford writing practice that also inspired my project. She writes about the outdoors – crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears and deer – and that is at least a third of what I expect my poems to have as inspiration. But I will be less disciplined about waking up early.

Now, I have been Writing the Day for 19 days and I don’t know if I can sustain the practice every day for an entire year. But, I know it is more pleasurable than resolving to lose weight, exercise more, spend less time online or any other of the common New Year’s boxes that so many people put themselves into in January.

A Summer Supermoon of Release

“Boy and Moon” by Edward Hopper

According to earthsky.org, this month’s full moon, which rises on June 23 (Sunday), will be the closest and largest Full Moon of the year – a supermoon. A supermoon is a new moon or full moon which occurs with the moon at or near (within 90% of) its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit.  They are not very rare. There are 4-6 supermoons a year with 3 in a row this year (May 25, June 23, July 22) but this June full moon is the most “super”.

I wonder how the early Native Americans explained the supermoons. They often called this full moon the Green Corn Moon because it was the time of the first signs of the “corn in tassel.” It meant the start of preparations for the upcoming festivals in the growing season.

American colonists were more likely to refer to it as a Strawberry Moon or Rose Moon.  Their ancestors in Britain may have known it as the Mead or Honey Full Moon. Those names go back to medieval times and are also associated with Druids and pagans. Beehives would be full of honey from the heavy pollen of spring. That brought them mead (honey wine) that is believed to have been discovered by Irish monks during medieval times.  Mead has a reputation for enhancing virility and fertility and acting as an aphrodisiac and so found its way into Irish wedding ceremonies. Some etymologists say the term “honeymoon” came from the Irish tradition of newlyweds drinking honey wine every day for one lunar month after their weddings.

In North America, late June is usually the first crop of strawberries and the first rose blooms.

Many cultures have celebrated the full moon with ceremonies. Though not very common today, neo-pagans, Wiccans and other  groups still mark the event.

You don’t have to be a member of any of those groups to have your own Full Moon release ritual which is said to center you and allow you to release something you hold inside that is doing you harm.

You use a “sacred space” of your choosing outdoors. People might use sage smudging to purify the space. They would bring some personal power totems – objects of special significance to them. You sit under the Full Moon on the ground and try to allow yourself to feel a connection to it. You can think of it as a centering ritual or meditation.

After all, the Moon is the mover of the living waters of the Earth and within our own bodies. Feel the earth under your feet and allow it to absorb any tension in your body. Feel the pull toward the Moon.

You don’t need to be alone, but talking is discouraged. Place before you a large water-filled bowl.  You want to have a small votive type of candle that you can float on the water. Each person “writes” what they want to release on a candle. The writing is more symbolic than literal. It doesn’t matter if the thing written can be seen, as long as it is actually written by the person.

Light the candle and try to feel the transfer of what you’re releasing into the candle and into the water.

Does that sound too New Age for you? Again, just think of the exercise of this quiet concentration and becoming aware of where you are and acknowledging the Moon in all its beauty far above you. You might be surprised to feel relieved after the ritual.

Daily Rituals

Ritual: noun – religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order;  Adjective of, relating to, or done as a religious or solemn rite.

And then there are those daily rituals we all perform that have no religious basis and might not even be what could be described as solemn.

Franz Kafka, frustrated with his job, his apartment and his life wrote in a letter that he “must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” He is one of the writers, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians that Mason Currey describes in his book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

Currey started writing about these people and rituals on a blog and discovered that these artists did subtly maneuver obstacles (some of which they had created themselves) and created daily rituals to get their work done.

Some rituals are harmless, even healthy, like daily walks. But others cause some damage along with art.

Jean-Paul Sartre took Corydrane tablets (amphetamine and aspirin) at ten times the recommended dosage. But Descartes just stayed in bed and let his mind wander in and out of sleep.

A number of writers set themselves requirements. Anthony Trollope set the number at three thousand words in three hours before he went off to his day job at the postal service. That worked. He had the job for 33 years and in that time he wrote more than two dozen books. John Updike kept an office away from home so that he had to “go to work” and set a quota before he was allowed to go to lunch.

Mason Currey points out that many artists have strange work and sleep rituals. Frank Lloyd Wright spent his days doing the business side of his work but worked on his ideas and drawings between 4 and 7 am. “I go to sleep promptly when I go to bed. Then I wake up around 4 and can’t sleep,” he told a friend. “But my mind’s clear, so I get up and work for three or four hours. Then I go to bed for another nap.”

In fact, in reading Daily Rituals, about a third of the artists had a ritual of waking up early.

Of course, there were also those who worked at night and into the early morning hours . Painter Toulouse-Lautrec was one night owl who was out sketching at night in cabarets and Friedrich Schiller, Samuel Johnson, Flaubert, Proust and George Sand were ritual night writers.

Kafka started to work about 11 pm and worked for 3 or 4 hours and that ritual was about the same for Thomas Wolfe and is the same for Bob Dylan and Michael Chabon. These are not just some sleepless nights. Chabon says he writes from 10 p.m. until 3 a.m., five nights a week. It’s a job. It’s a ritual.

I find some hope that Currey’s book originally was a blog on the slate.com website and became a book.  The book still feels like a collection of posts with some bridging material between the tales. Sometimes two stories are linked but are studies in contrast rather than similar.

Still, there are some rituals that run through much of the book. For example, using stimulants is very common and, thankfully, coffee is the most common one. Daily Rituals is a good advertisement for caffeine (there are some tea drinkers in there too). Beethoven, Proust, Glenn Gould, Francis Bacon, Sartre and Mahler all drank lots of coffee to sharpen their focus and attention, beat sleepiness and power ideas.

Balzac wrote very grandly that “Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle. The light cavalry deploys at the gallop. The artillery of logic thunders along with its supply wagons and shells. Brilliant notions join in the combat as sharpshooters. The characters don their costumes, the paper is covered with ink, the battle has started, and ends with an outpouring of black fluid like a real battlefield enveloped in swaths of black smoke from the expended gunpowder. Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”

Balzac was a binge writer working in (as described in one biography) in “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure” powered by as many as 50 cups of coffee a day.

Yes, there are those who used drugs. And we all know at least one story of an artist who used a lot of alcohol. But Currey says that his research found that while many artists did drink a lot, very few mixed alcohol with their working hours.

Hemingway famously said, “Write drunk; edit sober,” because the booze made the writing come easier, but he couldn’t judge the work or edit unless he was sober. Get it on the page and clean it up later.

I have written here before that you shouldn’t need a cabin in the woods to write, but it’s a setting that leads to some writing rituals.

The composer Tchaikovsky rented a cottage in a small village away from Moscow after years of wandering Europe when he was 45. “What a joy to be in my own home!” he wrote to his patroness. “What a bliss to know that no one will come to interfere with my work, my reading, my walks.”

His walks – 45 minutes in the morning before working and another longer one after lunch – became absolutes to him regardless of the weather and the ritual aspect took hold. His brother wrote, “Somewhere at sometime he had discovered that a man needs a two-hour walk for his health, and his observance of this rule was pedantic and superstitious, as though if he returned five minutes early he would fall ill, and unbelievable misfortunes of some sort would ensue.”

Composers really seem to like the walking. Beethoven walked after lunch with pencil and paper in his pocket, and Mahler did 3 or 4 hours of walking after lunch joined by his notebook and his wife.

One of my favorites – for his music and his odd life – is the French composer Erik Satie. Every morning he walked from his suburban home six miles to  Paris’ Montmartre district.

He visited friends, worked on his compositions in cafés, had  dinner, went drinking and, if he missed the last train home, he walked back again. He often went to bed at sunrise and only slept a few hours.

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard got most of his best ideas during his daily walks, and would rush home and begin to write some days without even taking off his coat and while standing at his desk.

Are you a creative type? Then there is probably someone in the book who validates your own creative rituals.  Do you like a good nap? You have a good number of creative types who agree. Thomas Edison had a bed in his office for naps. Miró practiced a 5 minute post-lunch nap which he called “Mediterranean yoga.”

Writer Thomas Mann’s ritual was an hour-long nap at 4 pm.

I don’t know how caffeine-fueled Balzac pulled it off, but those “orgies of work” were broken up with a 90-minute nap.

Night owl Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had a nap after lunch and before he began painting.

Some insomniacs made up for sleepless nights with daytime naps. Franz Liszt tried to get in at least 2 hours in the afternoon, and Kafka planned for 4 hours in the late afternoon.

I’m not sure that I even consider some of these sleep breaks to be naps. Frank Lloyd Wright woke at 4 a.m., worked for three hours, then went back to bed for a “nap” even though he often took another short nap in the afternoon. He did nap on a thinly padded wooden bench or stone ledge because he believed that lack of comfort prevented him from oversleeping.

If you looking for the overall creative takeaway from all the stories of rituals, it might be this: get up early , make coffee, get to work and don’t quit until there are some results. Then have some lunch, go for a walk, take a nap and enjoy the other parts of your life.  If you are more nocturnal, you can follow the same rituals – just start at 11 pm instead of 7 am.