Poetic Digestion

A prompt for you this week

If you’ve ever kept a notebook/journal/diary, you’ve been leaving yourself a trail of incredible little insights to your state of mind and the general quality of time through which you’ve been living.

The journal I started in middle school in the 90s & my current calendar book.

But sometimes it can be a challenge to actually hold on to those insights or even remember them at all once you’ve dumped them on to the page. And if, like me, you live your whole life out of your notebook and everything happens all mushed together from hastily scrawled revelations to packing lists to poetry to due-dates, often the insights are just buried.

For this, might I suggest a practice from my Poetic Digestion Toolbox…

I teach this idea - poetic digestion - as a framework for making meaning that doesn’t require us to “make sense” of anything. These are techniques that don’t need us to find any answers, don’t need us to be smart or figure anything out or come up with anything perfect or “correct”. How relieving!

Techniques and games promoting poetic digestion help us take any body of information and filter it down, essentialize, to “look from the corner of our eyes”— in ways that allow new meaning and connections to arise that were not readily apparent in the source material.

An example of Poetic Digestion:

In each Image Word Mystery class, there is a period during which classmates share their day’s writing out loud with the group. But instead of this being a passive audience moment, it is an active listening session in which everyone has their pen in hand, ready to take notes. We listen for turns of phrase that catch our attention, we listen for potent imagery, we listen for embedded themes, and we are capturing these things on the page as they float by.

After everyone in the circle reads, you have a page scattered with tidbits of information dropped in from each voice: In other words, you have a body of excellent randomized source material! You can see one of my note pages here:

After everyone had read on this particular day, I asked the class to poetically digest their notes so we could find the poem-written-between-us-all by a simple process of found poetry— We didn’t have to listen then write a poem about all the work we just heard our classmates read, we just had to circle words on the page until a poem showed up.

So from all the notes I took while the class read their work on October 6th, the poem I discovered written between us all (outlined in blue) was:

guided by
a torn up
relentless life
grief
is
vulnerable
medicine

And, voila! The oracle has spoken!

Isn’t making meaning fun?

I write & draw in my notebook every day with few exceptions, so I can amass a goodly amount of work in there during a month’s time. I take it with me everywhere and I write and draw in it constantly— So I’m always trying to find ways not to lose my own plot.

Here’s what I’ve been doing to poetically digest each month:

1. At the end of the month, I flip back through my pages until I find the beginning of the month (yes I religiously date my pages and yes I highly suggest this practice). The month’s worth of notebook pages becomes my source material.

2. Then I select one word or phrase from each page and write it down building a poem chronologically as I go. As I look over my source pages, I am scanning for interesting words or phrases that pop out, the big ideas, the symbols, the things that dominate the page, or the things that just feel the most twinkly to me at the time I do this practice. As I turn from one page to the next, the last phrase lingers in my mind as I softly see what words or phrases want to come after. I don’t think too hard.

And when I’m done doing this with all the month’s pages, I didn’t have to write anything “new” but I have a totally new piece of writing in front of me with its own interesting insights into the quality of time of my month.

There’s no one hidden poem in these pages, there’s no wrong way to make meaning like this. It doesn’t have to make sense-sense. And I can repeat this process as many times as I want with the same source material, choosing a different adventure each time and producing a completely different digested work at the end if I want to explore my options.

You can play with variations on this theme all day long—

I picked up my earliest-known-notebook from the shelf and took notes from each page. Here’s how I digested being 14, using words I wrote then:

it’s okay to run away. 
we undergo change like the water.
you don't want to be there,
and you don't want to be here-
a song without a refrain
no catch phrase
cradle me. 

Feels about right.

This week’s prompt:

Ready to try it on one of your notebooks? Can you pull one resonant word or phrase from each page (or from random pages) of your notebook and make new meaning from what’s already there? Your source material can be a month of writing, a year of writing, or an entire notebook! What new story does your digested poem tell about that chunk of time? Any new insights?

[And if you keep sketchbooks or include lots of visuals in your journal like I do, they’re in-play too: You can translate the images into words/lines of text. Coming across a figure study in my pages, I summarized it as “an indifferent nude reclining” and it became part of the poetry…]

xo,