Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work chronicles the habits of 400 writers and their quirky rituals, many of which include partaking in coffee, tea, sherry, wine, and tobacco. It is well-known but not known to what degree that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote poems while on opium. The poet William Heyen lights a candle before he writes. What-
ever the ritual, the purpose of it is to instill a certain mindset that arises from the act. As you may know, many athletes have rituals, too. Boston Red Sox third-basemen Wade Boggs ate chicken before each game. Among his many eccentricities, pitcher Turk Wendell insisted on chewing four pieces of black licorice whenever he started a game. According to David K. Israel, “At the end of each inning, he’d spit them out, return to the dugout, and brush his teeth, but only after taking a flying leap over the baseline.” We need not be that elaborate, but of course, if it works. . .
Discussion
What type of rituals, if any, have you used for writing, sports, or performing? Do you have any ideas for some you might consider adopting for writing?
Activity
Create a writing space, or visit multiple coffee shops, changing what you write by where you write. For example, work on a series of poems about your travels at the kitchen table but write only about your relationships in the student union. Try this for a short period of time and note how the setting and ritual affect your mindset and focus.
Dream
Whether it’s staring out a window and daydreaming or keeping a dream journal, exploring the strange images in our mind can also inspire writing, especially, if you’re an avid dreamer, those images we experience at night. When we dream, our brains make connections that our conscious mind does not make while we’re awake. And sometimes these connections lead to eureka moments and new discoveries. For example, did you know that all of the following scientific discoveries were made in dreams: the periodic table; evolution by natural selection; and the scientific method? (You can read about these and others at the websiteFamous Scien- tists.) Or did you know thatPaul McCartneyreportedly composed the melody of “Yesterday”
in a dream? According to an article by Jennifer King Lindley, “Stephanie Meyerawoke from sleep with the idea for theTwilight series.” And just imagine what effect dreams had onThe
Twilight ZonewriterRod Serling?!
Throughout human history, cultures have relied on dreams for knowledge and insight. Some Native Americans, for instance, believed that their ancestors visited them in their dreams. The Greeks and Romans believed that gods and goddesses visited them in their dreams. Many
religions connected dreams with supernatural or divine intervention. And Sigmund Freud famously understood dreams to be an expression of our inner-most desires and fears.
In recent times, scientific research and experiments have shown that while our bodies sleep, our dreaming mind sorts through the day’s stimuli not only organizing them, but developing them. In the article “While You Were Sleeping,” Jennifer King Lindley explains how sleeping heals the body, enhances memory, reduces stress, and boosts creativity. Good news for poets! John Steinbeck was right when he wrote, “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” That “committee,” explains Dr. Jessica Payne, director of the Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab at the University of Notre Dame, consists “of billions of busy neurons examining patterns between existing knowledge and new memories to develop innovative solutions.” She contin- ues, “When you dream in REM sleep, the rational control center of the brain is deactivated. This produces an amazingly creative state, and you are able to come up with ideas that you would not be able to when you are awake.”
This knowledge must have been known to the group of French writers and artists who, in the 1920s, began theSurrealist Movement. Interested in turning away from logic and reason, the Surrealists turned toward the subconscious and the inexplicable. They were interested in dreams, freewriting, random selections of images and phrases from various places that when juxtaposed would evoke a strange, unfamiliar sense of knowing that could not be explained rationally. Their work is surprising, startling, captivating and contemporary poetry has been very much influenced by their approaches and aesthetic. The poem “The Painted Couple” by
Matthew Rohreris a good example of a recent use of surrealistic technique:
The Painted Couple
A couple paints themselves like the sky so no one will see them. In this way they hope to stay in bed all day.
In the evenings, they walk as if invisible. They are overjoyed.
No eyes to either meet or avoid on the sidewalk, perhaps perfect solitude at last.
Everyone stares. A couple, naked and painted like the sky, walk down the street holding hands.
They stop to look in the windows of stores. They point at the shoes. They point at old beads. The birds rouse themselves from their roosts and fly at the couple.
Dozens of drowsy birds moving as one, diving at the couple painted like the sky. The postman stares from his left-handed truck
and the tavern proprietor stares from behind his stack of matchbooks and their friends stare from a passing Volkswagen
and a teacher stares from a copy shop, over the lid of a copier, and the policeman stares from his flashing car.
The couple who painted themselves like the sky stand before the magistrate, in clothes.
He is speaking. His mouth opens and closes under his wig.
Wisps of cirrus clouds slip out from under the man’s cuffs. the Pleiades rise and fall under her dress.
“The Painted Couple”, from A HUMMOCK IN THE MALOOKAS: Poems by Matthew Rohrer. Copyright ©1995 by Matthew Rohrer. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Com- pany, Inc.
A couple painting themselves like the sky is, well, impossible in real life, but not impossible in a poem. It evokes the painting ofRene Magritte, himself a surrealist, and known for paint- ing people who look like the sky. It is easy to imagine this leap of the imagination arising from a dream. Note the strangeness of the image of the magistrate in thepenultimatestanza: “He is speaking. His mouth open and closes / under his wig.” This description is strange. The magistrate is described in a mechanical way that makes him feel distant, foreign. Rather than saying he “talks” or “speaks,” we are given the image of his mouth opening and closing like an inanimate object “under his wig,” which adds a further sense of fakeness or artificiality. These details create a surreal image in our mind’s eye and make the magistrate feel cool and far away in the poem. Rohrer is a contemporary writer, but you can learn more about surrealism by researching writers at the roots of the movement such as Andre Breton,Stéphane Mallarme, andGuillaumé Apollinaire.
In addition to examining poems that use surrealistic techniques, you might also consider checking out art. One example of a piece of art, housed at the MOMA in New York, that strikes me personally was crafted byMeret Oppenheimafter a conversation she had at a Paris cafe with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar, when Oppenheim was wearing a bracelet covered with fur. The result was ateacup covered with gazelle fur. The MOMA web site is a great source for viewing surrealist and Modern art.
Activity
Keep a dream journal on the side of your bed and write down your dreams every morn- ing before you rise for one week. At the end of the week, read through and select the best material to start a poem. Keep this practice up and when you need images or mate- rial, flip through your dream journal for ideas.
Activity
Consult a dream dictionary and look up some of the images catalogued in your dream journal. Blending the meaning and the images together, compose a poem in which your dream becomes reality.