Fountains of Nonsense: How I Found My Own Way into Weirder, Wilder Writing
With Help from Jose Hernandez Diaz, Jon Pearson, and Some Imaginitive Kids
Fountains of Nonsense: How I Found My Own Way to Weird(er) Wilder, Writing.
But First, Some Announcements!
This April, I’ll be teaching two specialty classes available on Zoom. One is FREE, and offered through the library system. The other is offered at a much lower rate than its usual price through the YMCA. Sign up ASAP!
I’ve always been jealous of people with big imaginations.
Surrealist poets, absurdist comedians. My cousin Jon Pearson, who teaches Unhinge Your Head at The Poetry Salon, is always telling me to play with my writing, to have fun, to let my inner child out to toy around with words, to, well, unhinge my mind. And I’m always resisting.
Maybe because I’m an older child and I feel the need to control things. Maybe because I’ve been a teacher so long and I want to make everyone focus on getting things done. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been told that lying is wrong. For whatever reason, I tend to use my writing to describe reality and try to bring real images and feelings and events into focus, rather than use it to create new realities of my own.
But I love dreaming and dream worlds. I love poems that disobey rules, rules of physics, rules of language, rules of cause and effect. I gravitate towards poets that break rules easily. I once told my buddy, Kelly Grace Thomas, that I was having a little trouble making sense of some of her unusual language choices. “Sense” she said, as though it were a dirty word, “why would I want to make sense?”
My Husband is A Fountain of Nonsense
I think I married my husband because he does this so well. Just yesterday I was in the car driving with him and brought up the topic of reincarnation. He asked Can I be the reincarnation of several things instead of just one? Like, can I be the reincarnation of an entire heard of buffalo? Or a whole pod of dolphins? Or a Pencil? I think I am the reincarnation of the 1,856th pencil ever made. Then he blithely went about driving the car to our destination talking about his past life as a pencil.
I, on the other hand, tried to explain to him the history of transmigration dating back to the Greek philosophers. I’ve always been a little silly about how serious I take certain things.
Jose Hernandez Diaz Gave Me Some New Ideas about Surrealism
So, recently, I was delighted to interview Jose Hernandez Diaz on The Poetry Saloncast. I was drawn to his work because it is so surreal. So imaginative.
I asked him about some of his writing. Is it all metaphorical? Is it all just symbol or stand in for real things he’s thinking. He explained that sometimes the answer is yes, it is, but other times he is just building a world and using his imagination to make things happen. He’s just playing.
Of course, I don’t believe there is such a thing as totally random play when it comes to our imagination. Even being silly for the sake of being silly can tell us something about how our brain works. Our play might be like a rorschach test. The mind has a mind of its own, as my cousin, Jon Pearson likes to say. But when we play with our imagination, letting it roam free, we draw on a different kind of logic. Dream logic. Intuitive logic. Emotional logic. We say things in a symbolic language that might show us more about how we feel than what we think.
It might show us, for example, what we desire, what we wish to be true or even what we fear. It might just show us what is on our minds. What stuff is sticking in our craw from all of the living and reading and thinking we’ve done throughout our lives.
Maybe this overanalysis is part of why I have such trouble letting go of the rational mind and just playing or wandering or doing something for the pleasure of it.
Sometimes I Steal Ideas from Children
Children, before they turn five, don’t have so much of a problem with this. It’s part of why I like working with kids. The other day a little girl was trying to get the attention of another little girl who wasn’t paying attention to her. I asked “What do you want to tell her?” She said “I want her to know I’ve changed from a little Pteradactile to a Giant Pterydactile with big wings, and also, I’ve opened a soap store and I want her to come buy soap.” Naturally I asked what kind of soap and the girl, I mean the Pteradactyl was selling. “All kinds, cloud soap, snow soap, soap that smells like rainbow.” I asked for some and she brought me a handful of air, assuring me it was her finest rainbow soap and I smelled it and said, “Yes, it smells exactly like rainbow.”
Of course I had to write that down. And I’ve written a bunch of other things down that the kids say. Sometimes, I won’t lie, I steal their best ideas and try to elongate them into full poems of my own. But I always feel like this is cheating in some way.
Trying to “Unhinge my Head” with Jon Pearson
A few days ago I was in my cousin Jon’s workshop. He gave us a prompt to write using one of his patented, unhinge your head techniques. (Come to his class if you want to see what these are like). I was starting to really get into the activity, starting to build a whole new world where impossible things could happen, and impossible things were happening. I could feel my head start to unhinge… but then, I got distracted by reality again. What happened was that in my poem I added a fish. And instead of doing unique and interesting things with it, things that my favorite surrealists, or Jon or Jose would do, I just stopped for like twenty minutes to describe the fish.
“Damn it.” I commented. “I really thought I was going somewhere unique with this, but it turned out to be just another dumb fish poem.”
Jon and others assured me that what I wrote that day was meaningful and beautiful and clever and different from what I usually wrote, with more “flights of fancy, and depths of emotion” as Jon puts it. But I still felt dejected. I hadn’t written anything nearly as surreal or weird or strange or interesting as those I wanted to emulate. The next day I sat at my writing desk meditating on my utter inability to be creative. Then, in my self-critical voice I thought, “I wish I could just write poems about fish for a living and have that be enough.”
The Aha Moment
Boom, I thought. That’s it, and immediately wrote the poem. (I’ll share it with paid subscribers.)
What I Realized
The problem, I realized, is that I was trying to be a surrealist like Jose, or Jon or others I admire. What you can do is find the particular kind of strange lurking in your head, and then intensify it and magnify it.
I rarely write poems with clowns in them, or fire engines, or mythological figures from Meso-America. The kind of thing that lives in my mind is… well, fish. And bugs, and birds. So, even if I am trying to do something different with my poems, I need to honor that particular brand of surrealism that speaks to my nature. Even as I write this I realize it’s something Jose and I discussed on the podcast. He calls it “culturally specific surrealism,” something he does so well, inspired partially by poets like Tate, but using the imagery of Mexican and Latin American and Chicanx culture in ways Tate never would to create poems that are authentic to himself. Even as I try to get more interesting and surreal with my writing, as I try to “unhinge my head” and play and world-build, I realize I need to find my own way of doing it. I’m never going to sound like the other surrealists I admire, but I can take some of their ideas and examples and use them to find my own way into my own brand of “weird” and dream-like writing. There will probably be lots of fish involved.
If you want to learn more from Jose Hernandez Diaz, you can get access to the material he shared with us in his workshop, “Intro to the Prose Poem” by becoming a subscriber.
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