Last year, I taught an undergraduate level “Intro to Creative Writing” class while on fellowship at University of San Francisco. This was an elective course, so my students had all kinds of majors - everything from nursing to finance to marketing to physics. I had total creative freedom to create my syllabus exactly the way I wanted, and, part of the core requirement was that I include poetry.

I am not a poet. Poetry is such a refined distillation of language, and let’s just say, I don’t have the guts (at least not yet).

So I did my own private deep study, and improvised like the good San Francisco hustler that I am. I pulled from Pop Sonnets in attempts to pique the interest of a bunch of young people very used to writing in a very specific way and totally scared of reconnecting to their imagination (I had to give evidence as to why imagination is worthy of our attention). I asked them to bring in their favorite songs which we close-read and then I put together a playlist for us at the end of the semester. I gave them weird assignments that forced them into unfamiliar landscapes and environments and had them write about it. And of course, we read, everything from Millay to Hughes to Milosz to Del Valle, and many, many more.

The thing with poetry - not all, obviously, but work with me here - is that much of it operates inside specific forms. In order for a sonnet to be a sonnet, for example, it has to follow a certain scheme. Otherwise, it might be a gorgeous bit of prose, but it’s not a sonnet.

Perhaps this sounds limiting. How can I express myself! If I’m under constraint?

What I learned is that when bound inside a form; when we put our creative work under constraint, it creates boundaries inside of which utter wildness is possible.

Take our friend Edna, for example - she fits Chaos, for god’s sake, into a form*:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon --- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

*read it aloud. Read all poetry aloud.

This is my meandering nod to the collective constraints we are all under. Oh, how I feel the weight. I know you feel it too.

With an external world increasingly cut off, I’m here, tending the garden, best I can. The garden contains multitudes. It gives me something to do: my hands stay busy, my heart so soft. Dreaming of grand feasts around endlessly long tables with every single last one of you.

I love you. Keep going.

A frazillion fun links below.

xxoo

dani

⛓ Links for you, my favorites:

🎶 Pop Sonnets! Where songs we’ve all hard 10,000 times are transformed into sonnets.

🦋 For Crying Out Loud - deeply, deeply moving.

In dealing with my own chaos, I dream of wailing in the streets. I romanticize an act of courage I witnessed inside a church. I convince myself that I don’t need to cry, that public protests will be enough. But deep down I know neither dreams nor protests can provide the spiritual catharsis that I crave. I know that I should unleash my grief; I know I need to scream. I imagine there’s freedom inside a public wail. But I can’t imagine the space or occasion where it could happen, or who I would be afterward. Maybe I should join a Pentecostal church, or move to a place that still treats tears like they’re holy.

💔 A sweet little ramble around one of my favorite brains and forever crushes: “Look At What We Love. It’s on Fire”: Stephen Colbert on Trump Trauma, Leadership, and Loss

✏️ Kristi Coulter’s latest essay in Dame Magazine set my laptop on fire yesterday.

Some say 2020 will be remembered as the year of a vicious pandemic, or of the most consequential election in American history. They’re thinking too small: 2020 is clearly the Year of the Mantrum, a.k.a. what happens when a man with the emotional skills of a toddler doesn’t get his way…We’ve been on our way here at least since the 2016 election, but the more immediate trigger was Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings. If a man could spend a solid chunk of a job interview sobbing “I like beer!” and still get the gig, maybe one takeaway for other men was that dignity and self-regulation needn’t be requirements for them, either. Especially not when they’re being treated unfairly, i.e., in any way other than how they want to be treated.

✍🏽 The Psychological Benefits of Writing By Hand - as someone who’s kept a daily journal practice since 2009…I can attest to this. It’s also why in my writing workshops I always encourage people to approach first drafts by setting the laptop aside.

🙅🏽‍♀️ It’s Not Stealing, It’s Acquiring - a weird dive “Inside the heads of people who borrow things from friends and never return them” (I’ll admit to being guilty of this from time-to-time over many years of being a friend and I bet you can to).

🤨 Another article about the pushback on informed consent from Big Alcohol: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen. Big Booze wants to keep it that way.

the myth that moderate drinking can be heart-healthy—[is]an association that has long been debunked as a conclusion of shoddy analysis. Nonetheless, there’s a pervasive sense among the general drinking public that the science remains unsettled. That climate of doubt is no accident: A 2017 analysis found that industry-affiliated groups regularly spread misinformation online to cast uncertainty around alcohol’s cancer link. Companies also sometimes engage in a practice dubbed “pinkwashing,” which involves branding alcoholic products with ribbons denoting breast cancer awareness to obscure ethanol’s carcinogenicity. …

As a result, public health advocates say, there is a frustratingly stubborn gulf between what experts know about alcohol’s cancer risk and the awareness of everyday drinkers. 

🏁 A most unexpected and totally joyful music video:

📹 It’s annoying to me that this has this warning label on it…it is the sweetest animated musing called “How Have You Been?” about one person’s dealing with the discomfort of living at home alone in Pandemia. HIGHLY recommend: