One of the valuable bits of advice I did not cover in a recent Friday Five post about the book Writers on Writing was this morsel from the essay by Rosellen Brown (author of Tender Mercies and much more):
If it begins to feel too easy to do something, change forms. Make yourself an amateur in a new genre.
“Professionalism is something we want in airplane pilots and plumbers,” she continues. “But writers should always be doing something new and therefore dangerous, putting their feet down carefully the first tie, feeling themselves walking over an abyss, or leaping into space without any idea where they’ll come down.”
It was with this thought in mind that I recently began expanding my writing into paths less traveled by me, like poetry. Not that writing fiction and nonfiction had begun to feel too easy, but it was starting to feel like a rut. Or maybe a plateau. Whenever that happens, it’s a good idea to switch things up.
When I played guitar more frequently and found myself going stale, I’d switch from standard tuning to something like double drop D or open G. When I used to work out regularly and felt I’d plateaued, I’d switch routines. When my writing goes stale, I can switch it up by writing something unfamiliar to me, whether that is a different genre of fiction or poetry or something else out of the ordinary.
Not long ago, a new literary magazine called electric pink put out a call for submissions for its debut issue for “musical golden shovel” poetry. A golden shovel is “a poetic form in which the last word of each line has been taken from a section of a second, pre-existing poem to which the poet is paying homage.” The original golden shovel, by poet Terrance Hayes, pays tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks by borrowing lines from Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” The result, as shared by the Poetry Foundation:
When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we …
For electric pink‘s debut, editor-in-chief Natalye Childress played with the form, modifying it to focus on poems that pay tribute to existing songs instead of poems. The results are glorious. See for yourself.
Natalye allowed writers to submit up to five poems for this issue, so I decided to try my hand at this form. I wrote out half a dozen, decided that three of them might stand a chance, and after some editing and revising, submitted them.
None of the three made the cut. But that’s okay. Rejection is part of the gig. And after reading the poems that did make the cut, I had a better idea of the competition, and saw my own writing in a different light. (My favorite of the poems in electric pink‘s first issue are “Your Own Private Idaho,” by Erica Reid, and “At 5 AM, New York Smells Like the Day Before,” by Kathleen Latham. Each of my poems was less earnest, more flippant, which is probably more a statement about my mindset and approach than any other poet’s work.) And in the process of playing around with some golden shovels, I discovered a new way of digging into the soil of words, a new approach to writing.
Here, in the spirit of showing my work, is the exclusive, public debut of one of my three rejected golden shovels. The others will probably remain buried deep in the “drafts” folder.
Hey, do you want to hang
Out at the new club, the
One with the cool deejay?
Or we could simply hang
at my place, turn on the
stereo. No deejay!
Or, like bats, we could hang
Upside-down in the woods
Far from any deejay.
(After “Panic,” by the Smiths)
Andrew Careaga 