Chapter 4
All Your Words Fit to Print (and Some That Aren’t!): Keeping Journals
In This Chapter
➤ Why journaling is important
➤ Types of journals
➤ A short course in journaling
➤ How to get poems out of your journals
➤ Fun journaling exercises
Not every word you write is going to end up in a poem. That’s simply the way writing works. If you treasure every word you write, you are in for a shock and are missing a large part of the act of writing. William Faulkner had this advice for writers: “Murder your darlings.” By this, Faulkner meant that writers should be ruthless with their words, cutting and slashing and rewriting. Being a writer is a lot like being a butcher: You’ve got to know when and where to hack off the fat.
Journaling is about experimenting and writing without fear. Sometimes poets have a sense of dread when writing a poem; the inner critic emerges too early and begins to slash away at the poet’s momentum. With journaling, you have no critic looking over your shoulder. You are simply writing happily away, without thinking about your words being “good.” A journal is a safe place. Eventually you will be able to “murder your darlings” in your journal and extract the good stuff, the bits and pieces that will become poems. What about the abandoned words? They are just stepping-stones on your way toward becoming a better poet. Thank them and move on.
What Is Journaling?
Journaling is the act of regularly writing in a journal. The journal is a place to feel free in your writing, to doodle, to begin poems, to write down inspired lines and not-so-inspired verses. A journal is for pressing flowers and pasting images cut from magazines. You can do and be anything in your journal.
Most writers use journals. They record the day’s events, noteworthy moments, memories, stray images, new words, inspirations, feelings, and anything else they need to get out of their heads and on to paper. Journals are great for letting go of the flotsam rattling around in your head. Writing in the journal makes way for new “flotsam,” and that makes way for new poems.
The Importance of Journaling
The more you write, the better a poet you will become—that’s a fact. Being a beginning writer is a lot like being a beginning pianist who must play the scales over and over: You have to learn where to place your fingers.
Dodging Doggerel
Use only the best material out of your journals for your poems. Consider the rest “toss-away” junk. It’s often difficult for beginning poets to throw anything away, but the less you hoard, the more room you’ll have for better stuff.
Writing in a journal also enables you to “trash” all the words in your head so that you can get down to the business of writing poems. Remember, in poetry, “less is more.” If you don’t have a way to release all of the garbage in your head, you may want to put it all in a poem, which is a bad idea, especially for beginning and novice poets.
Journaling also gives you something to do when you’re not writing poems, and can offer you a wealth of material when you go back and look at your journal later. You may not see the poem in your journal entry at the moment, but later you may see it and write it.
Journal writing is a great way to “warm up” for writing. Say you have a great idea for a poem but you’re just not “inspired.” Work a bit in your journal and you might find the energy and inspiration to get to that poem.
The Difference Between a Journal and a Diary
A journal can be a lot like a diary, but it doesn’t have to be. The word “diary” implies that you are going to be writing the most personal details of your life, and that can be scary, especially if there’s the potential for someone else to read them. Instead, think of your journal as a place where you are doing the daily work of being a poet. That means recording images, ideas, and starting poems.
Touchstones
I went through a period once where I felt like I was dying. I wasn’t writing any poetry, and I felt that if I couldn’t write I would split. I was recording in my journal, but no poems came. I know now that this period was a transition in my life. The next year, I went back to my journal, and here were these incredible poems I could lift out of it … These poems came right out of the journal. But I didn’t see them as poems then.
—Audre Lorde
When to Write in Your Journal
Try to write in your journal every day at the same time. The actual time doesn’t matter: It can be when you wake up, just before you go to bed, or sometime in the middle of the day. But do it regularly and make it a “date” that you can keep every day.
Perhaps you’re a “jotter,” someone who carries a journal around and jots in it all day long. That’s great! You’re not going to miss a thing this way. Your journal is probably going to be small and portable, and you’re probably going to have a stack of them ready to start when you fill the one you’re using.
Types of Journals
There are many types of journals aside from the “garden salad” journal into which you throw everything. You can keep various “theme” journals where you explore something specific.
Roses Are Red
Tie a pen to your journal (a spiral-bound notebook is useful here). That way you won’t ever have to hunt for a pen while you forget the most inspired line poetry has ever seen!
Choose at least two or three of these types of journals and keep them regularly. When you don’t want to write in one on a certain day, you can write in another. This leaves you with a lot of options—and you have no excuse for not writing!
Touchstone
A writer uses a journal to try out the new step in front of the mirror.
—Mary Gordon
➤ Daily log. This is a diary, of sorts, about what you’ve done during the day. You can log everything from what you ate for breakfast to how you felt after a tough day at work. This is an easy one to keep, and you may find yourself starting to write about the day and ending up discovering something about yourself. This is a good way to “warm up” for writing.
➤ Dream journal. Excellent for tapping into the subconscious, which is a very important thing for a poet. Keep this journal by your bedside, and the second you wake up, before even running to the bathroom, record your dream. You will be surprised at the results.
➤ Emotion journal. Name a journal Fear, Jealousy, Anger, Rage, Loss, Happiness, Freedom, Inspiration (see where I’m going with this one?), etc., and just get all of it out on paper. Perhaps choose the emotion on which most of your poems are based. You’re bound to get a lot of material from this one.
➤ Memory journal. Record your memories here—from your earliest memory to an hour before—just make them significant.
➤ Urban journal. Perfect for city folk. Keep a record of your interaction with the city.
➤ Nature journal. Keep a record of the natural happenings around you: the changing of the seasons, the movements of the planets, and the natural events happening to you as you grow up and grow older.
➤ Love journal. A life- and heart-affirming journal. Write about those you love, and about love in general. Might keep you going on those tough days. And think of the possibilities for your poems!
➤ Letter journal. When in doubt, write a letter. This is a great journal to keep when you have no intention of sending the letters, or when someone has passed on—what a terrific opportunity to express yourself. Hint: You can write letters to yourself from other people, too.
➤ Wisdom journal. Do you give great advice? Crummy advice? Doesn’t matter. This journal will make you feel like Confucius, and you can say what you like without alienating your friends and family.
➤ Relationship journal. Everything about any relationship, which is perfect for poetry. Past, present, or future (!) relationships.
➤ Confessional journal. Diary exemplified. Let it all hang out. Spare nothing. But make sure it has a lock.
The Short Course in Journaling
Journaling seems like it would be easy, right? After all, you have no pressure for anything you write to be good, or even to turn into a poem. Well, for most of us, any type of writing can create anxiety, especially if there’s a blank page involved. Here are some tips to get you started writing in your journals.
➤ Write each letter of the alphabet down the left side of the page and then, starting from the top, write a sentence starting with the appropriate letter. You’ll invent a kind of poem to how you are feeling at the moment.
➤ Begin the journal with a string of sentences about what you aren’t going to write about. For example: This entry is not about today when the bus was late. It’s not about the time my dog ran away … you get the idea. This will get you warmed up and writing.
➤ Write an abstract word on the top of the page, like love, hope, pain, hunger, and so on, and begin listing all of the associations you have with that word. You should come to a point where you begin writing about a memory or a feeling.
➤ Choose an object from your immediate surroundings. Describe that object in exquisite detail, leaving nothing out. Make sure to use metaphor and simile.
➤ Write with your journal turned the “wrong” way, i.e., horizontally instead of vertically, or begin writing in the middle or at the back of the journal. This might help to free you from the notion that everything must be done the “right” way.
Extracting Poems from Your Journals
Once you’ve got a fair amount of journal entries written, and you’re going through a dry spell, you may want to go back to your journal to find the poems hidden there. Some may shout at you and be nearly finished, while others may take a while to find and will need a good bit of reworking.
Poet Richard Cecil used his journal doodlings to compose a sonnet—but he didn’t know it was a sonnet when he began journaling.
Richard Cecil says of his poem:
“I started with a big doodle pad and two lines of iambic pentameter that I’ve circled on the bottom of the first page—that was the first clump of language that I thought could grow into a poem. By the second typed page I realized I was going to write a sonnet because I had a (pretty lame) rhyme—say/way—and a meter that would lead to a sonnet if I could push it for 11 more lines. By the next page I realized that if I reversed the first two lines I could open more strongly, switch from Shakespearean to Petrarchan form, and strengthen the rhyme—say/x-ray. At least that’s the way it looks to me now, six months after writing this, though at the time I just plodded along from line to line, trying to make this poem go somewhere. When I came to the last page, final draft, I gave it the title for the first time, my standard procedure—I call everything ‘Work in Progress’ in order to prevent me from knowing where I’m going until I get there. I didn’t much like the title I gave it, though, and then I remembered a purple flyer I’d gotten in the mail the week before calling for essays on the topic ‘Essays about Poetry, Science, & Mathematics.’ That’s when it dawned on me that this sonnet was my essay—not that it would ever get published as one. So I crossed out ‘Creative Writing’s Place in the Pre-Med Program’ and re-titled it ‘On the Relationship Between Science and Poetry.’”
On the Relationship Between Science and Poetry
I’m sorry to inform you that you’re doomed,”
your skull-faced doctor isn’t going to say
while pointing out the black spot in your x-ray
as if he’d just been told to act out “gloom”
in tryouts for his small part in this play
called “The Death of X,” where you portray
the lead reluctantly, though you’ve been groomed
your whole life to star in this tragedy.
No, Dr. Grim is going to sugarcoat
the poison pill death’s ramming down your throat
with a thin layer of fictitious hope:
“With chemo many like you’ve learned to cope.”
In other words, he’s going to forget
his scientific training and turn poet.
I’m sorry to inform you that you’re doomed,”
your skull-faced doctor isn’t going to say
while pointing out the black spot in your x-ray
as if he’d just been told to act out “gloom”
in tryouts for his small part in this play
called “The Death of X,” where you portray
the lead reluctantly, though you’ve been groomed
your whole life to star in this tragedy.
No, Dr. Grim is going to sugarcoat
the poison pill death’s ramming down your throat
with a thin layer of fictitious hope:
“With chemo many like you’ve learned to cope.”
In other words, he’s going to forget
his scientific training and turn poet.
—Richard Cecil
A Poem a Day
If you’re feeling up to a challenge, start a “poem-a-day journal” and stick to it. Many poets get to the serious work of writing poems every day and wouldn’t even think of keeping a journal.
Poet David Lehman wrote a book called The Daily Mirror in which he gave himself the exercise of writing a poem a day for an entire year. Try it for a month in your journal and see what happens. Don’t worry so much about the poem being “great”; just get it written.
Here’s an entry from Lehman’s Daily Mirror. It has the feeling of a pantry list, but it uses politics (note the date: Pearl Harbor Day) and the self-consciousness of writing poetry to underlie the seemingly simple list of “don’ts.” Try writing something like it yourself.
December 7
Rhyme wave with leave.
Postpone diet.
Do not do today what you can
as easily not do tomorrow.
Do not lend your car to a friend
of a friend. When you get it back,
you will need a new solenoid switch.
Mourn quietly. Drink lots of liquids.
Watch parts five and six of Dennis Potter’s
Lipstick on Your Collar.
Read up in the Suez Crisis of 1956
and what it meant for “Little England.”
Was the invasion really known
as “Operation Musketeer?”
Do not answer the phone.
Do not comply with alternate
side of the street parking regulations.
Do not remember Pearl Harbor.
Whatever you were going to do,
don’t do it. No need for a handshake.
Just wave and leave.
Rhyme wave with leave.
Postpone diet.
Do not do today what you can
as easily not do tomorrow.
Do not lend your car to a friend
of a friend. When you get it back,
you will need a new solenoid switch.
Mourn quietly. Drink lots of liquids.
Watch parts five and six of Dennis Potter’s
Lipstick on Your Collar.
Read up in the Suez Crisis of 1956
and what it meant for “Little England.”
Was the invasion really known
as “Operation Musketeer?”
Do not answer the phone.
Do not comply with alternate
side of the street parking regulations.
Do not remember Pearl Harbor.
Whatever you were going to do,
don’t do it. No need for a handshake.
Just wave and leave.
Touchstones
One learns by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
—Sophocles
Exercises
Here are some fun exercises that will help you to cull poems out of your journals:
➤ Flip to five unrelated pages in your journal(s). Pull out the best lines from these five places and make a poem from them.
➤ Take the last sentences from 10 of your journal entries and begin a 10-part poem with them.
➤ Write a letter to your future self: a month from now, a year, 10 years, 20.
➤ Find five objects from nature and describe them in your journal—leave nothing out.
➤ Find a map of the world, close your eyes, and point. Write in your journal about what you think it would be like to live in the place under your finger. Then write an entry in the persona of a person who lives in that place.
The Least You Need to Know
➤ Journaling is a great way to “warm up” for writing.
➤ A poet’s journal isn’t a diary, though you can use it as one if you’d like.
➤ Try to write in your journal every day at the same time—or at least every day!
➤ Choosing two or three specific types of journals enables you to focus your writing and gives you options.
➤ Writing journal entries during “dry spells” is a great way to create material for poems you’ll write later.
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