Cut from My Notebooks

Posted on July 6, 2003 in Poems Writing Exercises

Note: I spent the sum of two hours working on this project. I went through the notebooks I kept, my blogs, and a bound book where I write down favorite passages from my reading. Selected sentences. Wrote them on paper and cut them apart. Then, I shuffled them around in various configurations until I came up with this:

My real name is Banishment.

You could label me of no economic importance.

I find things on the beach that I’m not sure that other people notice:

A mountain lion track pressed in the mud.

A spadefoot toad with a dispensation for rasping.

The children of the dragonfly lurking in the eel grass, seizing.

The soil here is thin and will not allow a rain forest to fester.

I’m a human cormorant, discharging my guano, whiting the landscape.

I hope someone will be around to scrape the beaches clean.

I’ve got to mind my parked states.

Somewhere between Los Angeles and Hawaii, the uppermost tenth of a millimeter of the Pacific boiled up.

A light haze blindfolded vista seekers today.

The bright light etiolated everything until the whiteness thrown off every object stung the eyes.

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.

I laid out a cross deliberately.

With what fierce thirst for penance I have tried to mortify in myself the throbbing of the flesh, and make myself wholly transparent to the love of Jesus crucified.

Life’s greatest danger lies in the fact that men’s food consists entirely of souls.

I live every day offended by these things.

Undo the rope and let the tide take me out to sea.

---

Try it yourself. Go through things you have written: your blog, email, letters. Collect them on paper, one item to a line. Then add other things: sentences from other blogs, favorite quotes, selections from the phone book, lines from favorite songs, advertising jingles. Do the same. Then cut them apart, mix them up, and see what fits.

When you see something you like, glue it down and share it with us.

Stolen from Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind.