Mini-Prompt: Stafford's Aphorisms

I have been reading and rereading William Stafford's poetry and prose since I was in college. It was his daily writing practice which inspired my own poem-a-day project in 2014.  It was good discipline and I produced 365 short poems and have continued that project on a weekly basis since then. 

One of his aphorisms explains his ability to write first thing every morning and produce something he considered a poem: "A realization: my slogan for writing—lower your standards and go on—applies to living, to getting old."  

Though I created my own short form for my daily writing so that I wouldn't be intimidated with the task and a form so that I had parameters, Stafford said, "I write short things because no one will listen long."

       

For this mini-prompt, I used Stafford's collection, Passages from Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems. I chose a handful of them to use. Your prompt is to select one and use it as a line, epigraph or title for your short poem. If you have his book or find others online, use them. Put quotation marks on the Stafford line if you post it here as a comment. 

Stafford often started the day and a poem with one of his aphorisms as one of his elements of his daily practice.

An "aphorism" — a freestanding sentence, an idea, a question, a puzzle. Often, William Stafford would next write a sentence that "lifted off" from daily experience to observe a pattern, a truth, an idea, or a private joke ("It still takes all kinds to make a world, but there is an oversupply of some"). This provisional understanding from daily life begins to raise your attention out of the mundane into the gently miraculous realm of poetry. It is your own koan. These aphorisms in William Stafford's daily writing rarely become part of poems (though some of his poems are built from a series of such lines). Most often, they are little wonders left to resonate as private treasure, threshold, key. A bell has been struck, bringing the writer to attention. 

If you write a poem and would like to share it with our online community, post it as a comment below this post. Take note that when you post any comment to the blog (and many other blogs), it needs to be approved before it appears. I've noticed that several people have submitted a comment multiple times thinking it didn't go through. Keep calm and don't resubmit.

If you're not familiar with William Stafford's poetry, I would suggest the collection Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford as a starting place.  Here are some aphorisms to consider - even if you're not writing a poem.

Every mink has a mink coat.

Believing our way, we find.

The arrow tells what the archer meant to say.

What can’t be avoided must be endured.

Art is first nothing, then something.

Faith is easy; doubt is hard.

My life isn’t what I thought it was. But the world isn’t either.

Many things we think we are leaving are waiting for us.

I’ve got in a lot of trouble in my life by being careful.

The river keeps looking for the perfect stone.

Strange, the best part of a room is a window.

If there is a trail, you have taken a wrong turn.

I hear the clock’s little teeth gnawing at time.

At first, it’s not much of a river.

          

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Writing the Day

Writing the Day was the name I chose for a new daily practice I started for 2014. It wasn't a New Year Resolution, and it wasn't totally original.  I want to write a poem each day.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the for me. Stafford wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.”

It’s not that I don’t already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning and what he did when it didn’t meet his standards, he replied, “I lower my standards.”

I like that answer, but I know that phrase “lowering standards” has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.

I call the form ronka – a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

And that will be our short prompt for this short month.

These poems are meant to be one observation on the day. It might come upon waking. It might come during an afternoon walk, or when you are alone in the night.The poems should come come from paying close attention to the outside world from earth to sky or from inside – inside a building or inside you.

People know haiku as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that’s an English version, since Japanese doesn’t have syllables.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.

For my invented ronka form, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like traditional tanka and haiku, my form has no rhyme. You want to show rather than tell. You want to use seasonal words - cherry blossoms, rather than “spring.”

It's hard for Western writers to stay out of their poems - lots of "I" - but ronka have fewer people walking about in the poem.

The poems are just 5 lines, but you can certainly write several on a single theme and chain them together renga style.

For examples, there are some on our main site and all my ronka poems so far are on the Writing the Day website. I look forward to you outdoing me at my own form.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2014

Parenting: Dark and Warm

After our May prompt mixing the mundane and erotic in a prose poem scared the poetry world into silence, we decided to normalize for June.

With Mother's Day and Father's Day past, the William Stafford poem "With Kit, Age 7, At The Beach" set us thinking about parenting.

That's a big topic and there are so many poems that could go into that anthology. From the poetic children we have poems that are as dark as "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. There are also the poetic parents writing about their own parenting in poems as warm as "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" by Galway Kinnell.

We also recommend William Stafford's poems and his many books on writing like Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life.