Lesson 5 - The Prose Poem as a Memory of Elephants
Lesson 5 - The Prose Poem as a Memory of Elephants
Use boredom to find beauty and write the wildest surreal flash prose
Lesson 5 of 8 from Karan Kapoor’s Surrealist's Toolkit: Creating Beautiful Prose Poems from Everyday Madness
A lot of writers who are prolific extol the virtues of having a writing routine. Some wake up early in the morning and start their day by writing for a few hours, while others write every night before going to bed. And of course there are many who are sporadic who don’t write for weeks and months until a dam breaks within them.
I have reasons to believe that following a routine does wonders for your craft. It’s best to treat your writing as you would any other day job. Would a surgeon ever say “I don’t feel like it today”? Or does a plumber ever feel a plumbing block?
Writers are special, but only in the way that they are able to look at the world in new, original ways that not many people can. I urge you to find inspiration in ritual and repetition.
Elevate the Mundane to the Miraculous
One of my most favorite writers I found two years ago is Brian Doyle, whose essays often turn everyday moments into profound reflections, showcasing how ordinary life can be imbued with extraordinary beauty. When I first read his posthumous collection, One Long River of Song, I cried at every single essay/poem in it. Every single one. And ugly-cried most of those times. Here are a few readings I did when I first encountered his work.
The way he turns everyday moments into profound reflections is unforgettable. For this lesson, it is mandatory to read, Joyas Voladoras, an essay that exemplifies how the mundane can be imbued with extraordinary beauty. Though there’s nothing mundane about a hummingbird or a blue whale, we might not pay enough attention to these marvelous beings. Look how Doyle brings their magnificence justice.
Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests…They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.
…
The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day, and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest animal who ever lived we know nearly nothing.
I love how this essay transforms into a poignant reflection on the beauty and fragility of life, using the juxtaposition of a hummingbird's tiny, rapid-beating heart and the immense heart of a blue whale to explore vulnerability, ambition, and the mysteries of existence. Doyle's eloquence elevates these creatures from everyday wonders to profound symbols of life's brevity and vastness. His ability to evoke emotion and wonder from the natural world illustrates how the seemingly mundane can hold deep, universal significance. Use wonder as the gateway drug to the Surreal.
Generative prompt #1
Write a prose poem transforming a mundane task or a routine activity (like making coffee or brushing your teeth) into a mystical, surreal experience by using language that is elevated and surprising.
Narrow Down from Larger Themes to Smaller Moments and Vice Versa
In “Joyas Voladoras,” Brian Doyle masterfully demonstrates how to narrow down from larger themes to smaller moments and vice versa. He begins with the specific, vivid details of a hummingbird's heart, illustrating its intense, fleeting existence and zooms out to the broad theme of life and its fragility. He expands his intricate observations into universal ideas about the nature of life and death, drawing connections between the tiny, fragile hummingbird and the immense, mysterious blue whale. Poems are always more interesting when they exhibit this movement.
I recommend beginning your poems with a very specific, concrete image or narrative thread before you move on to the more abstract, universal themes or ideas. This allows the reader to trust the poem and enter it. I usually use the analogy of a door or a window (door being a way to fully enter into the world of the poem vs windows as a way to look out from your own world into another’s)). The more of yourself you put into your poems, the more the poem becomes uniquely yours. We all want to meet someone when we’re reading. Make that someone unforgettable.
Generative Prompt #2
Begin with a broad theme (e.g., fear or love) and zoom into a specific moment. Once you’re finished with the draft, turn it around. As in, begin with a specific detail and then expand it into a universal idea without letting go of your personal context. Notice how the poem changes.
If your feeling up to it, please share what you’ve written below. If you’re not, that’s completely fine we shall meet again on Friday Aug 23 to explore sexy surreal poetry 👀
I am in control. I weigh out fifteen grams of coffee, then add three more beans. I used to think my grinder stole a couple of micrograms. It is the gas. The beans hold pressurised gas, and when the grinder grinds the beans the gas comes out, from wherever it’s been, colombia or nicaragua or indonesia or zambia rwanda ethiopia. My partner says I’m like a helicopter, I float around the flat turning one hand around the other and I never know the most efficient way to do it should I hold one hand still and only move one and I shift and change each time but I like the way it moves excess adiposity is a killer so I trick my body into moving by pretending the closest supermarket no longer exists so I have to walk to the one further away or insisting to my body that we must cycle to the other side of town as only coffee grown in sidamo will do and of course if I were a coffee farmer I would not have this problem at all and the washing station was destroyed by a landslide and rebuilt and destroyed by a landslide and it’s an el nino year and the downpipe broke water seeping out across the front of the building and I think i really need to call someone about that but I’m hardly able to do it now as I’m still grinding the coffee and the beans today are hard and dense and it must be because of sidamo the altitude I think making them denser
Late to the party but here's my effort for Generative Prompt #1
Taking What Comfort I Want
If this were not my pet, but some hideous beast of myth I might feel less comfortable extending a hand of comfort. I would tremble more than I am while my fingers seek out his wet nose for what must be an annoying daily trial for this old boy who though only four and slightly slowed from his chewy worst, seems to suffer like a dog will suffer who knows there is little recourse to the master. And that is what I am—master of the lead, the leash, but, too, the least likely to cause him to suffer more than this gentle caress which, to be truthful—always a nebulous gesture in story, is more about satisfying some strange craving in me, though beyond an intimation, I could not say what for sure and more than the most vivid myth illustrates still by suggestion and inference and the sort of association that makes you wonder why am I waking this dog when I know as well as you to let sleeping dogs lie.