When I was in elementary school our workbooks were called Think and Do. I think my education would have been a better fit for me if the books had been Do and Think, since I’ve discovered that I learn best through direct engagement with materials. I’ve always been disappointed if I think of the poem as a big idea that I explain with words.
Words are the material of poetry, the same way that clay is the material of a pot. I can’t force my ideas; I need to pay attention and follow where the work needs to go. The questions and answers are in the relationship between the maker and the material. The poem can’t exist as an abstraction without words, any more than the vessel can exist without the clay or the image without the paint. Our work tells us what to do, and our process is always a call and response, or a dialog, with our materials. I can’t possibly know what I’m writing unless I put one word next to another and to another one after that. The words are creating along with me. The questions and answers are always in the unfolding.
There have been times in my writing life when I’m lost, or perhaps every time I set out to write I’m a little lost. What to write next? How can I bring a deeper spirit into my work? What if there’s nothing left in the tank? It’s then that I sometimes turn to a specific form or technique to give me a framework to push against.
I used to envy visual artists, who have a tactile relationship with metal, wood, clay, and paint, how touch provides information, so I decided to use different ways to write to make my own work more physical. I’ve used rubber stamps, blacked out sections of existing text to make poems, or formed letters by making a series of dots and working in a defined space. I find all those methods slow me down and provide a direct engagement with text.
A few years ago I began to make an “alphabet” that combined upper and lower case script and print, using some of my best bad penmanship from back in the Think and Do days of elementary school. I developed this style when I was doodling and then began to fill six-inch squares with text. I collaborated with visual artist Susan Webster, leaving a defined space where she could respond to the written text with collaged images. There’s no rough draft. I write in ink, and I need to stop when I’ve reached the end of the paper.
In this slowed down style of working I find myself in a liminal state. There is no expectation. One word leads me to the next. I’m an elementary school student practicing penmanship and a grown man encountering the richness of human language and his own mortality. I can only think a few words ahead and I become increasingly aware that my thinking and making are joined together and arising from my unconscious mind. The writing becomes an embodied experience. I’m listening to my heart and forming letters at the same time. I’m imagining with my hand.
Image at top: Rain Falls, 6 x 6 in., text by Stuart Kestenbaum, images by Susan Webster. Text:
Rain falls trees shake in the wind the world is alive the only world this one that’s orbiting around the sun every day for billions of years that’s a lot of circles to make and beyond that every star and planet spinning & twirling it’s enough to make me dizzy every day it’s enough to make me look at the grass & clouds & the sunlight on the stones the way I would look at the tiny hands & feet of a newborn every detail accounted for which brings us pretty close to hope that there is something deep inside us that knows what to do next in all this rotating splendor of joy & wonder & grief what a journey for each & every one of us oh my