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Tips for poets, writers

 

Notes on poetry"Buddy, don't take any wooden nickels."   

Tips for poets and writers...

1. Area:  performance poems, exploring sounds and emotions

In general, try doing your performances with a different over-arching (or underlying) emotion. Try altering the tempo and volume of your delivery to avoid falling into rote habits - find the home note, tone (chakra vowel), find the melody line and/or rhythm and play with it. Try doing the poem excruciatingly slow and ridiculously fast, keep exploring corners, nuances, hidden parts of the poem... always go towards the most intensity... ray      

2. Area:  performance poems, movement, gestures, body expressionsWriting is work...

Just as William Strunk, Jr., said*, "Vigorous writing is concise.  A sentence should contain no unnecessary words for the same reason that a machine should have no unnecessary parts." The same holds true for performance and performance poetry. Movement and gestures are not random. A movement or a gesture either adds to the poem and performance or takes away from it.  It adds clarity to the message or to the impact or the experience of it, or it takes away from it, muddles it, or confuses the audience. Look as closely at the movements or body expressions as you do at the writing. Go over it and over it and over it until it works as an integrated whole.  Help? Full length mirror, cassette  recorder, or a video camera and recorder. You get the feedback. 

* with E.B. White in the now classic "The Elements of Style"

3.  Area:  writing, creation, spontaneity 

Forget the audience. Temporarily. Put yourself into it and let it come out without any thought of judging, being judged, critics, reviewers, editors, etc. In the creation process one must silence the critic in order to just be, in order to be free enough to let things happen of their own accord, to allow the inner to become the outer.  

4. Area:  writing, creation, spontaneity 

Kerouac said, "you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100% honesty both psychic and social and slap it all down shameless,  willynilly, rapidly."

That's what he called spontaneous bop prosady...in other words blow as deep as you can blow. I would add revision to that equation. He did, in spite of the lore that he did'nt, his drafts belie otherwise. However, editing does not mean censoring. You have to put everything in, even what you don't like about yourself -- especially that stuff. To be fully honest to your humanity in all its horrors and beauties.

 "Good Quotes...", Archives

"All art is born of surrender."  - - erica jong

"Be always ecstatic.  Be filled with a divine intoxication." - - Henry Miller

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