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January
- Run by your favorite parts of the path (above the floodplain forest, where the mesa slopes down to the river) and pay attention to how it looks as you glance at it quickly. Later, stop, stand still, stare at the same spot. Now describe it. (How) has it changed?
- Is there a certain spot (or time) during the run when you lose your unease? Write about it.
- Read Lines for Winter by Dave Lucas. Write your own miscreant psalm. (Make sure to look into the form a psalm takes).
- Make a list of collective nouns for Saras. Pick one and turn it into a poem.
- Pay attention to the color blue. Where do you see it at the gorge? How does it make you feel?
- What do you imagine when you imagine a pretty snowy winter scene? Write about it.
- Write an occasion poem about something mundane that happened on your run or your walk beside the gorge.
- Pick a word and list as many different meanings for it as you can find. Play around with the definitions. Make a poem out it (see Pine/ Susan Stewart)
February
- Find your blind spot, both eyes version. Stand 1 foot away from a white door. Stare directly into the center of it for several minutes until a dark oval with a small white center appears. Stare at it, then draw it in your notebook. This is your blind spot. (note: not sure if this works for people with normal vision.)
- Find your blind spot, one eye version. Get into child’s pose and stare at the center of the carpet with your right eye open, left eye closed. Stare until a small, jagged circle appears. Stare at it, then draw it in your notebook. This is the blind spot in your right eye. Repeat, opening your left eye instead.
- While you’re running by the gorge pay attention to the smells. Which is your favorite smell? Your least favorite? Make a list.
- What sound does your striking foot make on the sandy grit at the edge of the path? What does it feel like? Make a list of sounds and sensations.
- Think about Jane Hirshfield’s line in “My Weather” about “three large rabbit-breaths of air.” How big are rabbit-breaths? How big are rabbit’s lungs? Think about lung capacity and all the different lungs, big and small, residing together by the gorge. Breathe deeply and wonder, how many rabbit-breaths is one Sara-breath?
- Still thinking about Jane Hirshfield’s poem, wonder: what do I hold? what is my weather? Turn it into a poem.
- When feeling anxious or scared or irritated, make room for some more joyful thoughts by remembering some moments running by the gorge.
- While you’re running, chant in triplets, using berries: raspberry, blueberry, strawberry, blackberry, gooseberry, mulberry. Make a list of other, non-berry, triplet words or phrases. Is the stress always on beat one? Can you think of any that have the stress of the third beat? The second beat?
- Compose an abecedarian poem that uses “Xanadu (the movie or from the poem)” or “xylotomous (boring into or cutting wood)” as the x-word.
- Either find or make up a word for the feeling of a familiar sensation out of normal context, like feeling a brain freeze but from cold wind, not eating ice cream too fast. Think of a few examples. Choose one and write a poem about it.
- Think about the different types of clouds. Write about your favorite type
- Write about thresholds–literal and metaphorical ones in your life.
- Listen to Dolly Parton. Memorize the lyrics to one of her songs–at least a verse and chorus. Sing it to yourself as you run. Think about Parton as a songwriter and a storyteller and a poet.
- Make a list of words for the sounds that birds make. Do not include chirp or caw or sing.
- Instead of typing your thoughts about your run, speak them into your phone. Try using an app that transcribes your speech. Also try transcribing your own thoughts.
March
- Write an acrostic poem that casts a spell.
- Think about the word cast and how it’s used in casting a shadow and casting a spell. Similarities? Differences? Write about either or both or some other definition of cast (see the poem, TO CAST).
- Make a list of machines and the animals they mimic (off the top of your head, or by doing some research).
- Memorize a poem and recite it while running. Write about it: how you experienced your run while reciting, or how you experience the recited poem while running.
- Using Lynda Barry’s Instagram posts about panic over the Corona virus as inspiration, create your own response.
- Start collecting bits of songs or poems that you can recite for 20 seconds while you wash your hands. Or write your own series of poems that last 20 seconds.
- Read 3 of Mary Oliver’s poems in which she imagines the outside as a classroom (see March 8). Think about the gorge as a classroom–who is the teacher, the student? what is learned?
- Record yourself reading a draft of a poem you are working on. Listen to it before heading out for your run, or during your run. Think about it as you run. Write a different version of it when you’re done running.
- Write about your love of shadows and why you find delight in the shadow of a bird or a plane flying above you.
- Why does the color brown by the gorge bring you joy? Write about it.
- Ponder the question, How do we (learn to) love our body even as we know it will betray us? Try to think about it as you run and then after you run. Write an imagined conversation between you and your knee or you and your lungs or you and some other part of your body.
- Overhear a fragment of someone’s conversation and imagine the rest of it. Come up with multiple possibilities.
- Think more about woodpeckers. Why do they peck? How do they peck? What does their pecking do to wood? What else do they peck on? Find a scientific-y article about woodpeckers and turn it into an erasure poem.
- Pick out some poems you have already posted on this log. Record yourself reciting them. Listen to them right before you start your run. What new things do you notice about the poems?
- Start with the word “x-box” or “xerox” or “fluff” or “intermezzi” and write an abecedarian poem that includes it in which each line, in alphabetical order, begins and ends with the same letter.
- Create a “better words” notebook with pages for words that start and end with each letter of the alphabet.
- Cast a spell on a scary word (like pandemic) by making smaller words out of it and turning those into lines for future poems.