may 2, 2017 / 5 miles / 46 degrees
I love the energy of this post. Having recently finished my first poetry class, the one that changed my life, I was open to experimenting with new ways of writing with and about my body. I was exploring what it might mean to write while running and run while writing.
The idea of “stretching” or “core” exercises that could build up your ability to endure the difficulty of feeling everything, noticing everything, not looking away from the world, is one that I’m often thinking about and working towards. Will this be the year that I could do more with it?
Sheehan argues that we should try to be poets, “responding to everything around us and inside us as well,” like engines with the governor off. Then he adds: “The best most of us can do is be a poet an hour a day.” And laments: “There are times, more often than the good times, when I fail. I never do pierce the shield. I return with a shopping list of things to do tomorrow. The miraculous has gone unseen. The message has gone unheard.” His words got me thinking and inspired me to create:
A Deep Core Workout for 60-minute-a-day Poets?
60 minutes a day of intense feelings seems like a lot.
How can we train ourselves to feel deeply for that long?
What sort of strength and stretching exercises do we need to build up our “deep core” feelings?
To prevent hyper-awareness related injuries brought on by overuse or improper form?
To help us stretch our imagination?
Limber up our ideas, so we can bend, twist, contort them?
Strengthen our resolve against the worries and regrets that distract us?
Lengthen our vision to extend farther, beyond our myopic preoccupations?
Quicken our reflexes for faster responsiveness?
Attune our senses to the too-often invisible or ignored encounters?
I’m thinking about “core” workouts lately because so many things that I’ve been reading recommend core exercises for preventing injuries. A strong core stabilizes your bones, joints, muscles and internal organs.
Yes! I like the idea of creating an exercise plan for building up your core muscles, where muscles can be the literal ones in your body, but also Ross Gay’s “delight” muscle, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “attention” muscle. Reading this “poem” (or attempt at a poem, or very first draft of something that could be a poem), I’m strucky by the line, “quicken our reflexes for fast responsiveness” and thinking about fast and slow twitch muscles and the different exercises you could do to help build them up. Then I’m thinking about heart rate zones and my discussion of orange theory last year.
The Multifidus
The multifidus
pronounced: mull tiff a dus
The muscle consisting of a number of fleshy
not flashy or flesh-eating or flesh-colored or thin, but plump and succulent
and tendinous
sounds like tenderness or tendon-less, even though it means “consisting of tendons”
fasciculi,
pronounced: fa sick you lee or fa sick you lie, depending on if you want to rhyme it with an old oak tree or a key lime pie
which fill up the groove
the groove in the dirt trail, winding through the gorge? the groove of a Funkadelic album? what you’re in when it’s going well?
on either side of the spinous processes of the vertebrae,
not a process but a bony protrusion where the muscle attaches to the vertebrae
from the sacrum
pronounced: say crum, as in, “say crumb, why don’t you hop into my mouth?”
to the axis
aka C-2, aka epistropheus. Contains a bony protuberance, another fun word to say, on which the C-1 vertebrae rotates.
Reading through this fun experiment, I had an idea: a series of poems about different body parts/muscles with the same amount of whimsy? as this multifidus one? Collect poems by other poets that write about the body, possibly putting my poem in conversation with them.