By Nathaniel Rosenthalis
In most of my writing center sessions, I feel no explicit need to tell students about my own poetry writing process. Instead, on any given day, I help students troubleshoot sticking points in their own processes:
“I have too many notes and I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know how to get started in writing down my ideas, I feel blocked.”
“I’ve written this big, messy draft, and I don’t know how to edit it.”
When I work with these students, I might ask follow-up questions to learn more about how they are feeling about the assignment and the course; I might ask about their current process and if they’ve faced similar problems before; I might propose an approach, like reverse outlining, and ask if they’ve used it before and explain why I am proposing it as a starting point.
While working remotely, I meet with students online from my living room. I am more often than not surrounded by evidence of my own process as a poet. On the desk, several sheets of my handwritten prose I wrote in response to visual art. On the carpet, three plastic sandwich bags, each containing a stack of notecards with quotations from various sources. I angle the camera so that I can see the materials, but the students can’t. Even though the notecards aren’t visible to the students, they nevertheless inform the session by reminding me how active my own relationship is to process. I am constantly changing my process and developing it as I face new challenges. And as a consultant, I often help students change and develop their own processes.
I started using notecards in my own writing process for a simple reason: I was tired of losing track of the many interesting quotations I copied out for myself in notebooks. When I started a new notebook, I’d lose the quotes. So I began instead to copy quotes onto notecards. After a few weeks of copying, I started to notice a pattern of three different kinds of quotes I felt drawn to: quotes from poems written well before my time, mostly the work of Dante and Homer; quotes from interviews with living writers and artists, such as Deborah Eisenberg and Cecily Brown; and quotes from nonfiction sources, such as a singing pedagogy textbook or an essay by Susan Sontag.
When I began this project, I hoped that copying quotes onto notecards would make them more accessible and organizable and would allow me to use them in new ways beyond the brief moment in which I copied them down. After several months, the sandwich bags I stored them in weren’t large enough anymore, and I switched to black boxes with removable lids. Right now, I probably have over 700 notecards and counting:
The author’s box of notecards, which is divided into three sections: “Nonfiction,” “Pre-Modern Poetry,” and “Artist / Writer Interviews.”
Because I changed the way I organized my materials, I discovered a new way to engage with them. I decided to make a game:
Draw one kind of each card at random, lay them out, and write a poem in response.
For example, I wrote a poem that brought together words from Gregory Nagy’s The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, from the thirty-first canto of Dante’s Purgatorio translated by Allen Mandelbaum, and from a Paris Review interview with Yehudi Amichai. In response to my next round of cards that I drew, I wrote a poem that brought together words from an essay on silence by Susan Sontag, a passage from an early book of Homer’s The Odyssey, and a YouTube interview with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. I have continued to write these poems using this notecard method.
Three notecards with handwritten quotations from Nagy’s The Ancient Greek Hero, Dante’s Inferno, and an interview with Yehuda Amichai | Transcription
In using these cards as both inspiration and constraint, I trust that any potential combination of notecards can be interesting. I trust that if I repeat this process over and over, a lot of poems will be born, each in conversation with the other.
So far, so good. As of this writing, I have a manuscript of poems that is approaching 275 pages. Because of the organization and the looseness of this method, I’ve been able to approach my new book of poems methodically and without fear, through curiosity and a sense of adventure. While 275 pages of poems seems intimidating to pare down, I always come back to my curiosity about the physical aspects of the writing process. I am curious about the experience of making notes, arranging them in different ways, rewriting my drafts by hand, and making adjustments, until they no longer want to change. This curiosity and openness to process is what keeps me happy as a writer and what often makes any discouragement I experience short-lived.
In this spirit of curiosity and discovering new processes, I’d like to propose an exercise to you. Whether you are writing poems or an academic essay, you might consider the following steps to make your own materials:
- Copy out quotations that interest you on notecards. Cast your net widely: recent internet searches, newspaper articles, tweets, dictionaries, etc.
- Sort the quotations into categories.
- Go for a walk with a pile of notecards, and read through them as you walk, allowing yourself to think and wonder in response
- Write down at least one paragraph of impressions when you return to your desk.
- Repeat this process over at least three weeks.
Beyond using notecards to generate new ideas, you can also try out one of the below exercises when revising an existing draft:
- If you are close to finishing a project, you might consider revisiting key pieces of evidence you have used by isolating them onto notecards, allowing yourself to muse about them in different orders. You might move key pieces of evidence into the opposite order in which you have presented them in your draft in order to see if changing their order stimulates any new observations.
- If you need to drastically shorten the length of your draft, you might give yourself an artificial limit of how many pieces of evidence you need to use. For example, if you have nine notecards worth of quotes or key evidence, what would happen if you had to choose the six most important notecards?
- If you need to radically revise your draft’s structure, you might cut the draft of your paper into paragraphs and treat the individual paragraphs as notecards, moving them around to test alternate orders. Shuffle them. Cut their number in half. What happens?
My consultations with students have reaffirmed my instinct about the writing process. Namely, if you find yourself stuck or lost, it’s often useful to revisit a fundamental step that you have taken for granted or often relied on, such as how you organize your materials; when you choose to sit down and freewrite; or when you choose, instead, to take a walk and silently mull the matter over. Regardless of which exercise you try, my hope is that using notecards can help release your sense of play.
Photo Transcription
Notecard 1: “An epiphany is a vision that is felt to be real, not unreal. It is the appearance of something divine, something that is understood to be absolutely real.” Nagy, The Ancient Greek Hero, page 102.
Notecard 2: “Consider, reader, if I did not wonder / when I saw something that displayed no movement / though its reflected image kept on changing.” Dante, Purgatorio, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, Canto XXXI.
Notecard 3: “I was like someone walking on the street who stumbles over a rock — he can either fall or take quick steps to break the impact of the fall. Poetry was like taking quick steps to break the fall.” Yehuda Amichai, interview.
Published March 19, 2021
