Ever thought about writing a poem? Why not take the leap?
In a new series, award-winning poet Jessica Traynor shares insights to help you find your voice.
My three year old daughter sits in her car seat and asks, 'Why?'
We play her a pop mix on Spotify and she asks, ‘Why the song over?’, and other questions that are difficult to answer. In response to Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan, she asks ‘Why she leab her fambly and go away?’
This adorable/frustrating stage of development is familiar to any of us who have younger children, siblings, or who have spent time with toddlers. It’s a relentless probing of the boundaries and limitations and contradictions of language, a pushing of small fingers into the gaps in logic we adults have glossed over with age and use.
‘Why the song over?’ my daughter asks again.
‘Because… it’s over,’ says my husband.
‘Because she’s said everything she wants to say’, I offer.
Exhaustion and rush hour traffic aside, I have to admit that her questions are poetic in nature. She’s interrogating the often nonsensical constructs of the world, the associations we take for granted – why a song ends at a set time, why children grow up and leave home. As adults our frustration comes from trying to answer these questions without the asker having any of the symphonic context we as adults have. It’s like trying to demonstrate the image in a tapestry to someone who can only see a single thread.
But as adults engaged in creative practice, I think there are lessons we can learn from a toddler’s destabilised and probing worldview. For example, one of the most common pieces of advice you’ll hear from writers is to try to gather your ideas from the edge of sleep. In these moments, dream logic begins to creep into our waking consciousness and offer strange associations. If we examine these associations when fully awake, we might find ourselves asking Why?, just like a toddler. But there will still be a kernel of familiarity and a sense of deep meaning to the images our dream mind has offered us, even if it feels like a fleeting glimpse of that larger, unseen tapestry.
As adults engaged in creative practice, I think there are lessons we can learn from a toddler's destabilised and probing worldview.
Dream logic is creative, is problem solving, is freed from the bounds of the associative web of shortcuts we use to navigate the day. There is neuroscience behind this – in his book Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker talks about how dreaming allows us to find creative links that the waking mind overlooks: "During the dreaming sleep state, your mind will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge, and then extract overarching rules and commonalities – ‘the gist’." Talking about a REM-sleep study he conducted with his colleague Robert Stickgold of the Harvard Medical School, he says:
"The REM-sleep dreaming brain was utterly uninterested in bland, commonsense links […] Instead, the REM-sleep brain was shortcutting the obvious links and favouring distantly related concepts. The logic guards had left the REM-sleeping brain. Wonderfully eclectic lunatics were now running the associative memory asylum."
So for my first writing tip, the most foundational advice I can give, I’m telling you to take a nap. Go to bed early. Relax. And try to salvage from any remembered dreams, or dispatches from the edge of sleep, an image, a sound, a sensation, a strange association. You don’t need to rehash entire dream narratives – these are often most interesting to the dreamer – but if there is any image or idea which speaks to you of a deeper truth, salvage it and write it down. This is the first step in tapping into the vast, unexplored creative recesses of your mind.
