During most of 2020, I found myself paralyzed with worry and rage. I would coax myself to the blank page, but I found nothing there but more worry, more rage, more sorrow. And the page, all too often, remained blank. To keep working, I turned to a variety of writing exercises, finally settling on one called the “Ten Minute Spill” by Rita Dove, which I had found in The Practice of Poetry, edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. Here’s how it goes: With ten minutes on the clock, write a ten-line poem using five words from a predetermined list and an adage or idiomatic phrase (e.g. a stitch in time saves nine; a needle in a haystack; red sky at morning; etc). And that’s it. Don’t try anything fancy: no rhyming or meter of any sort. Just spend ten minutes figuring out how to arrange the words and the adage over the course of ten lines into something resembling a poem or poem-like thing. How long is each line? Doesn’t matter! Is it even a poem? Who cares!
I made this a daily habit. In my variation, I kept the time- and line-constraint, but I decided to pick the words and the adage randomly, through chance operations. I collected a very long numbered list of words and rolled my old D&D dice to pick the five words. Instead of an adage, I used a line or sentence fragment from one of several texts, choosing it at random. I refreshed the list of words from time to time, and I changed source text every month or so. For the poems in this collection, I threw the I Ching, taking images from the trigrams or phrases from the Judgment.
The point of these chance operations was to leave as much of the decision-making process until the very moment I began composing. I was too swamped by the quotidian to hear anything else; if I allowed myself to pick the words, I knew they would be nothing but fear, mask, Covid, police, murder, Covid, racist, protest, climate, rage, rage, rage — and that’s what most of each day already was. The chance operations led me away from the unhealthy polarity of either willfully ignoring the appalling spectacle or being angrily transfixed by it. Instead, I entered a third space beyond this polarity. I knew the worries, rages, and sorrows of that pandemic year would find their way into the poems anyway. They always do, of course, because poems are part of the world, and the world is part of every poem. But this way, they arrived obliquely, as I listened for different sounds and invited the shy sparks in my peripheral vision to wander out into the room. And for ten minutes each day, I remembered that, as Thoreau said, “Thank Heaven, here is not all the world.”
Robert van Vliet’s poetry has appeared in The Sixth Chamber Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Wine Cellar Press, Selcouth Station, Eunoia Review, Guesthouse, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He has been, among other things, a typographer, a singer/songwriter, a repair technician for Macintosh computers, a process designer, and a tutor & substitute teacher for middle school & high school. His chapbook, This Folded Path, is brand-new from above/ground press. His first book, Vessels, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2024. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Ana. His website is robertvanvliet.com.
