Talking Poetics #30 : Valerie Coulton

four words and a quote

When I started writing with intention, I would go to a café in Berkeley on a Saturday morning for two hours. I would take my notebook and some books that were in play for me, by writers like Kathleen Fraser. I was still living with my then husband but falling deeply in love with my poetry teacher. I would drink a little coffee, swim around in the books, and then, filled up with language, do what I called “dipping the bucket”, which was writing whatever showed up for me for about twenty minutes. Even though I called it “dipping the bucket”, my mental image was more like casting and hauling in a big net of silvery fish. Then I would sort through the fish and make some poems. These I would “type up”, often at work on Monday, and take into the poetry workshop.

Now I have lived in Barcelona for many years with my poetry teacher, who is also my favorite poet, Edward Smallfield. He invented a writing prompt that has served me unfailingly for the last 24 years. It consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote. He used to pass these out in workshops, and then everyone would write for 15 minutes, with the option to read our pieces aloud if we were so inclined. The writing that came out of this exercise was often astonishing, and sometimes led to book-length projects.

We continue with our postcards every week, in our private two-person Sunday workshop and in the four-person workshop we have with our friends and parentheses co-editors. We also use it, among other prompts, in the generative monthly workshop we teach, and it tends to be everyone’s favorite.

So, a poem often starts for me with a postcard. It might seem to be the image that sparks something, or the words/quote, but my sense is that it’s really the tension between the elements that makes something happen. Sometimes even the postcard fine print is important. Sometimes I use all the words, sometimes none of them. Whatever happens, though, feels like it couldn’t have happened if I’d simply sat down to write.

Here’s an example from our Sunday workshop on August 2^nd.  The postcard was of a woodcut by José Guadalupe Posada titled “Gran Fandango y Francachela de todas las Calaveras” The words were: sweet, battle, smoke and clatter. The quote was “we’re all dead men conversing with dead men”. Here’s the first poem that came from this:

el día de los muertos

the sea is not our home

someone sang

a floor of monsters

in the mind

something speckled, adrift

spine without body

swimming to nowhere

in our world

there is one bat

maybe two

small leather hunters

in the air between

us & everyone else

you have written of sweet wine

& the dead

those sugar skulls for sale

terra nova

As I’d been inspired mainly by the image up to this point, I decided to make another pass, trying to use all the words this time:

sweet

in the battle

to remain ourselves

smoke

sink clatter

skateboards

dogs

our neighbourhood bat

& the voices

of our bones

So, what happens to these “postcard poems”? Sometimes they’re stand-alone pieces, sometimes the beginning of a conscious series, and sometimes the beginning of an unconscious series whose pattern and coherence emerge over time. Lately I’m aware of new strands coming into my poems, different voices, memories, dreams and fears. I notice once again that whatever the prompt, the work is always my work, a product of whatever is under the surface waiting to be brought to shore.

Valerie Coulton’s books include small bed & field guide (above/ground press), open book (Apogee Press), and The Cellar Dreamer (Apogee Press). With husband Edward Smallfield, she’s the co-author of lirio and anonymous, both from Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Barcelona and co-edits parentheses, an annual journal of international writing.

On Writing #94 : Valerie Coulton

On Writing
Valerie Coulton

When I started writing regularly, I would go to a café with some books and read around in them until a stream of language appeared for me. Then I would try to capture that language in its unrefined state.

Later I would go back to select attractive words or lines from the stream. Not so much editing, more extracting my own language as though found.

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And then it was about being in a conversation, usually with one person, sometimes another writer, sometimes alive, sometimes “not”.

Maybe that’s the thing I’ve found to be the most interesting aspect of my own writing, the sense of a language stream that comes from and goes to “somewhere else”. Getting in touch with this stream is easier in the context of a long project or series.

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I put some things away for years, then read them again to see what I think outside the proximity of writing. Other things feel ready to serve. I couldn’t say what makes the difference.

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In my day job, working with designers, I read a lot about creative process. The same things come up over and over again: find stimuli, get as much stuff "out" as you can, set some constraints to work against, iterate, take on feedback from people who really get what you're doing (and ignore the ones who don't). All of these have been invaluable to me, and I come back to them again and again. Especially stimuli and constraints, two infallible ways of dipping into the stream.

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It's occurred to me lately that writing is a form of dreaming for me. It bends time. I'm alone and not alone. Familiar elements appear in new guises.

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After my father died, I didn't really feel like writing for a long time. Now I'm starting again, patiently, without a lot of expectation. It's not a continuation or a beginning; it's like seeing someone again after a long time. Will we feel the same way or some new way? Will we still want to spend time together?

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we are meeting in the halo
feet in sneakers

his enormous pages
the way blood crowds his face

sea of land of sea
                  little cloud meal

Valerie Coulton is a poet living in Barcelona. She has written Anonymous and Lirio with Edward Smallfield, both from dancing girl press. Her other books are open book, The Cellar Dreamer and passing world pictures, all from Apogee Press. New poems are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly.