by Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger heads to the spa

Most importantly, have fun with your poem, and try to surprise yourself with the decisions you make.

Routine can be a good thing, in many situations. However, writers often get the sense that they are drafting the same poem over and over again, in different variations, and have no way to break out of the pattern. If you think you may be one of these poets, indulge in the spa experience below. These procedures are bound to help free your writing circuits of excess, thereby allowing room for new invention.

Part I: The dietary analysis
Print off one copy of each of your newest poems. Make it a significant chunk of no fewer than eight, but perhaps no more than 20 poems. Locate a clear, somewhat clean floor that contains no pets or pedestrians. Spread the poems out in front of you, and try your best to read them simultaneously. With colored pens or highlighters, underline repeated words or stylistic/craft elements that appear in numerous poems. If you are feeling particularly ambitious, try to categorize poems in stacks based on shared tendencies (i.e., a stack of bird poems, a pile of poems in couplets, a handful of poems that use questions).

Part II: The mud bath
Please follow the following steps in order to fully benefit from the therapeutic properties of this exercise:

1. Identify five words that you use often in your writing, based on the research undertaken in the dietary analysis.
2. List the settings found in your poems, if place is an element of your work.
3. Note the point of view used most frequently in your writing.
4. Create a list of stylistic decisions — both good and questionable — that you make in many of your poems. (Use of the same stanza length or form, writing an unnecessary, throat-clearing first stanza, having a random, disconnected title, ending a poem too soon, and so on.)
5. Discern whether your poems have a primarily lyric sensibility, or a narrative approach, or a combination of both (and if so, measure the proportions).

Part III: The whirlpool
Cleanse yourself of all the remnants of the mud bath, but hang on to your notes.

Write a poem that uses:

• None of the five words that most frequently appear in your work.
• A setting that you have never used before, or that you haven’t used lately.
• A point of view that departs from your usual tendencies.
• None, or very few, of your usual stylistic decisions. If you usually have a brief title, try a long one.
• If you always write in one long stanza, try dividing the poem into smaller groupings.
• If you often write lyric poems, try a stronger narrative, and vice versa.

Bonus
Do something in the poem that “puts you outside your comfort zone.” Interpret that however you would like.

If you do not have the time or inclination to indulge in the complete spa package, consider a jump into the whirlpool minus the preliminary stages, using your intuition in place of the research. Most importantly, have fun with your poem, and try to surprise yourself with the decisions you make. Best wishes for a happy, healthy new year of poetry.

Mary Biddinger is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007) and the chapbook Saint Monica (forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, The Collagist, Copper Nickel, Diode, Gulf Coast, Passages North and many other journals. She is the editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, co-editor-in-chief of Barn Owl Review and director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. She teaches at The University of Akron and blogs at Wordcage.