Friday
Friday Flash Prompt: Write with a Hole in the Middle
I must admit, somewhat shamefaced, that as a poet in a flash fiction class I have been getting badly beaten up by narrative. Every week, I’d remind myself that I was writing prose now. That in prose, particularly flash prose, the hard and fast rule is that something had to happen and it had to be significant. Like a good student, and with all the training in literary criticism I had, I attacked this in a workmanlike fashion. I’d array my materials, ready my tools. I’d build a narrative like I’d build a structure, one stone at a time, cut and fitted. It was a lot of work, and it was getting me absolutely nowhere.
Jackson says it better than I do:
Then I participated in Rosemont’s graduate student reading, and in the same week read Richard Jackson’s article “The Word Overflown by Stars: Saying the Unsayable,” the title article of the anthology Words Overflown By Stars. A synergy started to emerge. First, there was what Jackson had to say about poetry using language to say what was “unsayable.” Secondly, I was rereading some work I hadn’t looked at in a couple of months. I started to examine what I liked doing in my writing, what I felt was important in the places where I felt I got somewhere deeper than just writing to write a poem.
The more and more I thought about it, the more I decided that my best writing was never about building a structure, but about finding a hole. My best all has a hole in the middle of it, and more importantly, seems to be about that hole, that absence. That is what I seem to find interesting.
Jackson says it better than I do:
“What I have been arguing against is the sort of poem one reads all to often..It tells us something has happened…A good poem is an art object, a made thing in words, and words cannot duplicate an experience. But the experience we have with the language, how it engages us, is an experience that leads our imagination further into the world of the poem. The language…becomes a metaphor for the experience.”
I realized my desire to do a good job, a workman like job, crafting narrative was holding me to relating an event. It was keeping me from being free to explore the significance of the event. I was trying too hard to say everything, and not leaving space for what I couldn’t say—or wouldn’t say?—to emerge.
I can’t say I’ve found a solution to this, but at least it is a concrete problem worth grappling with. With that in mind, my challenge to you is to write something Beautiful. Don’t worry if it makes any sense, follows the rules of narrative at all, write something pretty, haunting, evocative, not because of plot, but because of language. After that if you want, put it away awhile, so it isn’t so fresh. Then read it like someone else’s writing. Try to find the hole in the center, and then carefully prune back the unnecessary so the hole stands out, so the unsaid becomes apparent, even becomes stark.
As Yeats said, “If beauty is not the gateway out of a net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty.”
About the Author
Todd B. Stevens is currently an MFA student at Rosemont College. He has studied English at Cornell and Villanova. Todd worked for many years as a bookseller. His poetry has recently been published in Mad Poets Review and Off the Coast and is featured in the anthology Prompted:
Poems, Essays from Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which will be published early this year.
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