G, London, United Kingdom
How do we hold on while letting go? I’m thinking of Lucille Clifton’s lesson of the falling leaves, of the practice of detachment in my birth religion, of what is essential to the heart.
G
JNK:
Write every day without cease for an hour if you can when you first wake or the first hour of dawn, then for an hour before you sleep. Write at night if you wake. Do not look at what you have written until you’ve done this for one full lunar month. At the end of the month, find one word, one image, one phrase from each day. Transcribe only the one thing you have chosen from each day. Transcribe these again. Set these aside for a week. Return. Find a poem from these fragments, make a poem from them. Language may be one of the closest things we have to outliving our voices, to extending our pasts, to changing our futures. An easier route, I hazard, would be to actually let go: give everything away. Start again with nothing, or next-to-nothing. What can language restore to you? What can others? What can the world?
