Maybe You’re Doin’ it Wrong
Exercise #1
pick a word
it can be any word
a common one is best
say ego: then say ego, ego, ego,
not too fast, not too slow
a sixty cycle rate should do
until ego doesn’t mean ego
anymore
ego
doesn’t mean anything anymore
it has become a sound
two sounds
a long vowel and a short consonant vowel
combination
this is called Semantic Satiation
make a commitment
do at least twenty words a day
Exercise #2
when you have a little time
stand in the mirror
and look at your face
start with a dim light say 25 watts
do not look for defects
too fat too thin
to wrinkled
do not smile and do not
show your teeth
keep looking until you begin to lose
the attachment
to the reflection as being your face
keep looking until you lose
the sense
that the reflection is anyone’s face
in particular
it is a distorted face shifting in identity
but hang on
work up to full brightness
this is called derealization/depersonalization
it does run the risk
of becoming permanent
like crossing your eyes in a thunderstorm
Exercise #3
if you work hard on perfecting these techniques
you may be able to enjoy
prolonged periods
of moving through the world as no one
saying words
unburdened by trying to make them anything
but sounds you learned
as a baby
this is called being a baby
or being
a totally new thing unto itself
Exercise #5
now sit down at your computer
stare at the keyboard
not at each letter and figure
but the visual gestalt
of white on black
if you are an experienced typist
use only two fingers
and visa versa
begin to type
plausible sentence and paragraph structures
with no syntax and no story and no grammar
except for periods
use only geographic imagination
to guide your fingers
this is called
hypertextual metapoetic incongruous fixity
Finale
practice all these techniques
preferably while groveling at the feet
of a master who does yoga and zen
and has been in therapy for decades
in a few years
of this kind of intense work in destabilizing
the very essence of language
your poetry will grind like pure number theory
in a Bible Study
you will be ready to submit
your work
many places heretofore beyond your reach
to The Gettysburg Review
to Poetry
to The New Yorker!
6 thoughts on "Maybe You’re Doin’ it Wrong"
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Now I know how so many others succeed and get published in the erudite publications that would toss my offering in the first dumpster.
Thanks, Bobby, but now that I know, I guess
I won’t really do it. Just perverse, I am.
bruce florence
Yes Master Yoda, I said, I am not afraid. You will be. In truth Bruce I have been doing the first two exercises since childhood. Yes, really, I was shocked to read an article yesterday calling the depersonalization in the mirror the latest puzzle in perceptual psychology. I thought, wow, I should have published my findings when I was seven. I too have resigned myself to being to literary to ever get in to crazyhorse.
Publish it here! Great work from both of you!
(I started looking at myself as an alien when I was about fourteen.)
Love the name you have attached to exercise #5! You can never get away from yourself, Bobby!! And, do I detect some sarcasm in the finale?? Lots to ponder!
great piece Bobby. I am already asiduously practicing #4. Rilke says to the young poet:..you are disturbed when certain publishers reject your attempts…I suggest you give all that up…There is only one way: Go within.
You are right, Bobby, I’ve been doing it all wrong!
I enjoyed your words this June!