Spontaneous Outpourings Recollected in Tequila
There’s a new face on the literary scene: Quick Muse. The concept: two poets are given a prompt and fifteen minutes to write. Their keystrokes are saved, so on the QM website you can watch the entire poem unfold, including edits and erasures.
Editor Ken Gordon explains the project in an article in Poets & Writers: he wants to know whether poets can produce their best work under spontaneous circumstances. According to a New York Times article on Quick Muse, reactions from poets have been mixed. Mark Strand (politely) declined while Robert Pinsky is set to face off with Julianna Baggott today.
I think the intimidating part of the project isn’t the time limit so much as the expectation of quality. Robert Pinsky is quoted at the end of the NYT article as saying “You may not write your best, but you should be able to write something that is memorable.”
Are you kidding? I have poems sitting in the draft stage for eighteen months while I try to create something memorable. The thought of trying to do that in fifteen minutes? Terrifying. There’d better be a big shot of Tequila waiting for me if you want me to try that.
Oh, all right, then. It’s two a.m. There’s no one around to see and there’s a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen. I’ll give it a shot. So to speak.
Rather than steal Quick Muse’s prompt, I’ll use an excerpt from Sherod Santos’ A Poetry of Two Minds:
Seen from one perspective, Eurydice serves a crucial role in the fate that Orpheus must undergo if he’s to gain full powers as a poet. She comes to represent the descent into the poet’s unconscious, the knowledge of the depths indispensable to artistic authority. As Hélène Cixous has observed, “We need a dead (wo)man to begin. To begin (writing, living) we must have death.”
All right, then. Off to set a fifteen minute timer and begin writing.