Tuesday, July 10, 2012

So this is the first of the freewrites I mentioned...

... that I would include here to somehow maintain a bloggable [blog-worthy? blog-appropriate?] chronicle of my time w/ YWI. [The kids were great again today. Brilliant, even.]

J. led the students in a choral poem of selected lines from Terry Tempest Williams' "Why I Write," in which they had to speak the line that resonated most with them. If we're not leading, we're writing with them. The line I chose was "I write out of the body." Then they (we) had to write freely based on the line. Here's what my subconscious urped up, unaltered except for the brackets when I forgot a word and punctuation.

I write out of the body. I write in spite of the body. I write to define my body. Also to remove limits. To remove the space between us. I write though I am terrified of what comes. I leap. I have never climbed a tree, ridden a bike, driven a car, walked a straight line. In writing I leap and stick the landing every time. Or fall and allow myself the falling. When I was a childI had dreams about falling, belly first, through the roof and into the attic, through the night sky and int the roof, through a different universe into this one. I sometimes dreamt about flying and it was glorious. More often falling though. Writing brings me back to the edge of dream, no pesky superego, where flying and falling almost equal one another. I admit that sometimes [when] I write I dream myself into a different body. Every poem is a new body. I stretch my arms and legs wide to inhabit the skin of it. Sometimes I am dull, foggy. Heavy, almost immovable body. The pen refuses to move. The cursor blink blink blinks and I close my eyes and think how much better to be doing anything else, but don't really mean it. Would I choose another body [?] New, elegant carapace? No. I write into the body, this body, my own.

More just-in-time lesson planning to do. Or to sleep for 14 hours. Hmmmm. Yeah; no; I kid; workshops first.

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