How To Memorize Your Heart's Subtle Voice

A prompt inspired by the jaw-dropping brilliance of poet Diane Seuss & her wrenchingly beautiful Pulitzer-prize winning sonnets + how form, rhythm & other constraints compel us toward invention

First, thank you so much to Substacker Anna Rollins, who writes “On Writing & Publishing with Anna Rollins,” for shouting out Writing in the Dark today. Anna included WITD in an all-star lineup of valuable writing Substacks, saying:

“Along with beautiful essays, this newsletter includes some of the most creative, thought-provoking writing prompts I’ve ever encountered.”

Second, the Essay in 12 Steps challenges starts in less than two weeks, and is available to all paid subscribers. Free subscribers can upgrade anytime to join the challenge and access archived curricula for previous seasonal intensives, such as the 30-Day Creativity Challenge.

As for Anna’s high praise, I am grateful, and I hope she would find this week’s writing prompt thought-provoking indeed, since I’ve been thinking about it all week! It’s highly constrained—sort of like a water-access-only property. I mentioned on Monday that I am writing from the shores of Seagull Lake during a stretch of backbreaking cabin work which so far has included hauling brush, breaking twigs, hauling more brush, breaking more twigs, making piles, burning piles, painting and painting and painting, planting plants, and lots of other things that live on a never-ending list of things to do, all of which are complicated by the constraint of having no road and thus no car access. Everything we do here is limited in some way by the fact that we must come and go by boat. Arriving and departing by water forces us to think ahead, be inventive, see as far as we possibly can beyond the limits of that constraint. It absolutely forces us to use our imaginations.

And yes, this relevant to this week’s writing prompt, inspired by the genius poet Diane Seuss. For a long time now, I’ve been excited to read more of Seuss’s work, and I’ve wanted to teach from frank: sonnets ever since it came out. It feels impossible to ever get to all the books on my list! But finally, last week in the synchronous Writing in the Dark workshop, I taught an excerpt of Seuss’s work published in Poets.org called “Six Unrhymed Sonnets.”  The opening lines of the first of these sonnets convey how quietly transfixing this work is:

I drove all the way to Cape Disappointment but didn’t
have the energy to get out of the car. 

And this is just the beginning! You must see for yourself how propulsive, heartbreaking, and gorgeous Seuss’s sonnets, how despite being sonnets they also read like some of the most gripping flash I’ve ever seen. Her writing is so brilliant it’s intimidating. And that’s the perfect kind of material to inspire a prompt. Several writers in the workshop said that working this week’s prompt made them feel like children again. Which is so damn priceless—to return to that feeling of being totally over our head, giddy with figuring something out, released from the trap of doing the same thing over and over. Isn’t that sometimes what we need, to be pushed so outside of our own wheelhouse that our highest hope is just to brush up against the thing we’re reaching for in some clumsy effort to know it and love it better?

I think so.

And if you want to go straight to the prompt, you can, just scroll down to the bolded subhead that says, Writing Prompt: How To Memorize Your Heart’s Subtle Voice. It’s not an easy prompt, but I’m priming you to go with it, to give it a try and see what you get. Remember, the point is not to come away with a polished bauble. You don’t need a prompt to write a bauble! You already know how to write pretty sentences. The point is to write something you couldn’t or wouldn’t have written without a prompt. The point is to find even one single interesting fragment in the process. If you adopt that mindset—that this is about discovery and newness and the possibility of one interesting line—then it’s okay if what you make is mostly a mess.

Creativity is messy!

So was our little wilderness cabin a little messy when we took it over in 2020. Pretty, yes—so, so pretty, but some deferred maintenance. Again, the whole everything-by-boat thing. So, we’re things up because it is summer and that is what you do, but more specifically, I’m doing it for Zoe. Zoe was one of my beloved students from my decade+ as a Waldorf teacher, and she will soon be gathering here with a few friends (all but one of whom were also my students for eight years, when they were ages seven through fourteen) for a very special celebration in honor of her upcoming wedding. I’m working extra hard for Zoe—who in addition to being a former student and friend is also a current collaborator who has taught yoga and meditation (and very beautifully so) on several of my writing retreats. Some of you have been lucky enough to meet Zoe on those retreats. On top of all of that, she is also the daughter of a close friend I’ve known since college, so I have literally known Zoe since the day she was born. My bruises and cuts and aching muscles are in service to profound love.

Besides, I also love a deadline. I have coached many writers on how to use submission and contest deadlines as a means to produce and finish work. I don’t know what I would do without deadlines. I wrote about the power of deadlines in this week’s Lit Salon, when a writer wrote in to ask about a dead muse. You can read it in full here if you missed it.

The point is, deadlines work. There’s plenty of quality research on this. So Zoe’s celebratory weekend has been a way to kick a lot of things into high gear, things I have wanted to do anyway, but that are hard to get to, because … they’re hard. Physical labor is not like the good kind of working out. It pulls on the muscles and bones in all the wrong ways. So doing these projects kind of hurts. But tending to this land moves something in me.

I didn’t grow up with a cabin. I barely grew up with a house that meant “home.” I had a few home-like places over the years, places that felt safe and stable. Certain classrooms during my elementary school years. Certain friends’ houses and teachers’ houses. But my own “house” was rarely ever a place that felt like “home.” Undoubtedly that’s part of why, even though tending this harsh landscape and historic cabin and old aluminum fishing boat are all new to me, and full of difficulty, I am finding something truly joy-sparking about it. I especially love sharing it. As I watched my foster grandson here over the weekend, taking like to cabin life as if he’d always lived it (he has not), I marveled at the magic of that. That I can share something with him that neither of us ever saw coming.

How amazing is it that we can give something away we never had ourselves?

Diane Seuss, in frank: sonnets—says:

like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without

I would add that growing up broke and lonely can also teach you to treasure what you have and to find a certain ecstasy in giving to others, as Seuss does with her wrenching, life-giving poetry. How does she manage to say so much in so few words, and in such a constrained container as the sonnet?

I think it’s partly because when we push against a form like sonnet, with its many formal requirements, we must strip away pieces of what we are trying to say. The more we do this, the more purposeful we can be with our language, and the clearer our true message and meaning can become. Can become. It is not a given. It requires work and patience and starting over.

Seuss has mastered working with this tension in what Annette Lapointe called, in her New York Journal of Books review, “a technically exquisite, beautifully painful book.”

Lapointe also said:

"The sonnets in Diane Seuss’ latest collection, frank, are consistent in their 14-line form, but they push hard against the form’s strictures and often break loose. The line lengths are even, but rarely follow iambic pentameter (or adhere to any ten-syllable meter), and the rhymes come via sound-echoes rather than perfect line endings. These are poems held together by the careful boundaries (no line longer than another, not one line more than 14) Seuss sets around the emotional minefields contained within."

And: 

"Some of the sonnets struggle against their boundaries. Punctuation evades whole blocks of lines, so that we must recite a litany of fears without pause for breath: “I feared ambulances / janitors knives dogwood blossoms my sister’s boyfriends one of whom / threw a knife at my head one of whom pressed his whiskers into my face”. That poem struggles against adolescent terror and the restrictions of childhood movement, of the body, and yet it never forgets its sonnet-hood, so that it staggers into line fourteen only to crash into it.

I highly recommend you go ahead and read the full review to better understand how Seuss played within and pushed against the sonnet form. This will be helpful as you dive into this week’s prompt.

Writing Prompt: How to Memorize Your Heart’s Subtle Voice

Before you begin, it is going to be important to read Diane Seuss's six sonnets a few times, Really dwell in them. Print them if you can. Circle and underline things. Close read them for everything you can discover about them.

Be assured, we are not even going to try to achieve all the requirements of a traditional sonnet, but it would still be good to understand what those formal requirements are in order to gain a sense of the tradition. So, you will want to read the (deliberately simple, written for teaching children) craft reading from Poetry4Kids on how to write a sonnet. I am not trying to make poets out of prose writers, by the way; thus the simplest sonnet instructions. It matters not if you never, ever try to write another sonnet.

Remember, what matters is if you get one interesting line. Something surprising, something full of possibility. Something that jolts. And I predict that you will if you follow these eight requirements, constraints, and invitations (and please read through all eight steps before you begin!):