Tony Trigilio: Expressing Things for What Else They Are

This writing prompt is adapted from John Daido Loori’s The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life. Sit with an object/memory/experience until it begins to reveal itself to you—its details, contours, emotions, and so on. Be open to the possibility that you might need to sit for a long time. As you get more comfortable with the object’s familiar contours, the odd, strange, subtle, mysterious, and absurd (and equally-as-real) aspects of this object of your mind will reveal themselves. Express these in a poem—any form, shape, structure, tone, or pitch. You are writing about “what else” the object is, and likely also writing about “what it is not.” Like a painter working with negative space, this approach can help you discover the fullest sense of your subject matter.