Word Doodling

I had a little satori this morning, after I left my steamy shower. This idea had to do with a poetic technique.

I've already discussed the "Poem-a-Day" concept as described by William Stafford in his book Writing the Australian Crawl. The idea is not to try to write something deathless each day, but merely to write. A phrase or image from a mediocre poem may still prove to be the spring-board for a superior poem, or may find a home in a superior poem.

Well, for the past couple of days, I've had this image of the leaves of the Autumn Glory Maple — they are a bright red, and seem to provide their own source of light, or to glow like neon. This image led to a phrase, "autumn glory maple leaves / luminesce an unearthly red"; but I could not think of where to go from there.

So, there I am, padding au natural from bathroom to bedroom, when it strikes me that I could approach the thing like doodling. Whenever I'm in a meeting, I'm an inveterate doodler. Generally what I do is swirl my pen around until my subconcious suggests a shape or image — sort of like seeing pictures in the clouds. It's a very left-brain sort of activity, and I'm never concerned about what the end result will look like.

So: I wrote down that first image in my "patented" on-line Poem Postcard Format. By the point I wrote those first two lines, a third came to me.

I let the whole thing percolate in my subconcious until noon. As I walked to lunch, I tried to be very aware of weather conditions and the state of the trees. I'd already been thinking of trees as suburban sentinels, so I held that phrase in reserve. I noticed several trees where some leaves had changed and others hadn't. Although the word "piebald" may not seem accurate (it's most commonly used for black and white, esp. horses), I liked the sound of it. I was also charmed to realize the sky was a stormy gray this morning, and was brilliantly blue at noon, so I chose to include that in the poem as well.

Well, the third verse seemed pre-ordained: time of day, state of trees. You see the whole thing played out in the four entries below.