Writing with Your Whole Body

Writing with Your Whole Body! That’s what I’m going to talk about in the next few minutes.  That sounds silly I know. Writing with your whole body suggests images of someone flopping face first in the sand and squirming around to make marks and letters with your body. That’s not exactly what I mean.

However, throughout time humans have invented ways of making their mark —

1) with a stick in the sand,

2) carving with a sharp stone on a cave wall

3) making ink from berries and pens from twigs

and so forth, in order to make and preserve their mark, record who they are and who they might be. 

And always

GOOD WRITING INVOLVES THE MIND AND THE BODY. 

Think of it!  Even when we are telling our story orally, we are using our bodies.  Not just the brain but also the mouth, the vocal chords, the breath notes, the diaphragm.

The written word too, emerges not just from the mind through the tip of the pen or the computer. 

The written word involves and evolves from the mind and the solar plexus, from the eye, the ear, the tapping foot, the rhythm of the heartbeat . . . the length and depth of each breath, the infinite variations of the wind whipping our hair and the colors of the sunrise and sunset that greets our eyes.

Good writing also evolves from the memory hidden in the muscles, the thoughts flaming through the fingertips.

As Pulitzer prize-winning poet Stanley Kunitz said: a paragraph or a “poem without a body in it lies dead on the page.”

What does he mean? What puts a body in and on the page and lifts it from the page? Rhythm, sound, energy, pattern.

Perhaps you’ve heard about measuring a poetic line in “feet,” rhythmic units. When in poetry, for example, you are told that a line has or should have 5 iambic feet, (or 10 syllables), what in the world is an iamb? Are they talking about my feet? Yes, in a way.

In traditional written poetry, an iambic foot consists of one unstressed beat and one stressed beat, two syllables spoken and felt in the body unevenly, one with greater emphasis than the other. “I AM” “YOU ARE” “WE MUST”.

-/-/-/-/-/  THAT’S TEN IAMBIC FEET OR 20 SYLLABLES.

Not so strange to call those rhythmic units “feet” when you remember that poetry was originally spoken aloud and “stepped off,” actually walked, danced, marched. All those body parts moving, the muscles of the mouth and vocal chords moving, creating a rhythm that crystallizes the content — not just a droning rhythm, ceaselessly repeated — that would be boring. But instead these “feet” create a rhythm that with patterns of sound supports the content, helps to embody it, make it memorable.

Everything we know, everything we feel affects the whole body. 

That is why in the process of writing, even the small things matter.  It is important, for example, whether you choose to write with a pen or a stick, with a typewriter or a tape or digital recorder.  Use whichever tool is most comfortable, most adaptable to your process, the particular strategies you have developed over time.

Mechanical or hand-held devices: A tape-recorder, digital recorder, computer, “automatic pencil” — whichever device makes you more comfortable becomes part of the translation of ideas, emotions, images and rhythms into written and spoken word

I once drove famed writer I. B. Singer to 7 different stores before we found the exactly perfect yellow pad with lines but no left-hand margin. He“needed”that exact pad and a thick black pen.

He “needed,” not just wanted his way of bringing his story to paper. One of the reasons for the search of course was that initially he wrote in Yiddish from right to left. The other reason or reasons was perhaps habit, ease — whatever.

By remaking the connections between mind and body we increase the possibility of writing more fully, of literally embodying our thoughts and feelings so that they become known to us. WE DO NOT ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WE WANT TO SAY BEFORE WE SAY IT .

Different from what you are usually taught.

“Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.”  

So said W. B. Yeats, who revised all of his poems for re-publication when he was in his 90’s, who evolved from long dense poems and Byzantine images, to a spare clean line in his later poems — simplifying, simplifying, and following, perhaps, the slower movement of his body in age, the paring down to essentials.

“We breathe in dust and poetry,” says Denise Levertov, “we breathe out dust and poetry.” We in-spire and expire.

Inspiration means not just — in its original sense — to be breathed into by a deity, so that through you the “vatic” voice speaks.

Or in a more modern interpretation, inspiration has been interpreted as receiving a “flash of insight”. 

Inspiration, however, also requires breathing out — to expire — to give back.  

That breathing, we know from experience, stimulates the intellectual and emotional faculties. 

Many writers, inventors, philosophers, scientists discover that they often get their best ideas after a brisk walk, an exercise session, or simply when they are doing something else like washing dishes — something routine and physical, something that allows the writer to breathe naturally and freely — to flow.

Or, as Rainer Maria Rilke, considered the German language's greatest writer, wrote:  “Verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (we have those soon enough); they are experiences.  In order to write a single poem, one must see many cities, and people, and things; one must get to know animals and the flight of birds, and the gestures that flowers make when they open to the morning.  One must be able to return to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected encounters, to partings long foreseen; to days of childhood that are still unexplained . . . and still it is not enough to have memories.  One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the immense patience to wait till they are come again. For the memories themselves are still nothing:

“Not till they have turned to blood within us . . . nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — not till then can it happen, that in a most rare hour, the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”