Wild Mind

IT IS CALLED a cut-up. Take some old poems, journal entries, etc., and simply cut apart the lines with a scissors. Now place the lines on a clean sheet of paper, helter-skelter, mixing them up from your different sources. Throw in additional lines from the Yellow Pages, a dictionary, Scientific American. Play around with them, shifting lines, discarding some, adding others. When you have something that pleases you, glue it down on the page.
You can also do this with a friend, alternating lines from each other’s work.
It’s good practice. It breaks open the mind.
Now, do a ten-minute timed writing, but make the topic of each sentence different from the subject of the sentence you just wrote. At first it seems impossible, but then it becomes fun. It is good practice in making your mind nimble and willing to take leaps.

In his lecture, he said that Zen poems are marked by a feeling of space and also a tinge of sadness.
I agreed. Sadness comes from the knowledge of impermanence. Everything will eventually pass away. Why be sad? Because we love and no matter how dispassionate we become, we are not ice bricks. We are human beings with feelings.

That’s all a reader really wants”—she nodded her head—“to know the author better. Even if it’s a novel, they want to know the author.”