Note from 2006 Poet Laureate, Deborah Fries:
Welcome to the last visit from me in Muse mode.

Next month, you’ll have a new Montgomery County Poet Laureate, who hopefully will continue the work of using E-Calliope, your community Muse, to inspire more poems! I enjoyed launching this feature of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program, and hope it will build momentum as more people learn about it.

In this third visit, the Muse asks you once again to stay in your senses and stay out of your head. This time, you will search your soul for what you yearn for, pull out words that describe the yearning, arrange them and get your poems back to us for posting by April 1.


Musings about yearning:
Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler has formalized a way of teaching creative writing that taps into the place “from where you dream.” (Also the name of his book.) Yes, it’s the unconscious – an unconscious driven by desire. Butler says that as a human being with feelings, we “cannot exist for even thirty seconds on Planet Earth without desiring something.” He calls yearning the deepest level of desire.

What do you yearn for? Connection? Security? Excitement? Fame? Fortune? Escape? Solitude? A lost place? Lost love? A return to innocence? In his fiction classes, Butler requires that his students convey their characters’ yearning in the first two pages of a story.

He’s quick to tell you that he was an actor before he was a writer, and that he studied Method Acting and approaches writing as Method Writing.


Your Muse visits:
Let’s give Method Writing a chance.

1. Look at the picture of the cottage by the water above. Let’s go into it with our senses.
2. Smell the water, feel the wind (cool? warm?) How wet is the grass? What do you hear in the distance? Insects? Voices? What’s behind you? What’s missing? You get the idea.
3. Linger in the picture awhile longer. You have transported yourself into a physical place, with all its attendant sensations. Now for the Method Writing part.
4. What yearnings rise up in you when you look at the picture? Is there anything that the picture makes you want? Is there anything that’s not in the picture – that you feel is missing?


The Muse challenges you:
To write about what you’re feeling and yearning for, quickly, before it escapes. (Maybe
by the time you get to the end of the poem, you’ll realize it was something other than
you first thought.)

Load it up with images and sensory information – not summary or explanations.


The Muse Sets a Deadline:
Send your evocative memory poems to Montcopoet@comcast.net by April 1st for
posting on the E-Calliope blog.