Lawless Explications
An Introduction
There are several ways to go about the concept of what I call Lawless Explications. All of these are experiments with the intention to focus, reflect, and flex your creative muscles.
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One approach is to take a poem you have read and enjoyed, feel some level of affinity for or connection with, and play off of it. Maybe try to keep in mind Emily Dickinson’s famous “tell it slant” concept but in a way that expands beyond the realm of poetry into writing prose, bullet points, thoughtlets, or aphorisms that are inspired by engaging with the poem at hand.
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What do I mean by engaging? You can read a poem and write your thoughts as you read.
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You can read the poem once through and write a few thoughts down that are sparked by reading the poem. You can then attend to the poem line by line. In his book Why Poetry?, Matthew Zapruder does an excellent job of reminding us of the importance of remembering that in order to read a poem you simply have to read and consider each word, each line, and so forth — what these mean at face value. This is a simple way to find an access point. Zapruder points this out in the context of John Ashbery poems which, indeed, some find rather difficult to access.
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A Lawless Explication is not necessarily a finished “product” (so to speak) in and of itself. It’s the result of an exercise. You may find yourself with a series of fragments. That’s perfectly ok and fine. Think of this as brainstorming and journaling. You’re getting words down on the page and you’re actively engaging with poems. It’s a give and take. You do not necessarily have to wind up with a poem that is titled “With a line from Emily Dickinson” or anything like that. You certainly can though.
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Lawless Explications are about process. Your process. The way your mind walks through thoughts and engages creatively with text. Your personal universe (see: Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town) comes into play as you participate in this process.
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Will I get a poem out of a Lawless Explication? Maybe. And maybe not. Again, it’s really about practice. If this method is not working for you, well, let’s find you another way to practice with your creative tools so that the devices in your toolkit do not gather dust or get rusty.
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Lawless Explications are an opportunity to be playful. It’s easy to forget that the reason you were drawn to writing in the first place is because you found joy, solace, an outlet for expression and emotion, explore relationship dynamics, reflect on the your choices and the paths that might have been, the desire to dig deeper into your experience with both the interior and exterior world, and this act of searching though art may well have kept you alive in difficult times. Probably all of this and more.
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Try your best to let yourself get messy on the page. Or, if not messy, discover what wildness looks like for you.
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Coming Soon: examples of my attempts at Lawless Explications.
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If you give these a try, by all means, please feel free to share.
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~ notes ~
Written: 10.8.22
Revised: 2.15.23
My records indicate that I started writing Lawless Explications in July 2018.
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