I looked for spoons and found death.
A couple months ago, I found a blank notepad in a kitchen drawer. This was halfway through my first year (well, fourth, technically, yikes) of grad skool, when I moved into an apartment not far from campus that is owned by people I’ve never met and was previously rented by people I do not know. All I do know about who lived before me is the paint stripped by the adhesive backing of a mezuzah removed, and a blank notepad titled “PEC Healthcare & PEC Hospice” left behind in a kitchen drawer.
I was spooked when I first looked for spoons and found death. While the object is commonplace in a household or office, the words printed on it felt eerie, suddenly making me remember my own experiences with grief and dying, slowly making my bowl of pasta grow cold. It felt wrong to throw away and waste more paper; it felt weird to write my own notes on a space defined by a company I don’t know. But, as a writer, I also know it is easier to write into the words around us than to create out of a blank page.
A couple weeks ago, I started telling you about my modern art class and Yoko Ono and spontaneous meaning. Those ideas lingered in my mind as I wrote the titled-for-now project “Notepad Poems.” Inspired by works of Gertrude Stein, Yoko Ono, and Harryette Mullen, I’ve been trying to write poems with a variety of constraints.
Think of it like this: my poetic project uses found material (notepad) and associative language (words relating to healthcare and dying) to construct a new meaning that reflects a situational (so much death) and personal (I keep living) context not originally invested within the found object.
Am I making any sense? Don’t think too hard about it—just try to feel it. I’m definitely leaning into “experiment” in this project, trying different constraints as a way of generating novel forms of expression rather than attempting for it to be “good” or make “sense.” If it is “good” or “sensible” then it’s a nice coincidence but not the main goal.
Some of the “Notepad Poems” were spontaneous, writing how I want. Others employed constraints like erasure, limited vocabulary, or nonsensical syntax. One really generative writing exercise I used came from a process that Haryette Mullen details in the book Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works written with Barbara Henning:
I tried to follow Mullen’s steps using the words the notepad provided: healthcare, hospice, and home.
After assembling word lists and coming up with my own associations, I tried to write poems in a variety of ways. Some only (mostly) use the words from the list:
Some make puns on those words or try to build a metaphor:
Some try to embody the voice behind someone who might use those words or the space of the notepad to express:
Constraints are rules we impose on language to create an artistic or aesthetic purpose through them; my project tries to insert my own experience with death into the arbitrary situation of a “healthcare industry” that seems to value profit over prolonging life. Through using these rules and trying to write in a way that is “unnatural,” I was attempting to get to the truth of my feelings of anger and dissatisfaction and fear about the disregard for individual prosperity that is explicit in the commodification of death.
It was a process as freeing as it was fun—instead of letting a final project and a found notebook consume my ability to express, I chose to play with language until I found a voice through which to speak.
Want to try this yourself? Pick an idea or theme that’s been on your mind and use Mullen’s method from above to outline it and create from it. Or, look for something to write on: find an object with words on it and write alongside or against or around those words until you run out of space.
It’s surprising how much something can appear out of what seems to be nothing.
Healthily, Ricky
loved the insight into your process (and enjoyed the results too!)