Purpose
Okay. So now we create a literary writing-ness, a work of art—for a public audience.
Premise
My friend is an artist. (Was an artist? No. Is. Is an artist.) In college, he lived down the hall from me. He majored in art and emphasized in photography. He took amazing self-portraits. In one, a black-&-white, he covered himself in peanut butter, and you should have seen how beautiful it was. I used to stare at it a long, long time. The image was monstrous and grotesque and still somehow vulnerable and…well, beautiful. Today he lives in Iowa with this family and is a terrible Instagram poet. — One painting of his, from his senior year, for his senior show, which he worked so hard to perfect, stands out to me—for two reasons. First, it reminds me of a famous poem:
Why I Am Not a Painter
By Frank O’Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg[1]
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
Second, my friend's painting, which, admittedly, I do not (and will never) “get,” has a story that torments and inspires me. For this painting, he did not work in the artist’s studio our school made available to the art majors. Instead, he transformed his dorm room into a studio. He took out his mattress and put it upstairs in a friend’s dorm (though Danny didn’t sleep up there; he slept bed-less in his now-art-studio dorm room), and he made the wooden bed frame into a horizontal easel where he kept the canvas and his paints and papier-mâché and copies of dictionary pages and very old newspapers and all kinds of glues and then, for weeks, he worked on it with the door closed. No one was allowed into his room. He disappeared from us. At one point, though, he let me in to see what he’d been working on. It was an amazing, huge canvas covered in all those paints and papier-mâché and copies of dictionary pages and very old newspapers and all kinds of glues, and he’d made unbelievable and strange images out of the fragments that kept me thinking and wondering for a very long time. I loved it. It puzzled me and startled me and made me a deeper, better person. About a week later, when he had finished it completely, he was proud to show us what he’d made.
And when he showed it to me.
It was covered.
In black paint.
Everything.
Was.
Gone.
(Or seemed to be.)
“Why?” I demanded. “What have you done?”
I hope this strange story (admittedly without a satisfying ending) can become a metaphor for how to approach this writing assignment: That is to say, you have worked hard to unearth some difficult stuff—and you’ve let it cover the canvas for now. You have read and studied and discovered and expressed and arranged and deepened good questions and problems and answers. That has been good work, hard work, worthwhile work. And you should be damn proud of yourselves.
So now then.
Paint it over.
Remember: What’s under there is still there—it’s still the work you’ve done. The next essay, though—that next layer in the painting—even though it will look just one way to the world, nevertheless contains all you’ve worked to create so far—all those ideas and questions and expression. And yet, it will seem as though you’ll have to begin again.
The next essay, then, is new. But isn’t. But is.
This is a creative work, a literary work, a work of art. I want you to take the thoughts and growing and earnest efforts you’ve put toward this semester’s projects…and I want you to create a public-facing work, a personal essay, in which you dig deeply to discover—and express—a beautiful You.
Writing Task
In a literary writing-ness (as defined like this: If the world is like itself, then TheseWords are trying to find out how); or, in a literary essay (defined like this: trying, just the best Try I have to give); or, in a a story, or a work of art that poems&essays&makesEmFeelTruthNotJustAgreeWithIt, one which begins with this question & maybe flips it, twists it, hates it, aches in response to it, screams at it, but grows from it, churns with it, embraces it, asks it (then begins to answer) better questions, nevertheless begin your writing process with it:
Who are you?
Requirements: You tell me.
rubric: what would disappoint you & what would make you proud with a finished product?
reflection: here’s a chance to write about your writing: some questions to ponder & allow to inform this section:
how did you approach researching this problem? where did you start? how did you choose which voices to include?
what brave choices did you make, & why were they necessary?
was there anything unexpected that you discovered along the way?
what was difficult about the writing process & how did you overcome it?
what do you hope your audience will take away from your writing?
how would you change or improve your writing, when revisiting it? What modifications would be implemented to better “love” your problem?
“rules” were made to be broken. Which of those from the prompt did you break, & why was it effective to do so for your paper?
what do you want a do-over about?
I think you should emphasize really creative writing here like poems, haikus, etc. I feel as if this prompt could really be useful if students strayed away from normal essays for once.