Procedural Poetics: Process Notes for My Yearlong Book
Mara Sedlins
As I write this I’ve just gotten off the phone with my mother, who lives in another state and who I call every weekend. We covered many of the same stories and refrains that make up our conversations: what TV show she’s watching (William Shatner’s UnXplained); her knitting projects; reminiscences of her past professional life as an assistant principal, when there was only one computer for the whole school district; how she made a decision sometime during the pandemic that she wasn’t going to “do computer” anymore. I reflected on how computers kept me connected to others during the pandemic, but that technology can also keep people isolated from each other. I shared how some young people are rebelling against being on their phones all the time, and that software is mostly designed by tech bros who aren’t thinking about diverse populations in their testing. It isn’t my mom’s fault that her computer isn’t optimized for seniors like her and is difficult for her to understand. That seemed to make her feel better.
During the pandemic, I experienced a number of lifelines to the outside world due to the shift of activities to online formats: from my current home in Fort Collins, Colorado, I re-joined the San Diego Women’s Chorus, had birthday parties with far-flung friends, and reconnected with Durham, North Carolina, where I’d lived for two years and was a regular at Arcana Bar and Lounge, through Night School Bar’s virtual classes. The workshop topics resonated with me so much that I had trouble choosing one at a time. In total, I participated in a dozen workshops between 2021 and 2024, not counting teach-ins or discussion groups. By the end of 2021, I had taken three writing workshops with Night School Bar and was invited to participate in a Yearlong Writing Workshop in 2022. The idea was that each month, participants would write a short piece, and by the end of the year we’d all have completed a book-long collection. By the end of the first year, though, most of us were still immersed in our projects, and the workshops continued for a second year in 2023.
For me, these monthly meetings with a small, intimate group of writers did not end with a completed book (at least, not by the end of 2023 - but I’ll get to that!). What the workshops did for me was something more valuable: they jumpstarted an ongoing habit of creative practice.
By 2024 the height of the pandemic seemed to be behind us, and many activities that had shifted online in 2020 had shifted back to being in person. This cut me off from some of the connections I’d made, but it also prompted me to seek out my local communities. I began submitting creative work to a couple of experimental literary publishers based out of Boulder and Denver (shoutout to Tiny Spoon and Twenty Bellows!), including a piece I’d written during the Yearlong Writing Workshop. I created my own hybrid photography and poetry zines and left them anonymously in public places while I was traveling (a practice I’d started during the Yearlong Writing Workshop). And, over the course of the past year, I wrote a book of poetry, building on experimental practices I’d first played with during the Night School Bar Experiment and Experience, Fragments and Ephemera, and Writing with Words and Images workshops that I’d taken in 2021.
In addition to launching me into a regular creative practice, the Yearlong Writing Workshop helped me identify a throughline in how I create: I like to invent processes. The people in my writing group shared that my descriptions of process were as interesting as the things I made (if not more so!). In my professional life I’m trained in research methods, data analysis, and careful documentation, and these practices find their way into my creative life as well. I embrace the idea of art-making as experiment, in the empirical sense that I am acting on the world in the hopes of learning something new. In the past year, this throughline led me to a practice of writing that draws on my obsessions with nostalgia, structure, cut-up techniques, analog elements, and organizing information in digital spreadsheets. I recently came across the term, “procedural poetics,” and I think that’s an accurate description for my approach.
My Poetic Process (2024-2025):
Pull a slip of paper with typewritten text from the small Christmas tin that I converted into a pinhole camera. The phrase on the slip of paper is from my old journals, from an entry made in December. I’d collected these phrases to make a hybrid poetry zine in 2023, and the Christmas tin contains the leftovers.
Here is an example phrase: “a pull-apart novel?”
Write a reflection on the phrase in my writing notebook. What does it mean? What does it remind me of? What questions is it asking?
Pick up my cloth bag of dominoes. The bag is made of floral polyester fabric from the dress my mom wore to her sister’s wedding in the 1970s. I removed the poofy sleeves from the dress before wearing it to a cousin’s wedding a few years ago. The bag is made from the leftover sleeve fabric, beige with bright orange and yellow flowers and accents of magenta. The bag is lined with red velvet fabric that came from the bottom of the robe my mom wears around the house. When I stayed with her last summer, I worried that the robe was too long, that she would trip on it, so I shortened it for her and kept the fabric. When I told my mom about the bag, she said it made her think of an arm full of blood. I wondered if I had subconsciously constructed a womb.
The bag contains clear resin dominoes that I made with a silicone mold. Inside the dominoes are dried red dahlia petals. The petals fell from a dahlia plant that I photographed every day over the course of about a month during the spring of 2024 as part of another hybrid zine project. For that zine I’d collected phrases from my old journals, from entries made in July, and photographed cut-up poems using a double exposure technique so that the poems appeared on top of images of the dahlia plant. (I had done something similar for the December zine, but for that one I photographed bare tree branches against a grey sky.)
For this project, I’m writing poems using phrases from my old journals, but incorporating each month of the year instead of limiting myself to December or July. The 13-line poem structure that I’ve decided on uses phrases from each of the 12 months, plus a mystery, undated phrase representing the unknown and unknowable. There are journals in my collection where I didn’t bother to date my entries, and I wanted to use these too. The purpose of the dominoes is to help me randomly select which year’s journal I’m going to look in for each month. I have journals going back to 1995.
Referring to a chart in my writing notebook, I pull out a domino from the bag and record the resulting year. I repeat this for each of the 12 months.
Go through my boxes of journals and pull out the ones I’ve selected for this poem. Gather them all in a pile.
For each month/year combination, page through the corresponding journal(s), keeping the prompt from step 1 in mind. Try not to get too caught up in rereading the past, but skim through and focus on what jumps out. Write down excerpts that seem to speak to the prompt. Write them by hand in my writing notebook.
Put away the journals.
Type up all of the journal excerpts in the giant Google document I’m using to write these poems. (Lately I’m trying to switch away from Google, but it’s hard.)
Specifically, the poem structure that I’m using is a modified ribcage poem. It was invented by Athena Liu, and I learned about it in a writing workshop offered by the Tiny Spoon literary magazine in 2024. Each line of the twelve-line poem is twelve syllables long, ending with a one-syllable word that sits on its own line (so, technically it’s 24 lines). The poem is center-justified, and the one-syllable words can be read down the center - down the spine - as a phrase that captures the overarching theme of the poem. I decided to add a thirteenth line for my poetry submission to the 13th issue of Tiny Spoon. Then I kept writing more poems.
The next step in my process is to identify all of the one-syllable words in my journal excerpts, organized in a Google spreadsheet with 13 columns (one for each month, plus my mystery 13th line).
Use spreadsheet formulas to generate random combinations of one-syllable words. Write down combinations that I like. Repeat this until I have a thirteen-word phrase that forms the spine of a poem.
Here is an example spine: “leave room to want it to rage and change in clear cold light”
Check to make sure that the spine includes one word from each month of the year, plus the thirteenth undated journal excerpt (i.e., one word from each journal excerpt). Adjust as needed.
Often, there are words in the spine that are present in more than one journal excerpt (especially common words like “the” or “and”). I have choices about which specific month that word is going to represent. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of the possibilities and choices, or create a flowchart (as I did for one poem) to track all of the branching combinations as I proceed through the poem.
Now, write! I’ve created a framework in my Google doc with the spine words in brackets, interlaced with the excerpts I’ve gathered from my journals. Now I get to remix the words of my past selves, again keeping that initial prompt in mind and listening for what the poem is trying to tell me as I fit the words into twelve-syllable lines while maintaining a flow of meaning and grammar across the months and years. This part is so fun. I can do this on my phone, a little bit at a time or all at once, listening to music, on a plane, in my parents’ car on the way to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s house, on the couch at night when I can’t sleep, or in my old childhood bedroom.
Repeat the process as many times as I feel like it. Write multiple poems per spine. Write multiple spines per collection of journal excerpts. When I’m done with one collection, repeat the whole process with a new prompt and a new collection of source texts. I end up doing this for twelve prompts in total, and it ends up taking me almost exactly one year.
After my cycle of poems came to a natural close, I decided to write one more. This one would be a remix of the remixes, a thirteenth beast made up of parts from the other twelve. The spine is a cut-up of the other spines. The source text is the text of the other poems. Here is my thirteenth ribcage poem, the culmination of the Yearlong Book that I finally did write:
think about your message
Canyons in cold morning light circled, curling, caught
[the]
slow love of description. Not every one of the
[words]
I wrote down was missing; some are gathering to
[get]
real. A habit as intense as dreams in summer
[lost]
the sense of mistake, feeling more like a headlamp
[in]
a deep stretch of ocean. Each character returns
[a]
piece of the performance, unselfconscious in the
[light]
As an old woman, I went outside in the fine
[rain]
becoming visible. The small asymmetry
[each]
page places in the body falls ahead to keep
[time]
reversed. Lately life’s been taking lines, but it takes
[you]
in. The dream of a secret corner is within
[touch]
and every detail falls asleep in a field of
[blue]
