Mundane Wisdom

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Rain” by Raymond Carver

• Divinations

• Prompt

• Archive

Freewrite

The point of freewriting is to simply get your thoughts on the page. So do not try to be “good” or write “poetically.” Just write your thoughts as they come, keep your pen moving, and allow yourself to be imperfect, sloppy, redundant, or cliché if you need to be. Now is the time for ideas—we will turn those ideas into a first draft once we’re done freewriting.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. What did you do today? How about yesterday? Jot down the minutiae of your life, the aspects that were tedious and boring. Did you do your laundry and lose a sock in the drier? Maybe you cut the brown spots off of a potato? Did you trip on the stairs up to your apartment? How many hours did you scroll for? The more mundane detail you can provide, the better.

Poem: “Rain” by Raymond Carver

Retrieved from Writer's Almanac.

Divinations

There is wisdom in mundanity. That's what the poem reminds me of, as well as many great poems that surprise and delight me. Everything is fodder for successful poetry, including (and sometimes especially) the boring details that make up so much of our everyday lives.

Raymond Carver's simple poem demonstrates what slow and careful attention to our slow and careful lives reveals. That slow care can be found in moments as small as the line breaks. Let's look at the first three:

Line breaks can accomplish many things: multiplicities, suspense, internal contradiction. Here, they operate as moments of quiet reflection. Each line is still a complete unit, sure, but that first line break feels like contemplation: what did the speaker arise with? And then the second line break makes "and read" feel like a necessary afterthought: the obvious follow-up on an initial torpid desire. In that third line, we get a whole sentence tacked on, allowing the line to contain an internal wrestling.

This is where understanding craft is so useful, because, really, the rules of poetry are so arbitrary and ill-defined; it is much better to know that anything is possible, rather than any particular sets of dos and don'ts. The second stanza has slightly more rapidity to it, like the mind waking up:

This stanza is the same length and the previous one, but it has 3 sentences, not two, which adds a sense of slight rapidity. It is also, cinematically, a lethargic stanza: the speaker looks outside a window and doesn't move—but, energetically, I feel the stanza's tension and release, its submission to the day's mood. And in this slow but waking moment, we arrive at such brilliant insight:

I think most successful poems have a question in them, either stated or implied. These questions feel as though they came from beyond the rainy window, and the speaker's determination to live the same life over is so unexpected and so generous. I see this stanza operating on two planes. On one plane, the speaker refuses to judge himself for spending the day reading in bed—but then, is that really such an unforgiveable mistake? Which leads us to that other plane, which is, for me, a rumination on self-forgiveness. This is my first time being alive; probably yours, too. We are all bumbling through an experience, life, which no one can well equip us for, and in which we often only learn by errors. Yes, I would do it all again, too.

I can't tell you where this third stanza came from—the mind, the muse, or the mysterious unknown—but I can tell you that close, careful attention to the "boring" moments of our lives reveals some of our most interesting wisdoms and insights. Stare at the drying paint. Watch the grass grow. There is so much to be learned outside of the rush. 

Prompt

Write a poem with your attention turned towards the everyday and mundane. Explore this mundanity until you arrive at a sudden and insightful conclusion. Do not try to force epiphany, but let yourself be wowed by what you didn't know you knew.

Archive

Check out our full archive of prompts at the Poemancer website!