When I was assembling our writing prompt on zuihitsu and reading the very old Pillow Book, I also came across a new book by Courtney Peppernell titled Pillow Thoughts. I had never heard of Peppernell and I thought the book might be connected to my prompt in some way.
The Pillow Book was written by Sei Shonagon, a courtesan, around 1000, and it is a diary-like collection of her thoughts and observations on life.
The modern-day Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose that is - according to online descriptions - about heartbreak, love, loss, and self-worth. It is divided into ten sections, "making it so simple to skip to the parts where you want to feel the most." Hmmm, that's an interesting pitch.
It turns out that Peppernell is quite a bestselling author. Her writing career began in 2015 with her first novel, Chasing Paper Cranes.
Her first poetry collection, Pillow Thoughts, was released in 2016 and reached number one in its category, and attracted the attention of other artists, including The Chainsmokers.
The collection was then re-published by Andrews McMeel Universal, along with her second poetry collection The Road Between in August 2017. That year she also released her second novel, Keeping Long Island.
samples via her Instagram account
In an online interview, she explains the publication story.
What happened with Pillow Thoughts is originally it was self-published, and it had been out for a couple of months, and one morning I woke up and all these people on Instagram had messaged me and said that the Chainsmokers had tweeted out a poem from the book and everybody was asking “where is this poem from, we love this poem” so just to wake up to that was incredible. I knew who the Chainsmokers were too, I love their music, I like what they’re about, so to have them connect with a piece of my writing was super awesome and so we contacted them and they said “yeah send us a copy of the book we’d love to read it” and everything happened from there.
Courtney Peppernell is an Australian LGBT author, and she sells a lot of books.
For me being in the LGBT community I wanna be…. I write for everyone. But LGBTQ+ they’re special to me too. Especially with pillow thoughts…there still a lot of people out there who think I’m male. They don’t realize I’m actually a female. They have no idea that I’m gay. Some of my favorite messages are…they’ll come to my page and go “Courtney I thought you were a guy and sort of now I kind of get you and your book makes way more sense now” that’s cool bc it shows that love is universal but it also connects me with LGBT readers and the struggles that some of them go through and just mental illness in general.
On January 1, 2022, books that were published in 1926 entered the public domain in the United States (copyright differs in other countries). That means that you can do remixes and other things with these works. Are you a poet who also writes stories or novels? Maybe a reimagining in your 2022 practice.
On this call for submissions, we will consider the Zuihitsu (随筆 zuih-itsu), a genre of classical Japanese literature consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author's surroundings. The name is derived from two Kanji meaning "at will" and "pen."
It is neither prose poem nor essay - though it can resemble both. The translation is to "follow the brush" as in painting, letting the brush take control of the hand. The form implies there will be discovery rather than plan. The creation of order depends on some disorder.
The usually short entries contain juxtapositions, fragments, contradictions, random materials and pieces of varying lengths. It is often personal writing and contemplation. In longer zuihitsu pieces passages that look more like "poetry" (shorter lines, figurative language) also appear. One article I read called zuihitsu a genre in which the text can drift like a cloud.
Zuihitsu might be best known in its first appearance more than a millennium ago in The Pillow Book written by Sei Shonagon, a courtesan of the court of Empress Sadako/Teshi. Sei was a contemporary and acquaintance of another courtesan, Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote another Japanese classic, The Tale of Genji.
Makura no sōshi (The Pillow Book) was written around 1000 and like many old personal diaries and journals it gives us reflections on the customs and usages of the time. Sei Shonagon kept a diary that includes the intrigues, dalliances, and habits of Japan's late tenth-century elite, as well as her personal feelings.
I read an abridged translation by Arthur Waley. There is a little thrill in reading the diary of this very young woman. She writes in a time and place that treated poetry as important as knowledge.
Zuihitsu written today by most Westerners is hybrid. A precise definition is hard to give. I would say that the emphasis is not so much on a subject as it is about the movement between the passages. The passages are interconnected but flow from one to the next more by association than any literary logic. The writing process mirrors the author’s mind. Parts may be in verse if that is the best form for the idea. The form changes the content. Another description I have seen of the form is that it is a "lyric essay."
The first time I was introduced to the form, the modern poem that came to mind was "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. Looking at it again, it does seem to fit the form. Here are two of Stevens' "ways"
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
American poet Kimiko Hahn published her collection The Narrow Road to the Interior and uses this ancient Japanese technique in the writing of her very modern poetry. (Her title is taken from haiku poet Bashō's famous travel diary, Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior).
A Zen priest once told me that without snagging on a storyline, the body can only take loss for ninety seconds. The physical body has its limits, is what I heard.
The imagination can break through them.
Boiled peanuts. Leather of daybreak. Cotton thinning out into thread. Dried vomit. Ice water from the spigot. The sacred and profane share a border. In the desert, small droppings of unknown origin.
Even when I was young, I loved peering at faces in films. The pleasure of watching and of not being watched.
Hybrid forms leave fences open. They are wide fields with snow leopards, wolves, and honey bees. The combustion of imaginings forms a lake, water spreading, explosions on the surface of an oil slick.
Hybrida is the change of properties. Long ago the earth plates shifted, came together in new permutations. New land. New World. It permits a space to be wounded, sutured, broken again, and untied to float to a beyond.
This mixed presence is a ghost, converses with the living. What lingers sounds like leaves crushed beneath feet, or the light that remains on after you’ve distinctly shut it, the house in the field over there, the one that keeps living whether you view it or not. Lights in the upstairs room. Shadows move when the wind changes its mind. It seems inhabited, doesn’t it?
All those poet interpretations are worth looking at but as our model this month, I chose some sections from The Pillow Book itself. The author often makes lists under headings that could serve as titles. Here are some examples (there are more on the prompt page of our main website).
Pleasing Things
Finding a large number of tales that one has not read before. Or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed. But often it is a disappointment.
In life there are two things which are dependable. The pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of literature.
Lighting some fine incense and then lying down alone to sleep.
Looking into a Chinese mirror that’s a little clouded.
Things That Make Me Feel Nostalgic
Coming across a torn scrap of lavender- or grape-coloured fabric crumpled between the pages of a bound book.
On a rainy day when time hangs heavy, searching out an old letter that touched you deeply at the time you received it.
Write a zuihitsu-inspired poem, collecting a series of random but interconnected thoughts and personal notes about your surroundings.
I think that a good starting place would be to use Shonagon's organizing method of a heading which can become your title or serve as a kind of stanza. You need to decide on some unifying element even if your pen takes you along a stream of consciousness to some place unexpected. For example, you could write 12 thoughts, one for each month, or have 7 for each day of the week. The sections might resemble haiku.
Your submission this month is not a pillow book or diary, but it might be an excerpt from one. There is a free online text version of The Pillow Book if you are looking for more section ideas.
This is a very open form. Feel free to ignore most essay and poetry rules. We hope you're open to the challenge.
The holidays and the year end are busy times. I'll (hopefully) be traveling at the end of 2021 and (hopefully) returning a few days into 2022. As such, I won't really be looking at poems in this last week of the year or doing much on a computer.
The Winter Solstice has just slipped into place and it may look and feel like winter where you are now or it may be the start of summer if you are in the Southern Hemisphere.
In years past, I have usually posted something about winter and poetry. Around the start of December, my analytics usually show that people search and find posts and prompts about winter. So, this year I'm going to start the season with this anthology post of past winter posts.
Do you ever have a mind of winter? I posted once about that idea and Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man"
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Somehow winter haiku always seems very appropriate to the season - spare and quiet like the day after a snowstorm.
You should not forget in this time when some people, due to holidays, the new year, and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) fall into a depression that tending your inner garden in winter can be aided by reading and writing poems.
Emily Dickinson, the middle child of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830, in the family home on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
She celebrated 55 birthdays before her death in 1886. After her death, her family members found her hand-sewn books, or “fascicles.” These fascicles contained nearly 1,800 poems.
I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -
I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -
With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -
While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890.
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats. She was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary, Walt Whitman, because she was told that his poetry was disgraceful.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –
Emily lost several close friends and several family members, including her mother in the 1880s which seemed to have a negative effect on her health. She also reported severe headaches and nausea in her letters. Her deathbed coma was punctuated by raspy and difficult breathing. This has led researchers to conclude that she died of heart failure induced by severe hypertension.
As a year ends, we often look back on what we have experienced. That review may bring to mind what we have accomplished and good memories. It may also include regrets, things undone, and things we wish we could forget.
In a poem from 1784, "New Year’s Verses" by Philip Freneau, he blesses whoever came up with the idea of a year.
Blest be the man who early prov’d
And first contriv’d to make it clear
That Time upon a dial mov’d,
And trac’d that circle call’d a year;
I'm not sure if all of us would bless that calendar maker. Some might instead curse.
December is filled with holidays that mark the Winter Solstice and the end of the year. Though some of us in the North might be sad to see winter arrive, since ancient times both solstices were viewed as a celebration. Starting on the winter solstice, the days get longer moving to the vernal equinox and the start of spring.
From the Scandinavia Yule, to Hanukkah, to a bonfire on Mount Fuji and the Hopi tradition of Soyal with its Sun Chief, the day of the "sun's rebirth” is often marked with fire and light.
For this month's writing prompt, we look at "Burning the Old Year" by Naomi Shihab Nye (from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems) which seems to follow these fire traditions. In her short poem, "Letters swallow themselves in seconds" and notes "sizzle like moth wings" in a "swirling flame of days."
Read the full poem. Is Nye is actually burning something or is this a metaphor using the idea of burning? What does she mean when she says, "I begin again with the smallest numbers?" Why is it that "only the things I didn’t do" are what will finally "crackle after the blazing dies?" (If you have thoughts on this poem, please post a comment below.)
The end-of-year celebration that seems closest to Nye's poem is from England. The modern-day (and possibly short-lived) “Burning of the Clocks” festival in the seaside town of Brighton takes fire as a necessity for lighting the dark days of winter. People wear clock costumes and carry paper lanterns to the beach to put in a bonfire. Do they symbolize wishes, hopes, fears, or Time itself?
In ancient cultures, marking time for farmers planting crops and tending animals was important and treated at times as religious. Winter was dangerous and the return of light and warmth was critical to their survival. The Neolithic who constructed Stonehenge did so to monitor movements of the sun and seasons and it probably had religious uses too. At the winter solstice, where the tallest trilithon at the monument once stood is where the sun would have set between in its narrow gap.
Our prompt for December is to write a poem to close the year, but this is not "a happy new year" poem prompt but more of a look back at a year - this one or some past one. Would you burn some or all of it? Do you see the light of the solstice? How do you close "that circle call’d a year?"
