In an essay William Matthews wrote as a contribution to my anthology The Writer’s Journal: 40 Writers and Their JournaIs, later reprinted in Keeping a Journal You Love, the late poet suggested that a journal “en­courages scrappiness. Things needn’t be finished, just stored, the way one might ‘store’ a five-dollar bill in a trou­ser pocket in the closet for two weeks only to discover it smugly the next time the trousers get worn.”

A peek into the process he used in writing a poem for his son’s wedding by collecting such scraps reveals the way he collected those scraps and worked with them in his writing.

 Here are some scraps he shared for the anthology:

A morally sentimental 1968 rhyme: Nazi/ROTC

Is it more interesting to distinguish between different levels of evil than between different levels of good, or just easier?

As a boy, I thought “good” was monolithic, and so I remem­ber vividly the first time I heard the phrase “too kind. ” Who spoke of whom? Where? When? I don’t remember. But the monolith began to crumble. Some loose pebbles, some rocks, next boulders, and then an avalanche.

White southern women: “She’s too kind.”
Urban black boys: “He’s bad.”

Irony is not a defense against emotion. It’s an emotion about the relationship between words and emotion.

But then, emotion is a poor defense against irony. “Only a man with a heart of stone could read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” (Oscar Wilde)

German food critic: “The wurst is full of passionate intensity.”

Of course it’s a dumb joke. Are jokes about being smart?

Are smart jokes about being dumb?

Sebastian has asked me to give — to reinvent — one of the traditional blessings for his wedding to Ali.

I’ve who’ve blessed my marriages with divorce
as a man shoots a broken-legged horse.

An uncouplet.

I get #7, which lists the ten shades of joy. A thrilling phrase, “ten shades of joy,” but how dull they turn out to be, striding up the ramp in pairs not to the Ark but to the Love Boat:

bridegroom and bride
mirth and exultation
pleasure and delight
love and fellowship
peace and friendship.

The problem of course may lie somewhat in the translation. They make redundant couples, like legal phrases:

intents and purposes
will and testament.

Of course marriage and contract law are themselves a couple.

But where’s the breathlessness, the giddiness, the risk, the thrill and terror of vow-making? Eclipsed by all those abstract nouns.

Re-invent traditional ceremonies and Who may wind up absent? The deity formerly known as Yahweh.

But here’s the recurring problem poets face. The forms bristle with rust. Throw them wholly out and you’ve asked yourself to start from prose and make a poem. But if you’re not suspi­cious of them and intelligently combative, they’ll write your poem not for you, but instead of you.

The purpose of the forms is to raise talk above babble, and the purpose of “talk” is to tether the severities of the forms to the mess of emotional life. It’s a two party system, and each party needs a loyal opposition.

Wouldn’t it be easy to scrawl a journal entry in which I describe the relationship between “the forms” and “talk” as a mixed marriage, which would suggest why I, a deracinated WASP, will give the seventh blessing at a Jewish wedding?

Yes, as Nixon said, but it would be wrong.

Only a very great writer, Nabokov said in a related context, could resist such a temptation.

Well then, I won’t do it.

The forms represent their own history and the “talk” repre­sents this singular instance in the history.

***

Later, explaining how he uses what he writes in a journal, William Matthews wrote:

… a reason to keep a journal is to stumble upon scraps long after one first meets them in their own contexts. It’s easier to wonder “Now, what could I make from that” if one can no longer remem­ber very precisely what someone else had made from it ….

And he pointed out that:

… Roethke’s notebooks, in David Wagoner’s beautifully edited version of them, Straw for the Fire, were used that way. Apparently he’d weed them each year, throwing out what no longer sparked. A few entries survived a dozen or more such cullings before Roethke put them to some use we can identify from his poems …

Roethke’s was not a “scrapbook,” with its hope to preserve something of the past, but a collection of scraps that yearn to be changed from their illusory current form into something else, something future ….

Illustrating what he means about using the journal to store bits and pieces, Matthews wrote:

I thought: “Ten Shades of Joy” will be ten stanzas, of course, often lines each. Pentameter, natch. Perhaps each stanza might conclude with a couplet as an instance of knot-tying. “Ten Shades of Joy.”

The two lines I thought might become 1/50 of “Ten Shades of Joy” became part of an altogether differently scaled poem than the one I proposed to myself then:

The Bar at The Andover Inn May 28, 1995

The bride, groom (my son), and their friends gathered
somewhere else to siphon the wedding’s last
drops from their tired elders. Over a glass
of Chardonnay I ignored my tattered,
companionable glooms (This took some will:
I’ve ended three marriages by divorce
as a man shoots his broken-legged horse),
and wished my two sons and their families
something I couldn’t have, or keep, myself.
The rueful pluck we take with us to bars
or church, the morbid fellowship of woe­
I’d had my fill of it. I wouldn’t mope
through my son’s happiness or further fear my own.
Well, what instead? Well something else.

William Matthews compared the way he kept a journal to the “way a cook might tend a good strain of yeast or mother-of-vinegar.” I think that means to treasure and store the living organism and to introduce it into recipes and baked goods.

Here are three exercises to use for trying your hand at doing this:

1. Go back into journal entries you have already made. Pluck out five words or phrases (a group of words with no verb). Now imagine you are writing horoscopes for friends. Use one of the words or phrases in each horoscope (This was a class assignment Bill gave).

2. Go back through your journal entries again. Pick out five sentences that appeal to you. Imagine you are writing affirmations for yourself inspired by the sentences. Add words or change the word order to make the affirmations meaningful.

3. Choose ten phrases from your journal. Write each on a scrap of paper, fold each scrap and drop it in a hat, jar, bowl or basket. Each day for five days, pick out one piece of paper. Do a ten- to twenty-minute freewrite beginning with the phrase you have chosen. Whenever you get stuck, write the phrase into your entry again and continue writing with whatever pops into your head after that. If you have to, keep writing the phrase over and over until you find something to say. Of course, something to say always arrives.

I believe that each of these strategies will lead to generating unexpected writing. So much of the time, writing well requires that we trick the mind into allowing what is scattered or messier than we would have usually allowed ourselves. It’s in that mess that we find new ways of mining our observations, feelings and experience.