TIME JUMP /// (It will be hard to let go)
This is a quick bite, written in a ten minute writing amble (let's call it) after a couple of three minute sprints (so-styled because they certainly felt fast and frenetic, more hurried than I'm presently used to being).
Ephemeral outcome from a lovely writing workshop I'm participating in for Q1 2026 with, let it be clear, an emphasis on the process of creative connectivity, not the writing product. The sessions are supposed to produce beginnings or re-beginnings or re-ignitings or freshenings. I've joined them hoping for a fresh surge of creative motivation-and-inspiration for the novel I've been working on during and since my MFA.
So: I was delighted to find that the closing exercise of the night actually did take me into fashioning something that was in conversation with one of the central ideas of the novel - a desire to explore and reflect what it might be like to be a person who time jumped in a culture of people who do that. What problems would be endemic to their society? What modes of organisation would seem obvious to them and perhaps weird for us? What might disrupt their way of life and trigger a story?
It's already shifted a tiny amount - thanks to Poetry London, I've come to put faith in the power of tiny adaptations! - and the final verse is now still there, still rhyming in a not fully satisfactory way, but re-ordered*.
I'm not sure that it has any larger life - other than here in the Tumblr blogiverse? - so it might be that this small edit brings it to a final form.
[*Romily John blog will consider this adapted version at some point...]
Two main inputs into the piece - the bits in blue are taken from an exercise to form the kernels of kennings. [Quick definition below.]
Kenning | The Poetry Foundation
Our exercise generated a set of nouns by free association with a series of place prompts and then a set of adjectives, again from prompts but no longer remember what - followed by an invitation to mix them together until they formed something interesting... Here are mine, plus two bonus ones (one of these was from an earlier exercise and coalesced into a kenning, the other is a mis-rendering of someone else's into a theme I often use - storytelling at the hearthside, the Beowulf-yarn-spinning scenario.)
indistinct Spring // tentative darkness // hopeful tree // vast arteries
transporting bench // glum playground // crowded heart
[dusky] spatula // opaque growth
reworked: awkward edge /// re-rendered: farting hearth
The line in green is from a Lucille Clifton poem about taking a stance at the start of a new year*. This line was borrowed to get the current piece started and designed not to be retained but to be stripped out again (and *can* be stripped out without losing anything, a technique learned from, I think, a Helen Cox workshop, for which, grateful memories).
*"I am running into a new year"
Poetry Friday: "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton
