Your task for today is to do nothing.
Here’s what I mean by nothing: spend some time (5 minutes, 10! the whole day! whatever works for you) on something that’s restorative. It should be something you’re not required to do. Ideally, it will feel restful; it shouldn’t produce a little zing of productivity.
I gave this assignment to the students in my Resisting the Attention Economy seminar this seminar (an upper-level interdisciplinary course focusing on Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing; I didn’t think I should actually call the class Seminar in Doing Nothing ;) ) and here are the rules we came up with:
it can’t be productive.
you can do it by yourself, or with someone else.
it can’t involve a screen.
So going for an aimless kind of walk by yourself or with a friend/kid/dog etc is great; walking briskly to the library to return some books on the way to pick up your kid from t ball is also great but doesn’t count as nothing (for our purposes). Baking a cake because you feel like it is great, but rushing to cook your family dinner is not. (Or at least, again, it doesn’t count as nothing.) Staring into the distance is a great form of nothing. So is taking a nap.
If you’re stymied by the prospect of nothing, you might take a look at the suggestions in this article, about the seven types of rest.
And if doing nothing feels odd and hard, a) that’s actually not surprising, given our culture’s insistence on constant productivity and b) consider how a little restorative nothing can create some space in your brain to allow a poem to grow.
a note to new subscribers
I’m so glad you’re here. As you’ve probably gathered, we’re doing National Poetry Month a little differently this year—rather than the frantic pace of a poem-a-day, we’re writing little snippets each day, then pausing every couple of days to shape those snippets into drafts. The second poem prompt, which drew on the exercises from days 5-8, was yesterday. You can read more about the rationale for this slower (and hopefully more humane) approach here, and you can find all the exercises (and a year’s worth of prompts, tips, encouragement, interviews, and more) in the archive.
me vs the speaker in my poems
I tried to write something silly and short about this great tweet by poet and novelist Ruth Madievsky, and it turned into an earnest defense of the personal in poetry and why it’s been important, in my new book, to say that I am the speaker in my poems.
You can read that essay, on the LSU Press blog, here.
I’d love to hear from you. You can always reply to this email, comment below, or find me on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy).