What Pottery Taught Me about Poetry
I’m taking a pottery class at a local studio. So far, I have made many spectacular messes and lots of small mistakes, learned several ways not to handle clay, gotten my arms very tired, and formed one small plate (which may or may not survive firing and glazing). Still, it feels like good creative cross-training.
Learning how to make things out of materials other than words helps me drop into a depth of attention (or maybe beginner mind) that I need for writing. It lets me practice the arts of messing up, getting frustrated, and starting over without telling myself stories about what kind of writer I am. And it almost always gives me new ideas and tools to bring back to my journal and keyboard.
Working on a pottery wheel is challenging in ways that initially seem completely unlike writing a poem. Everything happens so fast as the wheel spins. A tiny divot rapidly becomes a wobble and then a collapse. There is no pausing to look out the window and collect my thoughts. A correction soon turns into wild overcorrection. The clay is either so slippery it feels out of control or so dry that it is about to lose its adhesion and slide off the wheel altogether (in theory there should be a just right state in between, but I have yet to find it). I have to hunch over the clay and use all my upper body strength to flatten it. And then it splatters everywhere when I try to scrape away excess slop.
My first real (albeit tiny) triumph happened yesterday when I learned how to connect my hands. I’d been using my right fist to press down while my left hand cupped the side of the clay in an attempt to keep it rounded together. I was performing two separate actions without any coordination and the result was a wobbling lump. Then my instructor had me hook my right thumb over my left thumb and plant my elbows on my lap. Now my hands were stabilizing one another and communicating an even pressure to the clay. Planting my elbows not only gave me a way to brace my arms, but also helped turn my attention back to how the clay was shifting under my hands (and away from the amazing bowls my classmates were crafting). My efforts were concentrated and coordinated, morphing the clay into its new shape.
Once I’d connected my hands, I also started to see connections between throwing a pot and revising a poem. The wheel spins much, much faster than I can cycle through rereads of a poem, but the process of smoothing the surface and sponging away excess—of iterating and iterating and letting a series of small changes accumulate into a new shape—is actually pretty familiar. And so is the need to coordinate all my intentions around what I’m making. Sometimes when revising a poem, I oscillate between paying attention to how it sounds aloud and paying attention to how it looks on the page. I’ll revise a poem with my eyes one day and then come back the next and revise with my ears and find the poem growing awkward and lumpy. It is only when I consciously link my eyes and ears (by reading the poem aloud while I break and move the lines around) that I can really tighten and hone the poem. I’m going to call this “connecting my hands” the next time I need to remind myself to do it. And I’m hopefully eventually going to make a bowl.
