Sticky Note Introductions

One of the most fun introductions to Creative Writing that I came up with was inspired by one of Beat era-and-beyond poet Anne Waldman's long poems, which comes near the beginning of the collection of the same name, Fast Speaking Woman. It begins with the epigraph,* “I is another,” attributed to Rimbaud, and the first stanza reads,
 

because I don't have spit

because I don't have rubbish

because I don't have dust

because I don't have that which is in air

let my try you with my magic power

The following stanzas are built with short, direct lines; most begin with the repeated incantation of “I'm a” or “I'm an” and sometimes “I'm the” and in one stanza, just “the.” The stanzas have anywhere from one to twelve lines in no discernible pattern, and in this small book that can hold about thirty lines (and the spaces needed to create stanzas) per page, Part 1 of this poem is twenty-one pages long! But more importantly, this poem is about Fast Speaking Woman, and the main part begins:

I'm a shouting woman

I'm a speech woman

I'm an atmosphere woman

I'm an airtight woman

I'm a flesh woman

I'm a flexible woman

As the lines pile up, they and the stanzas work together to give the sense of an incantation, a chant, and as the poem builds, so does the energy and the idea of what the poem is trying to do, which is to suggest a female creation emergence, the unwritten myth, to my mind.

Here is a slightly later stanza, which really shows Waldman's wordplay and building rhythm, meant to be spoken:

I'm an abalone woman

I'm the abandoned woman

I'm the woman abashed, the gibberish woman

the aborigine woman, the woman absconding

the Nubian woman

the antediluvian woman

the absent woman

the transparent woman

the absinthe woman

the woman absorbed, the woman under tyranny

the contemporary woman, the mocking woman

the artist dreaming inside her house

​

Here is a tiny excerpt, of Anne Waldman reading from this poem in 2016