Course:Writing and Capturing Beginner’s Luck by Elisa Gabbert

CRWR 501P 003
Advanced Writing of Poetry
	Instructor:Dr. Bronwen Tate; Email: Bronwen.tate@ubc.ca; Office: Buchanan E #456;
Important Course Pages
	Inspirations & Influences;
Categories
	Sources of Inspiration and Influence Aardvark Book of Poems Book of Poems by a Living Poet Choufleur Conflicted, Ambivalent, or Antagonistic Feelings CRWR 501 People Encountered Before Twelve Essay Fiction Films Fox Gemini Music Orchid Otis Places Poem Composed Before 1945 Poetic Prose Sadcactussometimesblooms Song, Painting, Film, Etc. Souris Yarrow Yellow Silver

Writing and Capturing Beginner’s Luck

This is an article written by Elisa Gabbert, the poet that I’m doing my apprenticeship on. In her article, she compares writing to poker games, where in both cases beginners are less afraid to try out new things because the stakes are so low. Beginners don’t know what’s right or wrong, they don’t have a style, and they’re in less routinized ways of making process.

“People say “trust the process”, but I’ve found there’s a danger in trusting my writing process to much.”

To me, when years and years of writing habits have accumulated, I agree with what Gabbert is saying about process. In order to capture beginner’s luck again, to capture something “inventive” or new or better, there has to be a willingness to put oneself in cluelessness again. It’s uncomfortable not knowing what to do, but it’s often the times where we immerse ourselves completely in unfamiliarity, that we’re rewarded with something else. It’s the willingness for more experienced writers to put themselves in the trial and error phase of beginners, to be not understanding of their own writing and their processes.

In applying this to my own writing, it makes me think of the times when I try something so far away from what I usually do. For example, writing with form restriction. It has always something I’ve avoided, as I’ve always thought it to be restricting my thoughts as well. Yet something Diane Seuss mentioned in her interview with Tony Leuzzi made me link beginner’s luck with form. She says, “each event, relationship, speech act, song that a particular sonnet might carry would hold the same amount of space – those reliable 14 lines – no matter the degree of gravity or levity.” This made me think about sonnets in a different way, and how all matters whether serious or lighthearted have the potential to be told in 14 lines. I’ve never sat down seriously to write a sonnet before, and began to wonder whether this can be a chance to try disrupting my own writing processes. What will I get when I allow myself to be unfamiliar with something again? To be so unfamiliar with its rules that I can only follow one at a time, where will that leave me? What am I gaining as I’m leaving out, and vice versa?

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