Creative Writing Exercises to Cure Writer's Block

Ginsberg's Mind Writing Slogans

I Background (Situation, Or Primary Perception)


• "First Thought, Best Thought" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "The Mind must be loose." — John Adams
  
• "One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." — Charles Olson, "Projective Verse"
  
• "My writing is a picture of the mind moving." — Philip Whalen
  
• Surprise Mind — Allen Ginsberg
  
• "The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!" — Basho
  
• "Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." –– Walt Whitman
  
• "...What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? ... Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." — John Keats
  
• "Form is never more than an extension of content. — Robert Creeley to Charles Olson
  
• "Form follows function." — Frank Lloyd Wright*
  
• Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
  
• "Nothing is better for being Eternal
  
• Nor so white as the white that dies of a day." — Louis Zukofsky
  
• Notice what you notice. — A. G.
  
• Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
  
• Observe what's vivid. — A. G.
  
• Vividness is self-selecting. — A. G.
  
• "Spots of Time" — William Wordsworth
  
• If we don't show anyone we're free to write anything. –– A. G.
  
• "My mind is open to itself." — Gelek Rinpoche
  
• "Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound." — Charles Reznikoff

II Path (Method, Or Recognition)

• "No ideas but in things." "... No ideas but in the Facts." — William Carlos Williams
  
• "Close to the nose." — W. C. Williams
  
• "Sight is where the eye hits." — Louis Zukofsky
  
• "Clamp the mind down on objects." — W C. Williams
  
• "Direct treatment of the thing ... (or object)." — Ezra Pound, 1912
  
• "Presentation, not reference." — Ezra Pound
  
• "Give me a for instance." — Vernacular
  
• "Show not tell." — Vernacular
  
• "The natural object is always the adequate symbol." — Ezra Pound
  
• "Things are symbols of themselves." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.
  
• He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
  
• General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
  
• For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." — William Blake
  
• "And being old she put a skin / on everything she said." — W. B. Yeats
  
• "Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better." — Jack Kerouac
  
• "Details are the Life of Prose." — Jack Kerouac
  
• Intense fragments of spoken idiom best. — A. G.
  
• "Economy of Words" — Ezra Pound
  
• "Tailoring" — Gregory Corso
  
• Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. –– A. G.
  
• Syntax condensed, sound is solid. — A. G.
  
• Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. — A. G.
  
• "Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." — Ezra Pound
  
• "... awareness ... of the tone leading of the vowels." — Ezra Pound
  
• "... an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters . . . — Ezra Pound
  
• "Lower limit speech, upper limit song" — Louis Zukofsky
  
• "Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia." — Ezra Pound
  
• "Sight. Sound & Intellect." — Louis Zukofsky
  
• "Only emotion objectified endures." — Louis Zukofsky

III Fruition (Result, Or Appreciation)

• Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
  
• "Alone with the Alone" — Plotinus
  
• Sunyata (Sanskrit) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
  
• "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" — Zen Koan
  
• "What's the face you had before you were born?" — Zen Koan
  
• Vipassana (Pali) = Clear Seeing
  
• "Stop the world" — Carlos Castafleda
  
• "The purpose of art is to stop time." — Bob Dylan
  
• "the unspeakable visions of the individual — J. K.
  
• "I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly." — Chuang Tzu (Tr. Burton Watson)
  
• "Candor" —Whitman
  
• "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." — W. Shakespeare
  
• "Contact" — A Magazine, Nathaniel West & W. C. Williams, Eds.
  
• "God appears & God is Light
  
• To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
  
• But does a Human Form Display
  
• To those who Dwell in Realms of Day." — W. Blake
  
• "Subject is known by what she sees." -A. G.
  
• Others can measure their visions by what we see. –– A. G.
  
• Candor ends paranoia. — A. G.
  
• "Willingness to be Fool." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "Day & Night / you're all right." — Gregory Corso
  
• Tyger: "Humility is Beatness." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
  
• Lion: "Surprise Mind" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche &A.G.
  
• Garuda: "Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• Dragon: "Unborn Inscrutability" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "To be men not destroyers" — Ezra Pound
  
• Speech synchronizes mind & body — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "The Emperor unites Heaven & Earth" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
  
• "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" — Shelley
  
• "Make it new" — Ezra Pound
  
• "When the music changes, the walls of the city shake" — Plato
  
• "Every third thought shall be my grave — W Shakespeare, The Tempest
  
• "That in black ink my love may still shine bright." –– W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
  
• "Only emotion endures" — Ezra Pound
  
• "Well while I'm here I'll
  
• do the work —
  and what's the Work?
  To ease the pain of living.
  Everything else, drunken
  dumbshow." — A. G.
  
• "... Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world's ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise." — Carl Rakosi
  
• "To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings." — Gelek Rinpoche

Overcome Writer's Block