Eudaemonia
“The [ancients] didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believed that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.”
Even though I already graduated from both high school and college (yay, me!) as a teacher, I feel it’s important to do my own assignments just to make sure they are actually do-able and that they achieve the teaching and learning ends I expect. In this semester’s creative writing class, I asked students to write a prose poem (I’ll get to this) that defines, describes, and/or somehow delineates their process as writers. Jumping off of Elizabeth Gilbert’s inspiration above, I asked my students to write a prose poem that invites inspiration in. In other words:
How do they, as writers, create an environment in which an ancient genius wants to take up residence?
I called the project “eudaemonia” punning off of Gilbert’s observation that “in ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaemonia, which basically means ‘well-daemoned’—that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creature.” My intention was for them to see that inspiration will come to them if they create and consistently offer an environment where those well daemons want to land.
I asked for a prose poem because I want them to get out of the idea of “poetry” (read that in an inky, curly, British-accented font) and work more directly with language choice and voice. And I want them to write the piece in one sitting—to just let words flow onto the page in invocation and invitation. I feel prose poetry responds best to time constraints; my best prose poems are the result of desperate writing.
But, since this was a class assignment, I also needed to give them some specific assessable, objective-driven, criteria:
5 senses—images of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
4 comparisons—metaphors or similes that may or may not include senses.
3 repetitions—a anaphoretic refrain that works to dissolve or draw attention to itself.
2 ungrammars—moments of broken rules in language or punctuation or syntax or spelling or other written convention.
1 allusion—a trail from another context to the poem for well daemons to follow.
All within about 200-300 words. A page or so. A nice, healthy paragraph of prose.
But rather than writing my own eudaemonia (I’ll get to this), I wrote a prose poem to define a prose poem, which I included below.
Brood Parasite
(or a prose poem written to define a prose poem to a classroom of high school students in absence of their teacher)
Ribbons and wattle and bits a better writer left behind: white pebbles, a full moon, “like clever Gretel” shaped with regurgitate–no, with daub–into a poem, solid and regular, like a nest, feathered, linty, fetid–cradling an egg, an egg of a poem, a poem that promises to hatch exactly as a poem should hatch, except a poem, like an egg, never–no, never–promises and, a poem, like Hansel (who you remember though I did not mention), tends toward over-consumption, so you feed the poem, the egg, the bulging yet wasting Hansel (Gretel is long since moved on) breadcrumbs, and then, as expected, a cuckoo bird lays her eggs in your poem, and when they hatch, they call you mother.
But, of course, I did write a eudaemonia. In my poem, I’m letting my well daemons know that I will take what they give me. That they should bring their broken pieces, their lost and abandoned offspring, their fragments no one else wants, and I will make them mine. The business of me sees value in what others overlook and knows that nothing—no, nothing—happens as expected and everything—yes, everything—hatches exactly as it should.
