"Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit" ...

... and yesterday's writing exercises surely prove that Mr. Polonius was indeed correct, even though he couldn't follow this maxim himself. Though the class has turned from poetry to prose, we're still working on concision and precision of language, particularly when it comes to imagery. We began with a morning warm-up, this time crafting literary lists with Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book and Dave Eggers' amazing Website, Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency, as inspiration. The class crafted literary lists on topics such as "Awesome Popsicle Flavors That Don't Exist But Should -- Or Should Not" and "Situations in Which a Lightsaber Would Be Inappropriate," learning all the while how to develop a theme and create poetic leaps in as few words as possible.

Afterward, we continued our discussion of Shonagon's aesthetics and the form of the zuihitsu, learning how the form should display aesthetic features including wit and/or lightness, courtly refinement, the aforementioned mono no aware, and purity of emotion and emotional expression. The students filed outside to finish up their zuihitsu, inspired by the beauty of nature and the interrupting nature of lawnmowers.

After lunch, we posted our work on the blog and workshopped in pairs. Then, it was time for the ultimate exercise in concision and brevity: the six word short story. As the story goes, Ernest Hemingway grabbed a napkin at the Algonquin hotel and wrote what he later claimed were the best words he's ever written:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

These six words tell so much, and contain a great depth of narrative and emotion -- so much so that what might've been dismissed as absent-minded scribbling actually morphed into a form of fiction. We wrote ten six word short stories a piece, then ended class with the fine art of flash fiction ahead of us for study hall.

Postscript: A Poem

Bird on the mountaintop,
still but still singing -- without
ears, is it a song?