Elaine Mintzer

Ars Biblica

  1. I am the Word, thy Art, that brought thee out of the land of literal analysis, out of the bonds of connotation.
  2. Thou shalt have no other Words before Me. Or after Me, unto Me, atop Me. . . all the prepositions.
  3. Just because it’s written in stone doesn’t mean it’s written in stone. As brilliant as the words are, they are probably not from My lips. Not sacrosanct. Revise.
  4. Remember the month of April to keep it holy. Observe the daily ritual. Write like your life depends on it. Or don’t. It’s your life.
  5. Honor thy creative gifts. Let them rain for forty days and forty nights. Let them wander the desert for 40 years. Let them move like the breath of God over the diaspora of the blank page.
  6. Thou shalt murder thy darlings. Those turns of phrase you love, that make you sound clever. So very clever.
  7. Thou shalt not steal unless said theft is acknowledged by epigraph, asterisk, footnote, or a few words mumbled into a mic at the podium.
  8. Thou shalt use adverbs sparingly. Judiciously. Wisely. Or not at all.
  9. Covet thy neighbor’s ass and his wife’s. Commit them to the page — their tawny flanks and topaz eyes, their exotic childhoods rife with painful memories. They are concrete manifestations of the abstract in your life.
  10. Just as imagined begets real, real begets art, begets image, begets a thousand words. Let your words beget words.
 
 

 


Elaine Mintzer lives in Los Angeles. Her work has been published on Moontide Press poet-of-the-month page, Cultural Weekly, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Beloit Poetry Review, Panoplyzine, Slipstream Press, Silver Birch Press, Gyroscope Review, Last Call, Chinaski, and Lummox. Elaine’s first collection was Natural Selections (Bombshelter Press 2005).