I have poetry group next week, and I haven’t had a poem to bring in a long, long time. I’m not a very consistent writer–sometimes I’ll write several poems in a month, sometimes none for several months–right now I’m on the downhill side of several months. I’d sure like to have SOMEthing by Tuesday.
So…I need an assignment. A list of several words would do. Or an evocative line or image might do it. Anything to jumpstart the creative writing battery.
Anyone? And of course, maybe some other stalled poets will be inspired, and post their poems here too…
No, no, no. This isn’t homework. I’m 39 years old, for heaven’s sake. I don’t get graded on this stuff.
I’m a poet. With whatever poets call it when they get writer’s block. I need something evocative, a writing exercise, not a poem written by someone else. There are books on the market full of writing exercises, but this is more fun–more immediate, if you will.
We did something similar once before. I’ll have to go search for the thread.
I’m just tired of taking muffins instead of poems. I think they’re on to me.
There’s always the old standby poetry-writing exercise: write a sestina. If you want to make it especially challenging, go up to six random people and get them each to give you one of the line-ending words. Or find some other way of randomly generating the words.
Just don’t read Dana Gioia’s “My Confessional Sestina” before starting out .
It’s a beginning, at least. A little wordier than is typical for me, but that’s typically what happens when I’m stuck. I’ll hone it down a bit over the next couple of days.
Wanna see? I don’t know how many of the words I used…just wrote them all down and had at.
REUNION
For that brief week in December, the household
pinwheeled around the kitchen, the unpolished kitchen table
filled with food—persimmon pudding wrapped in foil,
loaves of cheap sliced bread, a single blue-striped
bowl filled with improbable, sweet cherries. Everyone
was home—my brother back from the Army, so shorn
that he became a stranger when he slept, my sister
back from a ruined and undiscussed marriage, even
the cousins from Butte arrived to sleep on the floor
of my bedroom. We talked late into the darkness, feeling
the high angled ceiling of my upstairs room float
further into rolling darkness as the house grew quieter
around us. Outside, the moon was huge. Outside, the bone-
white sycamores stretched toward something no one,
not even Leslie, the witchy one, could discern. We wrote
terrible poetry about love, and wept as we whispered it aloud.
On the last night, we decided that we were all still
virgins. Technically, at least—even Karen. Early
the next morning, I woke to my lie and sleepy
warmth of my cousin Lisa against my back—Lisa,
who in eighth grade had broken the nose of a boy
who shoved his hand up her dress. Had I ever
been brave? I couldn’t remember. Outside,
the early light caught on shards of river ice, and
a part of me still stood
stunned and bleeding on a wooded riverbank.
In my warm, sleeping room I watched the shadows
slip to the floor, the last day of safety beginning
to wane, I whispered to my own pale face
reflected in the mirror, come back,
come back, I need you.
[QUOTE=bodypoetI’d sure like to have SOMEthing by Tuesday.
So…I need an assignment. A list of several words would do. Or an evocative line or image might do it.[/QUOTE]
Alright, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to write a sonnet in Shakespearian form: an apparent love poem that is actually an allegory for the recent US Presidential election.
