As you, Dear Reader, may remember from my last posting, I have recently been flipping through a wide variety of books about poetry ISO writing prompts that are remotely useful to me. I did this for quite some time today. I am aware that I wasted precious poemwriting time doing so. Near the end of my frantic flipping, I turned to a book that I’ve used time and time again: The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. Instead of following one of the many exercises in the book, however, I decided to appropriate some of the book’s sentences, phrases, and words into my poem for today.
(The work of art I’ve used in today’s poemlogue was created by Ellen Burgin and is entitled The Poet in Me Licks the Poet in You.)
The Poet Alone May Find
Pretend you’ve never been told anything.
[and pretend you've never read this poem!]
April 9, 2008 at 11:00 pm |
Did you say BISQUE? Like the fabulous bisque found at CCK?
Seriously though, I like this… you’ve become my muse.
April 10, 2008 at 8:07 am |
I’m glad to hear you don’t have much success w/ prompts–I always assumed they were an expedient to deal with the fact that there are way, way more spots in creative writing classes than people with any poetic talent or vocation. If random people could sign up to use the accelerator at CERN, then someone would have to think up ‘particle physics experiment prompts’ to give them something to do without hurting themselves.
One of Nabokov’s novels contains a ‘famous American poem’ that is actually a bunch of iambic-pentameter fragments from _Moby Dick_.
April 11, 2008 at 6:11 am |
Roy! Well, hello! Of course I had to look up CERN, and of course I must agree with you. I’m a strong advocate of the freewrite over the writing prompt. And the writing prompt that causes one to think in different manners over the writing prompt that instructs one to think about one’s own feelings — but that might just be because of my own issues concerning emotion.
April 11, 2008 at 9:17 am |
I love this. The first time I read it, though, I read the first line as “Pretend you’ve never been untold anything.” I now ask for permission for theft, lovely Zel.
April 11, 2008 at 12:11 pm |
Permission granted, lovely Viv! And when I was reading your post, I first read your reading of the first line as “Pretend you’ve never been untold.” So I am totally going to use THAT reading.
How can we possibly be so brilliant? How can the universe take it? How? How?