Running Errands
Lunchtime in Spring
Lesson: Choose an object and paint its portrait using only images to describe it.
Sweet Apple
Green wax encased in glass
Cylindrical and stout
Solid the color of lime where it’s cool
A bright flame dances in place
above a deep dark emerald pool
that burns to the touch
Lesson: Title as Catalyst to the poem. Ex: The (Image) of (Abstraction)
The Sole of Vengeance
It was love at first sight
Do you remember
The sun’s rays beaming through your window.
Bewitched by your beauty I stopped in my tracks
and caressed your supple skin.
The comfort I felt with you was instant
A perfect fit.
Our destinies intertwined like silk lace
How could I have known the pain you’d cause...
It wasn’t long before you no longer supported me
Like you promised weeks before
Squeezing me
from heel to toe
Until I could take no more.
Thankfully I walked away before it was too late
Or did I
The pain still runs through my body
The blisters are still there
But you don’t care.
Are you there?
Bloom
Carpet the color of dirt, paper-thin windows and blank barricades staring back at me
I wrote you, unsure of what you’d say,
hopeful your words would set me free.
Sirens screaming engines rumbling muffled voices from inside the walls
I listened to what you had to say for the first time.
Imagining somewhere with sparkling swimming pools, colorful cocktails
And silence
Forgotten office spaces and phone cables crisscrossing the sky
Desperate and unsure.
Your answer awoke me from a sleep decades long
Excited, determined and full of hope.
“We spend more time in our homes than traveling,” you said.
“Home is not an expense, it’s sanctuary.”
“How much more are you willing to pay
To have the things you want in your home?”
A lot.
Home now
Thanks to you.
With no desire to get away.
Lesson: Breaking Good (My breaks) |
From Macbeth (Shakespeare's breaks) |
|
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. |
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. |
Lesson: The Found Poem (poem-ify prose)
Chicken Katzu is a Japanese version of what
English-speaking Westerners might call a chicken cutlet. A boneless chicken breast
Coated with bread crumbs and pan-fried.
Schnitzel in Germany, Escalope in France, Cotoletta in Italy.
Each of which prepares cutlets in its own style.
Some use more oil than others, some pound the breast thinner, others don’t pound the breast at all.
This recipe calls for Panko.
Japanese-style bread crumbs which are drier, flakier and absorb
Less oil than regular bread crumbs.
Fried in just a quarter-inch of oil. The result is crunchy on the outside, moist and tender on the inside.
If you like a crispy chicken cutlet
This is for you.
English-speaking Westerners might call a chicken cutlet. A boneless chicken breast
Coated with bread crumbs and pan-fried.
Schnitzel in Germany, Escalope in France, Cotoletta in Italy.
Each of which prepares cutlets in its own style.
Some use more oil than others, some pound the breast thinner, others don’t pound the breast at all.
This recipe calls for Panko.
Japanese-style bread crumbs which are drier, flakier and absorb
Less oil than regular bread crumbs.
Fried in just a quarter-inch of oil. The result is crunchy on the outside, moist and tender on the inside.
If you like a crispy chicken cutlet
This is for you.
Lesson: Write a poem using the last words in an existing poem
|
Dr. Seuss:
I can read on a boat. I can read with a goat. I can read on a train. I can read in the rain. I can read with a fox. I can read in a box. I can read with a mouse. I can read in a house. I can read here or there Or anywhere. |
Me:
From the pier I see a man in a boat. He's short and gray with a beard like a goat. His coat has a curiously long rubber train. Perhaps it's to whether an oncoming rain. The only soul out there, he's smart as a fox. He's sure today's catch will flow out of his box. To keep others from knowing, he'll be quiet as a mouse. Dragging his bounty back to his house. Until then, he sits, waiting patiently there. Ocean perfectly still, not a bite anywhere. |
Poetry Resources
Poetry Tools
The Line - Often marked by some kind of effect. So, not necessarily the same as a sentence. It's broken at a line break - a signature tool in the poet’s toolkit. You break for sound, for sense, for visual effect, for shape, or a mix of several. Not necessarily for meaning, like a normal sentence does. See: Gwendolyn Brooks' We Real Cool.
The Stanza - A "paragraph" ends when the thought of what's being said is complete. Stanzas, however, are separated for sound effect; the thought can carry through several stanzas. The space between Stanzas is called the Stanza Break and it's important to acknowledge that silence.
Together, Line and Stanza orchestrate a poem’s musicality and flow of information.
Enjambment - When a line doesn't end with punctuation, but rather "ends" with the beginning of the next line. This can occur with Stanzas too!
Images are typically understood as anything you can literally touch (fur, sandpaper, mud), taste (mint, salt, gingerbread) see (cloud, barn, fire), hear (bark, laughter, roar), smell (garlic, body odor, fresh cut grass).
Abstractions are those things for which we have cultural symbols (a clock for “time,” a heart for “love”) but no image. If you think about it, using a heart to represent "love" is something a greeting card company told you, but it's not really what love looks like. Same with "time." So abstractions are OPEN to INTERPRETATION.
Other examples of abstraction: enlightenment, beauty, honor, success, appeal.
Metaphor - Colliding 2 different things to enrich what's being described.
Bad: The shark was a fish.
Better: The shark was a torpedo heading straight toward the fallen surfer.
The Stanza - A "paragraph" ends when the thought of what's being said is complete. Stanzas, however, are separated for sound effect; the thought can carry through several stanzas. The space between Stanzas is called the Stanza Break and it's important to acknowledge that silence.
Together, Line and Stanza orchestrate a poem’s musicality and flow of information.
Enjambment - When a line doesn't end with punctuation, but rather "ends" with the beginning of the next line. This can occur with Stanzas too!
Images are typically understood as anything you can literally touch (fur, sandpaper, mud), taste (mint, salt, gingerbread) see (cloud, barn, fire), hear (bark, laughter, roar), smell (garlic, body odor, fresh cut grass).
Abstractions are those things for which we have cultural symbols (a clock for “time,” a heart for “love”) but no image. If you think about it, using a heart to represent "love" is something a greeting card company told you, but it's not really what love looks like. Same with "time." So abstractions are OPEN to INTERPRETATION.
Other examples of abstraction: enlightenment, beauty, honor, success, appeal.
Metaphor - Colliding 2 different things to enrich what's being described.
Bad: The shark was a fish.
Better: The shark was a torpedo heading straight toward the fallen surfer.
Notes:
"The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
Prose Poetry: A prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry. See Amy Lowell’s “Bath,” “Metals Metals” by Russell Edson, “Information” by David Ignatow, and Harryette Mullen’s “[Kills bugs dead.]” Browse more prose poems.
Flash Fiction:
Free Verse: Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition. Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman explored the possibilities of nonmetrical poetry in the 19th century. Since the early 20th century, the majority of published lyric poetry has been written in free verse. See the work of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. Browse more free-verse poems.
Billy Collins:
I think a love of language and a sense of gratitude would be two ingredients in the recipe for making a poet. And laziness! Not being able to write more than half an hour a day. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in a windowpane.
Instapoetry:
Prose Poetry: A prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry. See Amy Lowell’s “Bath,” “Metals Metals” by Russell Edson, “Information” by David Ignatow, and Harryette Mullen’s “[Kills bugs dead.]” Browse more prose poems.
Flash Fiction:
- 8 Flash Fiction Prompts
- Vignette vs. Short Story vs. Flash Fiction
- Characteristics
- 8 Tips
- Walt Whitman's Flash Fiction
- Twitter Flash Fiction
- The New Yorker Flash Fiction
Free Verse: Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition. Matthew Arnold and Walt Whitman explored the possibilities of nonmetrical poetry in the 19th century. Since the early 20th century, the majority of published lyric poetry has been written in free verse. See the work of William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. Browse more free-verse poems.
Billy Collins:
- I try to start the poem conversationally.
- The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going.
- I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done. If the whole thing doesn’t come out at once, it doesn’t come out at all. I just pitch it.
- I force all my students to memorize a minimum of fourteen lines of any poem. Other students will memorize thirty or forty lines with ease and pleasure.
- Your voice is always inside of you, and you find it by releasing things into your work that you have inside. I grew by allowing aspects of myself that I had previously excluded into the poetry. I got to the point where my life got into my poetry.
I think a love of language and a sense of gratitude would be two ingredients in the recipe for making a poet. And laziness! Not being able to write more than half an hour a day. While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in a windowpane.
- Exercise your imaginative freedom, because in a poem you have the greatest imaginative freedom possible in language, amazing speculation and fanciful imaginative realms. You have no allegiance to plot, consistency, plausibility, character development, chronology. You can fly. Clear the trees at the end of the runway, and off you go. Take advantage of the giddy imaginative liberty that poetry offers.
- I want the reader to be in the sidecar, ready. Then off we go. Then we can take a ride from what seemed to be a hospitable and friendly environment into an environment that’s perhaps disorienting, manipulative, or a little off-balancing. I want to start in a very familiar place and end up in a strange place. Haruki Murakami does this! The familiar place is often a comic place, and the strange place is indescribable except by reading the poem again. I love Patrick Kavanaugh’s sense that tragedy is merely undeveloped comedy. I feel there’s a time to be clear and a time to be mysterious in a poem. Poems that fail for me are often poems in which the poet is being mysterious about something that should be clear, or simplifying something that should be left mysterious. It’s a matter of knowing what cards should be turned over and what cards should be kept face down. Poems that turn too many cards over don’t respect the mysteriousness of life, and poems that turn over no cards are a game not really worth playing. If you’ve written a poem about your brother who is in the hospital undergoing surgery, well, tell us that. Why should that be a secret? Tell us the circumstances of the poem. But how you feel about this brother you’ve always felt competitive with, angry with, how you feel about him being close to death now—should remain mysterious. Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory!
- Paris Review interview
Instapoetry:
