Poets: Prepare to Start Your Engines - Poetry Pre-Writing Tip

Note in the title I did not say START your engines. We have ten days left until the “big” day appears.

Car racing is part of the life blood of the family I was raised in and is even showing up in parts of the next generation of Jordans. When I was a young girl, I would spend hours and hours and hours in the garage, handing my brother, the race driver, tools. You know, sort of like a doctor asks for scalpels.

All that gorgeous, seemingly without effort grace on the race track doesn’t start when they raise the flag, it starts long before, when the drivers work on their cars and finally warm up their cars during the days before the big race.

I am going to share with you one of my favorite poetry writing warm ups.

I use my old fashioned notebook and simply write lines of poetry. Not poems, but lines of poetry, sometimes smoothed together into several lines, but usually just lines.

Because I love the haiku form, I often write lists of five syllables and lists of seven syllables and then I randomly put them together.

This has two effects: one is it sharpens my observations and helps me write clearly and concisely with carefully chosen words, it also allows me to the space to see the grace in simply showing up at the page to warm up.

Sometimes those non-effort haiku have actually been better than when I was trying.

I just saw a play, so I am going to revisit some of the scenes in a list of five syllables:

Stripes of glitter

His ears were not his

Gold dust  all around

Thees, thous, Entreats, huh?

Only one in white?

Bookish Helena

“Hermia” now blonde

Thin Lysander

Bottom stole the show

After Puck, he died

And now, how about some seven syllable lines?

Demetrius, more wispy

Dead Poets society

Plays in my head while I watch

Love the feathers in that crown

Feathers, can they sing like birds?

Pixie like face glitter smile

Down home music strums, struts, pounds

Yee haw, let’s try some moonshine

Animals always woo us

 + + + + +

The first time I made up this exercise I was sitting in a coffee shop, just writing what I saw, lines like:

Red deck sneakers squeak

Mommy takes baby

Baby takes Mommy

Purr, computers, purr….

Espresso smells so….

Who does she wait for?

Textbooks in a pile

Awkward laugh hovers

“Forgot my back pack!”

It is more fun than it looks – I guarantee it.

I also guarantee that warming up through using this very simple exercise over the next few days will assist you in being more attentive and writing more concretely, with more details and fewer “fluff” words.

If I happen to see one of you at a coffee shop scribbling in your notebooks or pretending to text on your phone, I’ll know what you are doing. I won’t tell a soul!

-- Julie Jordan Scott

Poetry Writing Prompt #17 - Bringing a Place to Life Via Your Poem

In Rainer Rilke’s “Diaries of a Young Poet” (not his more often sited “Letters”) he was making careful notes to his lady love, describing his travels as he ventured into Italy.

Please note Rilke's technique:

1.        He considered his audience: he is writing especially for an audience of one. A woman he is in love with who highly values the words he is writing. She is hungry for rich, ripe narrative.

2. Consider his writing voice.  Can you hear his voice and his heartbeat as he writes for his
  “audience of one? Keep your voice authentic no matter how large – or intimate – your “audience.”

3. Consider the overall metaphor.  What does it speak to of these two cities?  How does Rilke make these places feel like people?

The Words of Rilke:

“Florence, unlike Venice, does not disclose herself to the casual passer-by.  In Venice the bright, cheerful palaces are so trusting and talkative, and they linger like beautiful women forever by the mirror of the canal, wondering whether people ever see the aging in them. They are happy in their brilliance and have probably never desired anything other than to be beautiful and to display and enjoy all the advantages of this possession. Therefore, even the most fleeting person goes away from them enriched, richer at least by the festive fronts and their incomparable golden smile, which at every hour of the day remains awake in one nuance or another, and at night gives way to that almost over sweet, surrendering melancholy that has found a place in the Venetian memories of even the hastiest traveler through Italy.  

"Not so in Florence: the palaces raise their mute foreheads toward the stranger in almost hostile
fashion, and a wary defiance lingers around the niches and gates, and even the brightest sun does
not succeed in dispelling its last traces.  It is a strange sensation, especially amid the open life
of the modern streets where the people celebrate their festivals and shout their business, this dense fortified suspiciousness of the old bourgeois palaces, of the broad gigantic bourgeous arches with their eternal somberness embedded fossil-like in the folds of the mighty ashlars." 

Do you see how he makes these places into characters?

Poetry Writing Prompt: Consider a place you feel strong feelings about, whether you can’t stand the place or love the place deeply. Jot some notes about those distinctive characteristics you love or dislike and make them come alive as characters or as intriguing backdrops for your poem.

Your task is simply this: bring this place to life via your poem.

Word Prompt: Name of the Place of Your Poem

Sentence Prompt: “Name of place does” or “Name of place doesn’t”

As always, use these as possible leaping off points. If your writing moves in a completely different direction, be grateful! I am pleased when I see any of your poems posted, even if I don’t comment right away.

Also, please don’t feel there are any “hafta’s” or “gotta’s” attached with OctPoWriMo. We would rather you write sometimes than no times. We understand busy lives: there are no rights, no wrongs, no “only this way or that.”

Feel the freedom of poetry and love your words into life.

Oodles of Word-Love,

Julie

Links:

Background on the circumstances of the creation of Letters to a Young Poet along with excerpts from the website, Silence Speaks.

Rainer Rilke "Letters to a Young Poet". This link takes you to a 21 page PDF that you may print for free. I believe this is a must read for all creative people. You may like to seek other translations as well. In fact, after you read this you may want to go to your local bookstore and compare the different translations you find there.