1)  Sit before a window.

2)  Look carefully at everything in view.

3)  Write a poem about what you see.
 
 

My Love is Like a Doornail

Make a list of worn-out, cliche comparisons:  "my love is like a rose," "dead as a doornail," "white as snow," "cold as ice," "the sands of time," "happy as a lark," "old as the hills," etc.  Include at least fifteen.  You might begin your list at the beginning of the semester, and add to it whenever you hear such cliches in your daily life.

After you've made your list, write a short prose piece in which you regroup the items of comparison:  "happy as ice," "cold as a rose," "blue as time."  Jumble the worn-out expressions, feeling free to sometimes make little sense.  Write simply for the pleasure of making the comparisons fresh.
 
 

Eating Poetry

Considering Kinnel's "Blackberry Eating," write a paragraph or poem about some single, rich physical experience, using language to strongly suggest the actions and sensations of that experience.  Or, after looking at Roethke's "Root Celler," try your hand instead at a "cold," "hot," "scratchy," "wet,' or "smooth" poems.  Choose one sensation and make your language mimic it through sound.
 
 

buh-DUM, buh-DUM buh-DUM buh-DUM buh-DUM

Write a full page of lines, double-spaced, in iambic pentameter.  These lines do not necessarily need to connect in meaning to one another, nor do they necessarily need to make sense in and of themselves.  Simply practice the iambic pattern (five iambs per line).

When you're done, try writing a real poem in iambic pentameter.

(Ok-- you wonder how you ought to start?
Just think in terms of lines that sound like this.)
 
 

Lound and Sanguage

Write a paragraph or poem full of nonesense words or portmanteau words, as in "Jabberwocky" or "A Nosty Fright."  Experiment with the sheer sound of words, feeling free to be playful, extravagant, illogical.  Consider transposing letters in word groups, combining words to form new ones, or distorting words slightly to form interesting, intentional malapropisms.
 
 

Oral Fixation

One way to sharpen your attention to detail, sound, and pattern in a poem is to memorize it.  As with the "Tracks" idea above, you can't really know the benefit of this exercise without just doing it.  For notebook credit then, select a poem at least fifteen lines long from our text, memorize it, and then recite it aloud to the class.  (Reciting aloud also has its benefits.)
 
 

The Line Breaks in Each of the Following Free Verse Poems Have Been Removed

The line breaks in each of the following free verse poems have been removed, and each poem written out as a prose paragraph.  Without changing any of the poems' wording or punctuation, reinsert the line breaks yourself, experimenting with different arrangements.  Try each one first with all short lines, then with all long lines, for instance.  Try end-stopped as well as enjambed lines, or try breaking the lines in places where, in reading the poem aloud, you would naturally stop to take a breath.  Provide breaks which help reinforce or mirror the meaning of the lines themselves, or which otherwise contribute to the poem's feeling or sense.  See if you can adhere consistently, within each poem, to a single principle of lineation, whether rhythmic, syntactic, syllabic, visual, or otherwise--though you might even try breaking the lines completely at random, just to see what the result will be.

Check with me in class for copies of the original poems--to see how the authors themselves broke their lines.
 

Poet #1:

There is always something to be made of pain.  Your mother knits.  She turns out scarves in every shade of red.  They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm while she married over and over, taking you along.  How could it work, when all those years she stored her widowed heart as though the dead come back.  Now wonder you are the way you are, afraid of blood, your women like one brick wall after another.

Watching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautiful and why you do not love but cut yourself, shaving like a blind man.  I think you let me stare so you can turn against yourself with greater violence, needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away scornfully and without hesitation until I see you correctly, as a man bleeding, not the reflection I desire.

My family slept those level miles but like a bell rung deep till dawn I drove down an aisle of sound, nothing real but in the bell, past the town where I born.  Once you cross a land like that you own your face more:  what the light struck told a self; every rock denied all the rest of the world.  We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate--My state still dark, my dream too long to tell.
 
 

There are songs too wide for sound.  There are quiet places where something stopped a long time ago and the days began to open their mouths toward nothing but the sky.  We live in place of the many who stir only if we listen, only because the living live and call out.  I am ready as all of us are who wake at night:  we become rooms for whatever almost is.  It speaks in us, trying.  And even if only by a note like this, we answer.

Jazzing Up the Jejune

Choose one of your already "completed" poems and, knowing that it will still be there when you've finished this exercise, plough under the language and fill the lines back in with whatever odd, zaney, surprising, arbitrary diction that comes to mind.  With the help of a thesaurus, revise the diction (any or all of the main nouns, verbs and adjectives) to make it new and more vivid or imaginative.  You might arbitrarily choose a single page from a thesaurus, and force yourself to use words only from that page, even if they make little, at times, logical sense.  Alternately, you might fill in the poem with diction which is new but not entirely random:  in place of words denoting or connoting happiness, pleasure or peace, for instance, you might fill in words having to do consistently with depression, pain, or violence.  You don't necessarily have to keep this revised version of the poem.
 
 

This and That

Write a poem about how your mother and father met.
 
 

This and That (II)

Write a poem about chlorophyll.
 
 

This and That (III)

Write a poem about the North Dakota sky.
 
 

This and That (IV)

Write a poem about the Eleusinian Mysteries.
 
 
 
 

Back to front page of Harmonious Confusion