Boomer Poetry: Writing Prompts for Seniors and Adults Who Want to Write Poetry: May 2013

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Poetry Prompt: A Springboard Poem

The hardest part of writing a poem every day is getting started. One way to get started is to have the first line already there and waiting for you. I do this several ways. I keep a notebook where I just write lines I like and life form books I’m reading. It could be the first line of every poem in a book I just picked up. It could be incomplete phrases that I just found neat-o-mosquito.

Pick a line that gets you to thinking or feeling and then write the rest of the poem. When you revise you could revise the line lifted, or maybe leave it out all together.

Here are a sampling of lines that you can use, or pick something on your own. Don’t over think this, just write freely. Try to start writing and don’t stop to reread or revise for 5 minutes. Then you can start rewriting and perfecting.

SAMPLE LINES:

· It’s like the breeze is looking for something lost

· Somebody somewhere is always in pain

· When I don’t know what to do I know

· A lot can be said about miscommunication

· Eight crows huddled in the grass

· The sun is seen daily, but not studied.

· Some words are as sharp as shards of glass

· Sometimes a miracle is not what happens, but

· Can a slob be a perfectionist?

· You’re never the person you started out being.

· A dock is a bridge with no ambition.

· I’m spending more and more time trying to remember

· I used to wonder what it was like to be

· I had a knack for going too far

· The six o’clock news surrounded my house with fear

· I want to do nothing and do it with gusto.

· Faith is the paperbag I breathe into when

· My life was a hat filled with slips of paper

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO POST YOUR WORK AS A REPLY TO THE PROMPT.

Friday, May 24, 2013

Is Rhyme Obsolet? by Tex Norman

Is Rhyme Obsolet? by Tex Norman

I recently got this message in my email from someone named Matthew.

In my experience, if you rhyme in a poem, no one takes you seriously. I don't understand these brainwashed people.
Are we to believe there are no more Poe's, or Frost's, or Shakespeare's, or all kinds of great poets throughout the centuries?

A good lyrical poem is very hard to come by, but that does not mean they don't exist?

I have a difficult time believing that "real critics" take any NEW lyrical, rhyming poems seriously. I would need proof to feel differently.

I wrote a response:

Dear Matthew: In your note to me you seem to be either frustrated or upset. I think you are when you say that many people do not take your work seriously if it rhymes. I am not sure it is fair to brand all of those people as "brainwashed." When a majority of people accept something it may mean that they are just going along with the majority, they are on the bandwagon, in step. racing toward a cliff like a bunch of lemmings. But any label applied to a large group is usually a prejudice. Some of those people who prefer "free verse" may just prefer it for some reason.

Are good rhyming poems being written today?  Yes.  Are there recognized contemporary poets using rhyme today?  Yes.

One mistake some people make is assuming that because a poem is called Free Verse that it is free from rhyme.  End rhyme is often missing, or used only occasionally, but internal rhyme may actually be used with abundance.  Free Verse often makes use of many traditionally accepted poetic techniques.

I continue to think about rhyme even after responding to Matthew.  I remember a couple of lines by Theodore Roethke:

I am the final thing
A man learning to sing.

I remember reading A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko in which the Russian poet said that he wrote his verse using rhyme because he liked the verse to sing.

When Robert Frost said that free verse was like playing tennis with the net down he was speaking to the challenges that come with fixed form poetry and the writing within the parameters of the fixed form has an aspect of fun attached to it.

Nevertheless, if you scan Poet's Market you will see, over and over, literary magazine editors saying they do not want to receive any rhyming poetry.  Why is rhyme less of a factor in most contemporary poetry, or poetry deemed by most as serious poetry?

Rhyme Driven

Sometimes you will see a criticism of a rhyming poem that it is "rhyme driven."  What does that mean?  Well, if a poem is rhyme driven it means that the line is heading for the next rhyme.  The trip matters less than arriving at that perfect rhyme at the end of the line.  When the whole reason for the poem is to reach the rhymes, that poem is rhyme driven.

Poets using rhyme came to realize that they were sometimes prevented from saying what they want to say, because the rhymes were not there.  If they establish a pattern of rhyme and want to stay consistent with that pattern they end up not saying what they originally intended to say.  Or if they say what they wanted to say they had to torture the syntax.  A line may be considered tortured, if there is even the slightest whiff of odd word order.  Consider one of the great poems of American literature. Let's look at the opening two lines from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost:

Whose woods these are, I think I know
His house is in the village though

Wouldn't we normally say:

I think I know who owns these woods

It is very common for the word order to alter in order to force the line to rhyme. But word order alterations are also used by free verse poets. Take for example the opening two lines from former Poet Laureate William Stafford's powerful poem, Traveling Through The Dark:

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

In this free verse example the natural order of the words is clearly altered. Most of us would say,

Driving through the darkness I found a dead
deer on the edge of the Wilson River road

Most of us would call driving driving and not traveling.  Most of us would say we came upon a dead deer not a deer dead.

In the Frost poem the word order is altered to make the rhymes fit, and they do fit very well.  In the Stafford poem the word order is altered to simulate that slight surprise you get when you come upon something dead.  The first line ends with deer, and the beginning of line two is dead.  The altered word order, and by separating the words on different lines gives you a tiny unexpected shock.

Am I saying that altering the natural word order is bad when it is done for rhyme and acceptable when it is done in free verse for some intended effect?

Well, no.  I love both the Frost poem and the Stafford poem.  Poetry is not natural. Poetry is not the same thing as natural conversation.  I think we want our poems to elevate language.  We want poetry to have a density to it.  In a poem we want, at least sometimes we want, levels of meaning.  We like the words to have multiple meanings and all (or most) of these different meanings to apply to the meaning of the poem.

All poetry alters the natural way of using the language, but better poetry tends to alter or manipulate the words without having that alteration stand out.  We don't seem to like it as well if the alterations of the phrases and sentences call attention to themselves.

Rhyming Nouns

In some inflected languages (like Italian) where the word endings change based upon their grammatical usage, you are just going to find oodles and gobs of rhymes. Translating these rhyming poems into English and matching the rhyme scheme can be difficult and sometimes impossible.   In English we have a problem of having fewer rhyming words, and so we end up rhyming a bunch of nouns together (boy, joy, annoy) which tends to force us to put our rhymes at the end of each line.  So you are reading the poem, and you are coming to a near full stop at the end of each line. This pause at the end of each line causes the poem to have a sign-song, nursery rhyme quality to even a serious work.

Take this corny, just made up example:

Standing by her grave I sigh
and wonder why she had to die
the driver he was young and drunk
a careless no good stupid punk
and now she rests beneath the sod
and I stand here questioning my God.

I intended the subject matter to be serious, but obviously the lines come to a full stop and there is the rhyme waiting and obviously a noun. It just doesn't have the effect on a reader that the subject matter would have sought.

Enjambment

Enjambment means that the sentence moves on to the next line with little or no pause at the line's end. In English, while rhymes are less frequent, we do have words that pair up when we look for other parts of speech. A noun might rhyme with a participle, or a verb with a pronoun, or an adjective with a preposition. This provides some interesting possibilities, and it tends to move the poem along forcing the reader to read past the end of the line without stopping to saver the rhyme.

Consider the Keats poem: Endymion (a poem, like Chaucer's, in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets) which demonstrate how enjambment works:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and asleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.(ll .1-5)

In line 2 we end with the words will never and that is a stand alone phrase.  The mind is asking, "never what?"  The whole phrase, will never pass.  The word never is an adverb.  By mixing things up and rhyming nouns and using adverbs, prepositions, nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives and nouns to rhyme with one another you get lines that flow.  You avoid lines that end with a big stop while the rhyme yells out "look at me."

AS for me, I both agree and disagree.  I don't enjoy serious poetry that sounds forced, and trivialized by its use of rhyme.  One of the more comman creative forms using rhyme today is rap lyrics.  In one rap by Eminem the writer/performer attempts to tell a serious story about his marriage and his feelings for his child.  Here is a short exerpt from one of Eminem's songs.

I keep having this dream, I'm pushin' Hailie on the swing
She keeps screaming, she don't want me to sing
"You're making Mommy cry, why? Why is Mommy crying?"
Baby, Daddy ain't leaving no more, "Daddy you're lying
"You always say that, you always say this is the last time
"But you ain't leaving no more, Daddy you're mine"
She's piling boxes in front of the door trying to block it
"Daddy please, Daddy don't leave, Daddy - no stop it!"

When I'm Gone by Eminem

This is an autobiographical work, and it is serious.  The lyrics go on to describe a performer who is tortured by guilt for being "on the road" and away from his child.  The lyrics include the attempted suicide of his exwife, and the turmoil of his daughter's life.  This is a serious work, but it doesn't work as a poem.  Just reading the words seems to trivialize the content.

Now it is not fair to take a song lyric or a rap lyric and expect it to stand alone as a work of poetry.  Some song lyrics can stand alone, but usually the lyric is central to the music it was designed for, and what might not work with words alone, may work out perfectly when accompanied by music.

So let's look at serious rhyming poetry by famous and admired writers.

First look at an excerpt from Longfellow's poem The Wreck of the Hesperus:

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

            The Wreck of the Hesperus By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

No one can deny that a ship sung in a hurricane is a serious topic, especially for the sailors that died and the grieving family members left behind, but this poem just seems silly to me.  Notice that all the rhymes are either nouns or pronouns.

Let's check out The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy.  Thomas Hardy's fiction is very powerful even for today's readers, and he is clearly a skilled poet.  In this poem the speaker is contemplating a man killed on the battle field, and noting that under different circumstances the man he killed might have easily turned into a pal, a nice guy he would be happy to share a beer with, but because of war things turned out very differently.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

            from The Man he Killed by Thomas Hardy

Write What you Want The Way You Want

Does all this mean that a serious poet can only use rhyme for satire, humor, and children's poetry, but never for serious works?  Can we never again have a Robert Frost style poet recognized and admired by the masses?

I don't know.  I like to think that a great work of poetry, or a great work of any sort of art, will be recognized by the world.  I fear this is just something I want.  I believe there are great writers, and artists everywhere, and they gain fame and admiration because they work hard for it, and they get lucky.  I believe there are fabulous artists who may be admired by a small group, but once they die their art fades into oblivion. Really, it is the nature of existence that we all eventually fade into oblivion.  There will be a time when no one remembers Shakespeare.  Of course this may not happen until all human beings have been wiped off the earth, but the conclusion of life on earth is to die and this planet will become a spinning ball of dust similar to Mars. Oblivion comes to us all; it is just a matter of timing.  If oblivion is unavoidable, then why not write what you like, and write it the way you want to write it.  Creativity is interesting and almost exclusively the purview of human beings.  When we create we celebrate human life, all life and our place within all that exists.

Norman's Poetry Boot Camp by Tex Norman

To be a poet you have to write poetry. Maybe you need a lot of other things, but you can have all the other things (whatever they might be) and if you aren't writing poetry you aren't a poet. You may have the soul of a poet. You might have poetic inclinations. You may be a poetry lover, but unless you are writing poetry you can't be a poet, not even a lousy one.

I propose that you consider giving yourself a challenge, accepting the challenge, and completing the challenge. Make a commitment, that beginning today, you are going to write at least one poem, and that you will continue writing a poem a day, every day, missing no days, for at least the next 30 days.

Don't say, "I'll start on the first day of the month and write a poem a day for the rest of that month."

Why wait? What are you waiting for? If it is March 15th, then write a poem a day until April 15th. Then go drop your taxes in the mail and come back home and write your final poem entitled: Ode to Money.

What if I miss a day?

Well, what if you do? So what. You set yourself a standard of a poem a day for 30 days. If you miss a day it means you didn't meet your standard.

Just to help, if you need the prompts, here are 30 prompts to keep you writing for the next 30 days. Write. Be a poet. Don't wait for inspiration to strike.

1) Pick something from current events and write about it. You can write a poem. It can be a poem about a news story, a political commentary, or maybe even some current topic like an Ode to the Internet, or an Elegy for an Underwood typewriter.

2) Write a confrontation poem. Think of a confrontation you had, or one related to you that was especially memorable. Relate the confrontation in first, second, or third person. If it is remembered like, "I should have said. . ." then now is your chance. Say what you should have said, or what they should have said. You can provide a resolution, or leave the ending open-ended.

3) Take the phrase: Save it for a rainy day. Save what? How would it be saved? What good would come from having saved it, whatever it turns out to have been?

4) Try writing a season poem [Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn] Make the work evoke the selected season for you. Or write one poem with 4 sections, each a different season.

5) Write a poem about a big change in your routine. It happens to all of us. Changing jobs, going through a wedding prep, and event, surviving a traumatic incident, all such things change one's life. What you usually do you can't do.

6) Write about a series of big changes in your life that have been kicked off by a small change.

7) Write a poem about something that you think would make you happy. While living inFlorida a hurricane knocked out our electricity for over a week. Getting electricity at home again was something I thought would make me happy. For someone else, that may be a vacation trip to London, or a visit by a parent, or an adult child, or some imaginary gadget like a time machine, or a car that runs on grass clippings.

8) Write a poem that is, in some way, about food. Make the egg a protagonist, or perhaps food only makes a cameo appearance in a more humanly dominated work. You could even make food the bad guy, the antagonist.

9) Write a poem about finding something. It could be something fraught with memory that had been waiting in a drawer. It could be an old trophy in a closet, an old photograph in a box in the attic, or perhaps something like a sense of compassion, or a sense of humor. It can be funny, sad, mean, or mad. What do our things tell us about ourselves?

10) Write a "rant" poem. Writers feel strongly about things, and not ranting is what takes effort. In this poem, let your rant off the leash. Go off on politics, religion, global events, weather patterns, and if you have some road rage, well, it is just safer to let it go in incendiary verse.

11) Write a poem about marriage. It can be about your marriage, but it could be about someone else's marriage, or some imaginary couple's marriage, or the someday marriage of your newborn baby, or simply about the institution of marriage.. It can be pro-marriage; it can be anti-marriage; it can be pathetic whine on the topic of marriage.

12) For this week's poetry prompt, I'm also going to discuss an interesting poetic form called the cento. A cento is a poem composed of lines from other poets' poems. It's similar to the cut-up technique made famous by William S. Burroughs and others. The main difference is that a cento uses only lines from other poets, whereas the cut-up technique uses lines from any and every where.

I want you to go through your favorite poems and piece together your very own cento. The lines do not need to be popular or well known--but you should know where and who you're drawing from. The method that helped me was to find the lines and write them down first before trying to make something out of them. Later on, you can try this exercise on your own poems, especially ones where you might like a line or two but feel disappointed in the whole (I know I've written many that fit this description).

13) Write a dream poem. Until I got my C-PAP machine I hadn't had a dream in 30 years, now I have dreams, but only remember bits and pieces of them. If you can't remember any recent dreams, then try making it about a long ago remembered dream. In fact the old and unforgotten dream is probably best, because it has not been forgotten for a reason.

14) Write a poem with the title of "How to ____ (blank) ____ " where you use the title as the springboard for your poem.

You can insert whatever you wish into that blank and then go in any direction with the actual poem. My mother use to make a pie that I still remember fondly. But my poem "How to make mama's Mock Apple Pie"- doesn't have to be a recipe poem, although that might be fine, it could instead be about mama, or pie, or mocking things, or something completely different. As with all the Wednesday prompts, feel free to have fun with it and get creative.

15) Write a poem about the number of years you have lived [ 58, or 36] or about birthdays.

16) Pick an target audience and write a poem that aims at that target. Put the name of your audience in the title of your poem. Your audience can be dead or alive, real or imagined, general or specific.

17) Write a poem that involves a large crowd. A mass of stadium sports fans, or rock concert goers, or after a funeral church crowd. Be lost in the crowd, be the keynote speaker, be the leader of a mob, or be afraid of it. Write about a historical crowd and imagine what one or all those people were thinking.

18) Write a Vacation Poem. I don't vacation much. Remember, a poem can, and perhaps, often it should, be fiction. Write the poem as if you're going on vacation; or someone else is going on vacation; or maybe you live in a tourist town that is currently swamped with college spring-breakers.

19) Write an "invasion" poem. An army invading a Middle Eastern town, or a person breaches the walls of your heart, or your life, or some event that invades your brain, and changes your mind, a mind you felt was unchangeable on that subject. It could be roaches in your house, rats in your walls, or weeds in your flower bed. It could even be housing editions, or Starbucks, or street gangs.

20) Write a poem with the following title: The Reason I ____ (blank) ____. Try something you do that you have no clue as to why. Explore the possible reasons, and see where it leads you.

21) Write a letter poem. It can be a letter to a company, or someone from your past who is actually lost to you now, a letter to a historic figure, or a letter to your future self.

22) Think back to those Spoon River Anthology poems where people in graves rise up and give us a brief insight into their life, or how they died. Now do that for yourself. Write a poem about your own death. Or you could just imagine what dying might be like, or make some comment on after life, or lack thereof. The main thing I want, though, is that you focus on your own death--not someone else's.

23) Not only will you die, but everyone you love is also going to die. I will die and everyone I care about is going to die. Write a poem about the death of someone you loved who is now gone.

24) Not only will you die, but everyone you love is also going to die. I will die and everyone I care about is going to die. Write a poem about the death of someone you care about as if they were already dead. Don't show it to them, or at least disguise their identity.

25) Write a poem about getting older. You don't have to wait to be old to do this. If you weren't just born, you have been getting older. A 12 year old is no longer 10. A 30 year old person was once 18. It doesn't matter how old you are you are getting older, every single solitary second, with every beat of your heart. Have you ever heard an 8 year old talk about when they were younger? All of us can look back. And looking back can make us look forward, and hopefully to look at our NOW.

26) Write a list poem in which you list all the things that matter most to you. Remember that Broadway musical standard, These are a few of my favorite things? This can be serious, or funny, rhymes or perhaps you have the time and inclination to try a villanelle, a pantoum.

27) Write a poem about the weather. It doesn't have to be storms, but, of course it could be. Perhaps a particular sort of weather brings y or incorporates the weather into the poem. Whether you make it about a crazy storm or a cloudless summer day, you gotta give the weather report.

28) Write an occupational poem today. Write about a job. It could You be your own occupation or one you admire, or a job you can't figure out why anyone would do. It could be about the best job you ever had in your past. It could be the worst job you ever had. It doesn't have to be a story poem, it could be just what it felt like to do the work without commentary, or some sequence of events. .Or it could actually be a story poem, a funny story that is associated with a job? Babysitter, paper carrier, mucking out stalls, mowing yards anything can become inspiration or grist for a poem.

29) Write a one side of a phone call type poem. This is a poem where one person talks to another, but you only get the first person's words. You don't hear replies or questions. Albert Camus wrote an entire novel, The Fall, in this way. If you have trouble with this try writing a dialogue and then cut out one of the speakers, then play around and see what hints and implications can be made by allowing your reader to hear only one side.

"Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object" ~ Lies by Roger Fides

30) Write a NO APOLOGY poem. Anyone can beat themselves up with guilt and regret. Take something that you did that is perceived to be wrong, and defend yourself. Defend your actions. Take crap off of no one. Flatly refuse to take the blame. Shift the blame, or explain it away, or deny you had any part of it.