First, pick a human enterprise and write down ten associated verbs.
I'll have to continue this in separate posts because the software deletes blank lines in a way that wil make this less readable.
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Poetry Exercise | Forum
Wolfie
Jul 5 '21
I was listening to a podcast about Jeff Tweedy's book, "How to Write One Song." It described a poetry exercise that I decided to attempt.
Wolfie
Jul 5 '21
Next, pick a paragraph from any book or article, and select from that paragraph any ten nouns.
Wolfie
Jul 5 '21
Next, draw lines from nouns to verbs to create word-pairs that seem likely to be interesting.
Wolfie
Jul 5 '21
Finally, build a poem around these word-pairs. Don't be too rigid. The word-pairs can have other words in between them.
LUCY
She’s dead. We’re black-draped and tidy
at torso and hip but our eyes are bedraggled.
The casket grabs hold of our faces and
wrestles
them to the ground.
We’d cry “Uncle!” but the tomb chokes us
breathless. We gasp. That’s all that’s
left to us
of our powers of speech.
We leave and try to forget, but London,
her London, sucker-punches each of us
when we least expect it.
The city feels too full of too much
truth,
like Transylvania must have felt to those
who’d been
kneed in the gut by what the Count really
was,
the dead creature he was, against whom
none
could defend, as invincible as Lucy, victorious
corpse.
We try to play our money games but our attacks
are blocked by the lethargy of the slain.
The ship of our careers goes down in defeat.
Even going home just feels like a kick in the head.
She's dead.
talisman
Jul 5 '21
Was Lucy your aunt? Did she live in Transylvania? Did your ship anchored there, to the harbor of Transylvania?
