This week’s prompt was inspired
by an interview that Matthew Thorburn did with me for Ploughshares. I’ve always
enjoyed the process of interviewing and being interviewed, and the more probing
the questions, the better. The challenge this week is to interview yourself, to
ask yourself some thought-provoking questions and to turn those into a poem.
Guidelines:
1. Make a list of questions about
your work, your art, your relationships, and your personal life. Just make a
list of questions.
2. After you’ve complied a list
of questions (at least 10 because use all of them), answer each question in
writing.
3. Take a break for an hour or
two, more if you wish and, when you come back to your questions and answers,
read them carefully. What insights did you discover? Did you learn anything
about yourself? Was there a motif or theme present? What mood or tone did your
questions and answers suggest to you.
4. Now, using some of all of the
questions, begin to write a poem around them.
5. Get the core of your poem
together before you begin to experiment with format. (You might set the poem up
as an interview with stanzas comprised of couplets or triplets or some other
stanzaic arrangement that fits the content).
6. Edit carefully and be sure to
limit yourself to the “heart” of your interview.
Tips:
1. Try to write in the active,
not the passive, voice. To do that, it can be helpful to remove “ing” endings
and to write in the present tense (this will also create a greater sense of
immediacy).
2. Be on the lookout for
prepositional phrases that you might remove (articles & conjunctions too).
3. Avoid clichés (and, while
you’re at it, stay away from abstractions and sentimentality).
4. Show, don’t tell—through striking imagery, a strong emotional center, and
an integrated whole of language, form and meaning.
5. Understand that overstatement
and the obvious are deadly when it comes to writing poetry. Don’t ramble on,
and don’t try to explain everything.
6. Weed out anything superfluous
that isn’t absolutely essential to the poem.
Example:
