This week’s prompt is designed to
be fun, but it’s not “just for fun.” I’ve often stressed how important it is to
be wary of using too many adjectives, adverbs, articles, prepositions, and
conjunctions. With that in mind, here’s an experiment to further underscore how
meaning is often inherent in nouns and verbs. It’s also an exercise in doing
the opposite of what we often do when we write poems—we often over-write and
then go back and condense. This week the challenge is to under-write and then
add only the most perfect and necessary details.
Guidelines:
1. Write a poem using only nouns
and verbs. That right, no other parts of speech are allowed at this point in
the writing. Be aware as you write that your poems must have meaning, so don’t
just write any old things that pops into mind. Be sequential, make sense,
create the “skeleton” of the poem to come.
2. After you’ve written your
noun-verb poem read it carefully and add only enough details to give your poem
a “body.” Be judicious is your use of modifiers, qualifiers, and don’t add any
word that aren’t absolutely necessary.
3. Let the poem sit for a few
hours, or even for a few days, then go back to it. What’s your poem about? Does
it say what you wanted it to say? What’s its apparent subject? What’s the
unspoken subject? At this point, you’ll continue to work the poem to give it
its “spirit” (its emotional core).
4. It may be helpful to take a
look at the example below and try to work through the guidelines using the
example given before trying your own poem.
Tips:
1. Decide what you want to write
about before you begin.
2. Think about the meaning(s) you
want to create.
3. Stick to your subject.
4. When you begin to flesh out
your poem and then give it a spirit, think how you can most concisely give your
poem a sense of relationship to its meaning and to its language. How can this
poem be developed to explore, illuminate, and situate something about the human
condition?
Example (Guideline 1):
went home
ate dinner
washed dishes
walked dog
saw stranger
remembered time
whispered words
