Poetry Prompt #80 - Who Would You Be?

Have you ever thought about changing roles with someone or just being able to live someone else's life? Have you ever thought about becoming someone other than yourself? If you could become anyone (alive, dead, fictional), who would you be? 

This week, step out of your skin, become someone else, and write a poem about it.

Some things to consider before writing:

• Who am I?
• Who am I meant to be?
• Who would I like to be?
• Who would I choose to be if I could become someone else?

Alternative ideas for this week:

• Write a poem about a poem that you’d like to “inhabit” (enter a poem, become part of that poem by writing about changing places with a character from it).

• Write about becoming a character in a song or a movie.

• Write about becoming the subject of a famous sculpture or a famous painting.  (Ever wonder what life would be like for the woman in DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa” or what the Venus de Milo might be like if she were flesh and blood instead of stone? What would you be like if you were the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo?)

• Write from the perspective of your avatar, doppelgänger, or alter ego.

• Write about why you don’t wish to change places with someone else.

Poetry Prompt #79 - From Painting to Poem

"Il Penseroso" by Thomas Cole (1845)

Ekphrastic poems are based on other forms of art, most often paintings, but may also include  sculpture, musical composition, dance, etc. You can read more about ekphrasis if you click on fifth tab in the page bar above. You will also find the following informative: Ekphrasis: Poetry Confronting Art  and Notes on Ekphrasis.

This week, I thought it would be interesting to move from painting to poem by writing about a painting (with an invitation to post your poems for sharing). I've chosen "Il Penseroso" by Thomas Cole, one of my favorite painters and the founder of the Hudson River School. Interestingly, Cole's "Il Penseroso" was inspired by a poem of the same title written by John Milton in 1631 ("Il Penseroso" by John Milton)

Keep in mind that ekphrastic poems do more than offer textual descriptions or verbal interpretations of visual art. Take a good look at Cole's "Il Penseroso" and see where it leads you. (Click on the image for a larger view.) Notice details.

You may want to begin by jotting down your impressions, images inspired by the painting, and feelings, memories, or experiences that the painting calls to mind. Think in terms or your emotions and your spiritual response to the painting.

Some questions to consider before writing:

What is happening in the painting?

Who  or what is the subject of the painting?

What mood does the painting suggest?

How do you relate to that mood?

You may want to create a dialogic in which you journey in "conversation" between the painting and your text. Or you may avoid referring to the painting at all (other than, perhaps, a mention in the title or subtitle).

If the Cole painting doesn't work for you,  feel free to work with one of your own choosing!

Famous Ekphrastic Poems:

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats 

" Musee des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden

Poetry Prompt #78 – Home

This week’s prompt invites you to write a poem about “home.”

“Home” may mean many things to us – it may be a physical place or it may signify the center of our world (the heart of our immediate reality). “Home” may be the brick-and-mortar of childhood homes, homes in which we’ve lived as adults, places in which memories were made, or places in which joys were shared and hearts were broken. “Home” may be imagined or mythical locations, dreamscapes, or the metaphorical geography of a particular place. “Home” may include specific attachments, relationships with others, things we said and did, and experiences that helped or hurt us.

“Home” has long provided inspiration for poets. In William Stafford's "One Home," a childhood home is remembered; in "Home Again Home Again," A. F. Moritz reflects upon time, aging, and family.

“Home” may represent both place and people as in Gerald’s Stern’s "The Dancing," and relationships may be revealed through “home” as in Adrienne Rich’s "Living in Sin."

W. H. Auden’s collection About the House (1965) is an extended analogy between the house as a building and the building of the self. For Auden, “home” becomes an extension of “self” through poems that look into physical rooms as well as into their metaphorical equivalents. Click Here to Order About the House

Other Examples:

"Home" by Bruce Weigl

 "Home Is So Sad" by Phillip Larkin

 "9773 Comanche Avenue" by David Trinidad

 "This Room" by John Ashbery

Some things to think about before writing:

What memories do you have of a childhood home?

What’s your “dream home?”

If a genie granted you the wish to go home for a while, where would you go?

When you think of “home,” what people do you think of?

How has a particular home impacted your life?

What memories of a home can you express through attachments within and to that home?

Does where you live (or where you have lived) define you in any way?

How does a home have two inner spaces – physical and metaphorical?

Is there a “home” in your life that isn’t a physical structure?

Is there a person in your life who represents “home” to you?

By way of sharing, here’s a poem from my book What Matters about the day I sold my childhood home: 

Selling the Family House

I didn’t plan to be undone

by a catbird crying, irises in

bloom where a cherry tree stood,

the baby, born dead, buried there;

or those ovals on the wall where

our pictures were hung, holes

from the nails that held them.

The house – empty or nearly

empty –  crumbles into itself.

I leave a few books on their shelf.

Some shimmer, the others are rags.

What voice do I hear (or want to

hear)? The catbird cries; the earth

turns on wing-boned fingers.

Bijou

Bijou 

September 15, 1994 - November 3, 2011

Sire: All Star's Rambo

Dam: Lucy At All Star

Derivation of Name: From the French,

meaning a small, dainty, exquisite jewel; 

something infinitely special, precious, 

and delicately beautiful.

AKC Registration #TN160180/01

January 16, 1995

With much sadness, I write this morning that my dear little Yorkshire Terrier, Bijou, died on Thursday evening. She was seventeen and to her last moment the "personification" of her name. Her passing was very sudden and a great blessing to have happened quickly and peacefully at home and in my arms. Bijou was the last of my Yorkies. I miss her terribly.

There's an Irving Townsend quotation that touches me deeply and expresses what I believe many pet lovers feel about the "little creatures" with whom we share our lives and our love. In memory of Bijou, and in memory of pets you've loved, I offer the quotation as the prompt for this week's poem. (If you write or have written poems for beloved pets, please feel free to post them.)

“We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own 

live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. 

Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. 

We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, 

never fully understanding the necessary plan.”

– Irving Townsend from “The Once Again Prince”

Poetry Prompt #77 – Wilderness

In his most recent chapbook, Kicking the Rain, R. G. Rader included a poem entitled “Let There Be A Wilderness.” The poem immediately struck me because the dialectic of the poet’s observation is so immediate and direct, and so filled with metaphorical meaning. Clearly, R. G. wasn’t thinking only about “wilderness” in a literal sense, but, rather, in a context of implied meanings that suggest relationship, tension, and the conflict between “safety” and risk-taking.” It’s a love poem that’s not exactly a love poem, it’s sensual and passionate in its defense of romanticism, and it tosses out a challenge to those who are afraid to explore the wilderness (or wildness) within themselves.


Let There Be A Wilderness

by R. G. Rader

Let there be a path leading out of sigh

And at its other end a temperate zone:

woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot

From “Against Romanticism” by Kingsley Amis

Let there be roads that hurt the feet

at places I travel – exotic

outside the temperate zone.

Let there be a wilderness

where I taste the pleasure of wild food

where the winter cold is cause for no clothing

and the soft cushion of summer grass

is softer still when you and I fall upon it.

Avoid the temperate zone

where little is safe from each hour’s boredom

and all the words are neatly packaged

into the pages of a book.

Let there be time to share

and to lose our  passion

and a way to find it again,

a space where wingless birds can fly

a place filled with beasts

who dare do battle.

Copyright © 2010 by R. G. Rader. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

From Kicking the Rain (Finishing Line Press, 2010) 

Click Cover to Order Kicking the Rain

Many see “wilderness” as a path to awakening, and it is deeply present in many of the world’s “wisdom” traditions. Wilderness is transcultural and transpiritual – shamans and mystics, sages and saints have gone into the wilderness to find inspiration and enlightenment. Jesus Christ and the Desert Fathers went into the desert; Buddha and Lao Tzu went into the forest. Thoreau went to Walden Pond, and in Emersonian transcendentalism, nature was created by a transcendent god for the benefit for humankind. These examples all beg the question, “What is it about wilderness (in any of its forms) that draws humankind to it?”

Wilderness may be understood as a way and as a tradition, and throughout history, “wilderness” has been strongly symbolic. Importantly, wilderness is never merely the untarnished forest, the crystal stream, the field of flowers; it is also tangled vines and exposed roots, rain and mud,  rocky places and poisonous berries. Wilderness is wild nature in all of its aspects, and it may be expanded to include human nature.

Okay, I’m sure you see where I’m going this week. Our prompt is “wilderness,” and the challenge is to write a poem that focuses on a personal wilderness experience, a wilderness insight, a wilderness “therapy,” or  “wilderness” as a metaphor. What we’re not looking for are “nature” poems (which I love dearly but not this week).

Examples:

"A Table in the Wilderness" by Li-Young Lee

"Wilderness" by Carl Sandburg

 "Across a Great Wilderness without You" by Keetje Kuipers

"If a Wilderness" by Carl Phillips

Before beginning to write consider these questions:

What’s your wilderness?

What has a wilderness taught you?

Where has a wilderness taken you?

What life experience can you describe in wilderness terms?

What does wilderness offer your senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell)?

What specific wilderness images will you incorporate into your poem?

Poetry Prompt #76 – Phrase Play

Have you ever listened to someone who uses a particular phrase so often that you expect to hear it whenever you speak with that person? Are there certain phrases that you use often in everyday conversation? Think of the “trendy” phrases that become (for me anyway) like fingernails on a chalkboard; for example, push the envelope, I hear you, piece of cake, I could care less, my bad, just sayin’ (and a new one that I heard recently – totally salinda meaning peacefulness, or a peaceful state of mind). 

Interestingly, every language has well-used colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions; for example, in Italian in bocca al lupo literally means "into the wolf's mouth" but, rather like the strange English expression "break a leg," this phrase is used in Italy to wish someone good luck.

Choose a phrase (not a cliché but a common idiomatic expression) and write a poem "around" that phrase. Alternatively, you might try using that phrase as much as possible within your poem. Turn the expression over and around, spin it, repeat it, extend it, give it new meanings, mock it, praise it, see how far you can stretch it. You might even consider using the phrase as a metaphor.

Begin by making a list of expressions that you or friends use often, and then choose one for your poem. Another idea is to use several phrases throughout your poem, or perhaps even compose an entire poem of  “phrase plays.” Try taking a humorous approach – have fun with this!

Virtual Poetry Salon

Please visit Diane Lockward's blog (Blogalicious)

to "attend" a virtual poetry salon in which I'm the guest poet!

Click here: Virtual Poetry Salon

Interview Excerpt:

Diane:  How did you select the title for your book?
Adele:  Strangely enough, What Matters had a title several years before it became a book. Like many images in the poems, the title came to me late one night. It literally “popped into my mind”  before I’d even begun to think of the poems in terms of a collection. I woke up the next morning knowing that What Matters would be the title of my next book. That day I took a long look at my newer poems (revised, written, and in process) and began to see them arranged in sections relative to the experiences that drove them. The title powered the long process of writing, editing, tweaking, and selecting. 

Diane's virtual poetry salon is such a creative and fun idea complete with an interview, reading, and virtual food (see above)! Enjoy!