Category Archives: Writing Prompt

Eating a Croissant in a Graveyard – writing prompt

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St Mary’s, Totnes in Devon

For Easter Sunday I have chosen this poem by my friend Kathleen Kummer. The title is intriguing, the details are precise: we sense they are based on the poet’s own experience. Then there is the reference to that well-known Stanley Spencer painting of the Resurrection. You can see it here. Does it work for you as a prompt?

I asked Kathleen about the graveyard. It’s part of St. Mary’s Church, a Grade I listed building in the centre of Totnes, Devon. Perhaps, I could have worked it out for myself: the poem mentions the iconic ‘steep hill’ in Totnes. Kathleen and I have walked up and down it many times, and hope we can do so again soon. Easter Greetings to you all!

Eating a Croissant in a Graveyard

I’m eating a croissant in a graveyard, grassed over.
People come here to rest, eat a sandwich.
(I wish I’d bought something less flighty, like
a scone or an Eccles cake.) The graves
are few and not recent. There’s a table-top tomb,
ideal for a picnic, but respect is shown:
low voices, no chirrup from a mobile phone;
people sit on the wall or the grass. I’m expecting
that Labrador to cock his leg, but he doesn’t.

Across the street, the bustle of the market
just reaches us, and I think of the dead
around me, of how this town was theirs,
that they walked up the steep hill, stopping
to speak to their friends about their simple,
complicated lives. When I close my eyes,
I see them clambering out of their graves,
as in that Resurrection painting
by Stanley Spencer, looking dazed,
but as if their discomfiture won’t last long,
with the green hills they knew around them,
the sky blue and summery. And surely
the warm-hearted townsfolk will welcome the dead.

It’s as if I’ve banished them by opening my eyes.
The place is empty, but for two men
in wheelchairs, parked with their backs to the view.

High Street, Totnes in Devon

Fairy tale – a poem

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photo credit: Enrique Meseguer, via Pixabay

On a writing workshop last weekend, I introduced Vasco Popa’s The Golden Apple: a round of stories, songs, spells, proverbs & riddles. I have been using some of the riddles and proverbs as writing prompts.

Vasco Popa (1922-1991) was Serbia’s greatest modern poet. Ted Hughes was an admirer of his work and wrote the introduction to his Collected Poems. Popa collected folk tales from many sources. He found a rich inspiration for his own poems in this “eternally living wellspring of folk poetry” which he combined with vivid imagery and a touch of the surreal.

Here are two riddles from The Golden Apple. The answers are at the end of the blog.

With an iron key
I open a green fortress
And drive out the black cattle

A horse with its pack goes into a house and comes out of it, but its tail never goes in.

Vasco Popa

Popa’s Collected Poems inspired my poem Fairy tale. It was first published in erbacce and then in my debut collection Another life (Oversteps Books Ltd, 2016).

Fairy tale

Someone needs to go to
a deep cupboard in a dark room
the others wait outside

The first one becomes
a grandmother with a stoop
then someone else steals
her white lace cap her smile
her soft voice
they go to lie still in a deep dark
bed in a cold room

Then someone else walks a long
way through the wood, across
the saddled serpent under a cold
sheet of dark clouds

That someone is dressed in crimson
already – it will save time
the old one will rescue the red girl
but they will not have enough
bricks to finish the job

after that someone else will get to be hungry
and someone will always be eaten

Answers to the riddles: Watermelon, Spoon.

Hunters on the Hill – writing prompt

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One year ago I received an email in Dutch from poet Elsa Fischer. She had read my second collection and related to the poems about the Second World War. Elsa and I have kept in touch by email. Her poems were featured here on 24 May 2020 – the end of that month we were going to meet in person in The Hague ..

A 1,000-piece jigsaw of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters on the Hill is waiting in the hall – a present for a friend. Seeing it there reminded me that Elsa and I have both written a poem inspired by that painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. On its website you can see all the works by Bruegel that still exist from their 2018 exhibition.

Prompt: Choose the same painting, another work by Bruegel. Or work from the cover design of a jigsaw …

Jonathan McAloon published a fascinating article on Artsy “The Deadly Truth Behind Pieter Bruegel Elder’s Idyllic Landscapes” (4/2/2019). The winter of 1564-65 was the coldest winter of the century. Europe was living in what’s now called the “Little Ice Age”. It would be so cold that rivers froze enough for local people to have rent-free marketplaces on them. Frozen birds fell from the sky, people could enjoy themselves skating. There were also food shortages, resulting in illness and riots.

Elsa’s poem Hunters was published in the journal Poetry Salzburg Review. Mine is in the pamphlet A Stolen Hour (Grey Hen Press, 2020). We’ve both taken the viewpoint of someone in the landscape.

Hunters

I’ve come to feast again on Flemish grotesque
at the peasant wedding and Shrove Tuesday’s kermis.

To watch the hunters as they bring in the kill,
the trails of blood not far from where I stand

for cover. I hear branches and shrubs and ice
breaking and feel no pity until the knives release

a medieval agony of entrails, shimmering,
steaming, on to the floor of the estaminet.

The heady beer explodes, the pissoir smells.
I grab a cue at the billiard table. I am seventeen.

Piercing the cold like the crow’s flight I escape
into the northern twilight, away from memories.

In a far corner

It is a clear afternoon.
I hear children laughing,
the clacking of skittles,
skates carving the ice.

I know it is Friday and hear
the silence of crows.
My bones are strong,
my wife is in good health.

I do not yet know that
on the hill the hunters
with their wet and tired dogs
are heading for home.

I think about my wife,
heavy with child, her apron
as white as the snow
under my feet.

I see plumes of breath from my lips,
as though I’m a horse with plough.
Branches on my shoulder creak, shudder.
I’m yoked to this life.

Snow – writing prompt

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Oak bark, by 2999492 via PIxabay

I hope that you have had a safe and good transition into 2021. Twice this week I pulled open the white vertical blinds to see a thin layer of snow. It does not often snow in Manchester; snow comes sooner to the hills around it where some of my poet friends live.

Perhaps that’s why I enjoy encountering snow in poems. One of my favourites is the poem Snow by Louis MacNeice, with that fourth line World is suddener than we fancy it. You can read it on the Poetry Foundation website here

My short poem is below.

Snow

1

I arrive suddenly
yet will always linger
in the shadows of trees, drystone walls.

Over time I make a blanket
to purify, a silent pause
for you to hear your heartbeat.

2

From the York train I noticed
crumpled sheets of dingy grey.

The April sun does not reach
the entrance of tunnels,
behind the wrinkled wood.

Snow depends on shadows,
a mare keeping her foal close by.

Prompt: You can choose to write a short poem, or two linked poems about snow. If you like, include a line from one of my poems.

Knitting – poem and writing prompt

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Photo credit: cocoparisienne via Pixabay

In this region, schools will start tomorrow. Everywhere, there are large white banners up reminding drivers that children are about, on foot or on their bike. For various reasons, I don’t have good memories of my time at primary school. When I think about knitting, or see someone knitting, my stomach contracts. But, don’t you love the bike?

 

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Photo credit: Foundry Co via Pixabay

Did you knit this yourself?

It would have been a morning.
Glasses, graying hair in a bun,
typical spinster teacher.

Why ask a question to which you
already know the answer?

Because you had never been able
or willing to show me left-handed knitting.

The few centimetres my mother
had added during the week stood out:

too smooth and regular, too clean,
easily done in her click-clack rhythm.

I watched you unpick it, leaving
me sitting with a pile of curly wool.

Prompt: Was there a subject that you disliked or even hated at school? Was it because of the person who taught you the subject? You may well have written a poem or short story about this already. Is there another poem waiting underneath?

A man with a frown – poem and writing prompt

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Photo credit: Pixabay

It is March, so here is an example of personification. It comes from a workshop: we were asked to choose a month and write about it, as though it was a person.  Do you see March as a man too? Does his emotional state reflect typical March weather?

 

March

He is a man with a frown,
walking in a military
manner. He is the eldest
son of a Rossendale baker, who
married young and placed his hopes
on other people’s shoulders.

He studied accountancy at a redbrick
in the Midlands, ironed shirts himself,
lost his accent, met a nurse
in town one night, got drunk,
a lower second degree, a baby,
a small semi in the suburbs.

Last year he didn’t get a rise,
didn’t get promotion either.
He thinks about renewing insurance,
calculates the cost of divorce,
puts his hands in his pockets and
strides over the zebra crossing.

He often feels like going crazy, going
off with a woman half his age, living
in the south of France, but he walks
back to the empty house, hiding
under a large black umbrella,
cursing under his breath.

Ink wasters

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pen 2

The late poet Gerard Benson coined this term for the warm-up, stream-of-consciousness exercise at the start of a workshop: Start writing, don’t stop writing, don’t think, just keep the pen moving.

If you’re familiar with The Artist’s Way, then you have the Morning Pages in your toolkit. To me, the Morning Pages are still more of a “dumping” ground of grumpy stuff, Aargh – not a morning person and never will be….

At a workshop the tutor or facilitator gives a starting line and sets you off. But, how do you create that effect when you’re by yourself? How do you nudge your self on to the track? Here are some options I’ve used:

Liminal lines
The immediacy of being on a threshold of sorts, for example:
Standing on the flood line I noticed…
When I stepped into the room…
Waiting on the platform there was…

Lines that open onto the unexpected, the other side
I turned the corner and then…
As I opened the door…
At the back of the cupboard…
I thought I saw…., but….
I never even once…
It was that dream again…
Sometimes you’ll think of…
No telling what arrived here in the night…

Unlikely/Doomsday scenarios
It hadn’t stopped snowing for thirty years…
It rained for ninety days, then suddenly….
The morning after the storm…
Your body lies on the floor, with or without you…

Juxtapositions
I have an envelope with pieces of paper, some with names of rooms in a house, others with objects, others with abstract nouns. So, we might get hallway, stapler, vanity. Off we go just putting those together in some way or another.

List poems
We’re not expected to write a “proper” list poem with a story arc, a development, an argument. Just a list of anything will do. Six lines is a good starting point, six things I would never eat for breakfast. Then another day there could be a list of the opposite: breakfast favourites (scrambled eggs and my poet friend E told me to add mustard and some dill, homemade porridge with berries, and I’ve just found out that one berry is one calorie, so I’ll have a few more, and strong black coffee in the mug with lavender fields on it. That mug was given to me by a lodger who’d had wanted to become a nun, but then decided to train as a nurse instead….)

Borrowed lines
Using opening lines from poems often work. I have typed up a batch of these, cut them out and put them inside an envelope. Picking one out gives the surprise effect that just reading it in the book doesn’t give.

I’m signed up with the Academy of American Poets for poem-a-day. I really like getting a surprise poem in my inbox every day and sometimes use the title or the opening for my warm-up. Yesterday’s poem started Imagine your heart is just a ball. Go to poetry.org to sign up. Similarly, there may be good “triggers” from other websites – on-line magazines, poetry publishers. A recent newsletter from Carcanet showed Snow in C Sharp Minor which I found intriguing and could have used as a prompt. It is a poem from Errant by Gabriel Levin.

And there is always Carl Sandburg’s This morning I looked at the map of the day…

Sometimes ink wasters can be developed and turn into a poem. It’s rare for one to be a complete poem straight-away. That’s a bonus. Below is one of those. It was published in The North, No 48.

On the town

In the time it took to buy a birthday card, a special
80th birthday card, they had arrived in a long, black limousine,
jumped out, set fire to the hotel and released wicker
baskets. The flying baskets with wicker wings chopped
tops of trees, trees falling on traffic lights – chaos everywhere
and in the middle of it the small bronze statue.
A smiling woman holding doves covered in birdshit.
The wind howling, sirens crying like the end of the world had come.
And me and that card that had cost me £2.99 and nowhere
to buy stamps, no letter box to post it.

Refrigerator, 1957

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To help me get back into writing, I got out 52. Write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going. The book originated in the 52 Project by Jo Bell and guest poets. I opened it at random and got to Prompt No. 15 titled Bell, Book and Candle. This is a prompt on writing about the unnoticed object.

The second sample poem Refrigerator, 1957 is by the American poet Thomas Lux. As synchronicity would have it, today is the first anniversary of his death. He was born in 1946 on the dairy farm his father owned. On poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets, I watched a short video In Memoriam 2017 which had a picture and a short quote by each of the US poets who died last year.

Adding that date to an ordinary object already makes it less ordinary. It tells us the perspective is that of an eleven-year old boy. More like a vault – you pull the handle out it starts. There is humour: not a place to go in hope or hunger. Then the poem zooms in, heart red, sexual red, neon red, on that jar of Maraschino cherries. The same jar there through a childhood of dull dinners… Then we go down the timeline to grandparents, pig farm in Bohemia. The poem ends and because you do not eat/ that which rips your heart with joy.

 

 

 

 

 

14 Ways to Write an Ekphrastic Poem

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You will find this interesting and useful article on the website of the poet Martyn Crucefix.  He gives examples of poems under each of the 14 headings.  I came across the article just the other week, timely as I’m doing a Poetry School course held at the Manchester Art Gallery.

Martyn has divided these 14 ways into five subgroups:- Through Description, Through Ventriloquism, Through Interrogation, Through Giving an Account and, finally, Come At a Tangent.  He suggests people try to write one a day for the next fortnight.

I doubt I’ll manage one a day, but I’ve taken heart from the article: I have lots of abandoned ekphrastic poems, because one tutor was adamant that such poems have no merit if they merely describe!

World Poetry Day

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I ran away to sea many years ago.  In 1969 I arrived in London as an economic migrant and went to register with the “Aliens Office”.  P&O Lines Ltd had offered me a job as a WAP (Woman Assistant Purser) and I joined my first ship, the Arcadia.  The small flags on my blue uniform jacket and white dresses showed that I could speak Dutch, French and German to all the European passengers who were going to start a new life in Australia and New Zealand.

The haiku below was first published in the 2004 Members’ Anthology of the British Haiku Society.  The theme that year was “Other”.

down on the quayside

the band playing; their faces

already smaller

Happy World Poetry Day!