Category Archives: Writing Prompt

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!

 

Joan – writing prompt

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To honour International Women’s Day I’m posting this poem about a woman.  It was first published in The Best of Manchester Poets, vol. 2, published by Puppywolf (2011).  I aimed to give the reader enough clues (the Gauloises cigarettes, the stubborn streak) for them to be able to guess the identity of this woman before they read the final lines.

Writing prompt

It’s a good prompt: with which historical figure (famous or infamous) could you have gone to school, college, university with?  Did you even sit next to them in the classroom?  What were they like then?

Joan
One of the girls I went to college with
was Joan who’d left home early.
She smoked Gauloises, had a stubborn
streak, wanted to study philosophy.
We thought she was depressed; she cut
herself and once put out a cigarette on her arm.
I wish I’d asked her why.  I can see her now
with that hair cropped short, staring straight ahead.
People shouting, the smoke, the crackling fire.
Too hot, I need to step back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paterson

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During the Christmas holidays I went to see Paterson, the delightful film about a bus driver who writes poems.  The poems in the film are by the New York poet Ron Padgett.  Back home I found his work in the New York Poets II Anthology, including the Love Poem that Paterson writes in the film.  The first line is: We have plenty of matches in our house. 

Paterson is also the title of a long poem by William Carlos Williams, so I re-read him.  Seeing Paterson sit in his bus scribbling away each morning before he drives off for the day reminded me of another American poet, William Stafford.  He wrote a poem each day, starting with a brief description of the weather, then a short aphorism, then a poem.  I believe his “hit rate” for acceptances was 1 : 7, or 1: 8.  I’ll settle for that!

May you have a healthy, happy and creative year.  If you’re short on inspiration, you can always write about the matches in your house.  Over Christmas I used up a couple of boxes of good old “Svalan” from Sweden.  Now I’ m on “Flix” from the Netherlands.  The packaging is modern, but the tips are brown…

The Snail – writing prompt

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I’m planning to get the 10.41 to Liverpool Lime Street. I’m on the single-decker blue Magic bus, with the bright orange bars and handles inside. We’re crawling through the Curry Mile – with the newly completed cycle lanes and a few badly parked cars, the buses have to manoeuvre; even the walkers are catching up with us.

white petals float
towards the shisha bar
sleeveless cyclists

The Liver birds are shimmering, a salt tang, ice cream sellers and flocks of French pupils draped around the dock. The Tate opened late this morning. A friendly guide – grey curly hair, faded lilac shirt – directs me to the first floor.

On one side of The Snail four bronzes: a backbone has become an “abstracted plait”. In fuzzy black-and-white film Matisse points with a walking stick to where the next piece of cut-out should be attached. The Snail’s alternative title is Chromatic Composition. Apparently it was planned as part of a triptych, this “purified sign for a shell”. The pin holes are visible in the brightly coloured paper.

Photo credit: Alexas_Fotos via Pixabay

In a traditional saijiki (list of kigo, or season words) the snail is linked to summer and that fits with these colours: orange, lilac, greens, blue. My own saijiki is Haiku World: an International Poetry Almanac compiled by the late William Higginson. It’s a unique anthology: over a thousand haiku, from more than six hundred poets, living in fifty countries, writing in twenty-five languages. At 400 yellowing pages it’s too heavy to carry around.

The snail is caracol in Spanish, slak in Dutch/Afrikaans and katatsumuri in Japanese. The Spanish word sounds like the shape of the protective shell and katatsumuri is, perhaps, the non-moving or slow moving, the snail stuck to the window. Many years ago I had a Korean manager lodge with me at Norwood Rd. He and his colleagues were learning English at the Business School. Smoking he paced through the rear garden, saw me sprinkle blue pellets…Miss Fokkina, you nourish the snails?