Twenty Little Tuesday Tryouts

7:40 a.m. –Atlanta

Hello, all. I can hear the gasps as your eyes flick over the post. It looks more frightening than it is. Really. Think about it: I got through it. Can you cheat? Of course.

Bur, first, an assignment as prep for next week’s prompt. The good news is that you may be able to use much of what you collect as fodder for the poems-a-day sites. Keep pen and paper by you any time you watch television over the next seven days. If you don’t usually watch much television, for this week, pick channels like National Geographic, the news, or The Discovery Channel, and give thirty minutes a day to it. The premise of next week’s exercise is: Things I learned from watching t.v..The lines below are another person’s. I will give you his name and the whole poem next week, so you can see what he did, but these few lines show you what we are heading for.

– Watching Wildebeest roam The Serengeti makes me sleepy
– Flocks of migrating birds look like dots on a big screen
– I still don’t understand basic science or maths
– Teaching history is “key in the 21st century”
– History is not being taught in many schools
– Much of modern art is thought provoking
– A lot of modern art is not very good, expensive trash

If you have no television, be creative. We are heading for a list poem on a week of observations and what we learned from some one thing.

For today, I want to give you the exercise by itself, then broken up, so you can see how I answered each step, and the final draft. I wanted to put a working draft in to show the transition to the final piece, but this isn’t a post on revision! The exercise comes from Jim Simmerman who originally designed it for a creative writing class, titling it ‘Twenty Little Poetry Projects,’ and now uses it the way I do, as a strategy when the brain is not moving forward with an idea.

Steps

1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in
succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
4. Use one example of synesthesia [mixing the senses].
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8. Use a word [slang?] you’ve never seen in a poem.
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve heard [preferably in dialect and/or
which you don’t understand].
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction:The
[adjective] [concrete noun] of [abstract noun]…
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative
qualities.
13. Make the character in the poem do something he/she could not
do in real life.
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense such that part of the poem sounds like a
prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that
finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Personify an object.
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but
that echoes an image from earlier in the poem.

I was going nuts while typing the drafts from my old notes. I kept wanting to fix things and get rid of verbs of being. I also had to decipher the original below my first revisions.

I am a concrete person with my writing. When I first tried this, I was sitting on our bed, in Jakarta, because that was my work space. I was feeling downhearted with life — I wrote the first line. I had a small Persian carpet next to me I was staring at while trying to figure out how to do this prompt — I wrote the next line…

1] I am a prisoner without walls
2] among the flowers of my Persian carpet vines/weeds are beginning to sprout

Once I had a focus, a direction, I found the exercise much easier to carry out. I don’t think I can write this exercise without knowing where I am going. It would be interesting to try, though. Randomness has merit.

Steps with my first draft
1. Begin the poem with a metaphor.
1] I am a prisoner without walls
2. Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
2] among the flowers of my Persian carpet vines/weeds are beginning to sprout
3. Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in
succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
3] They twine and curl reaching for me pulling me down into the fields of silk and wool; as I slide through warp and weft I hear the rustle of thread grasses. My nostrils fill with the pungency of sheep and goats and I taste the dryness of dust.
4. Use one example of synesthesia [mixing the senses].
4] The dampness of a blue silk river runs through my ears.
5. Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
5] Nearby, Omar Khayyam sits writing under a date palm, the white minarets of Nineveh on the horizon.
6. Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
6] If a carpet can have a horizon.
7. Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
7] The hunt was on; turbaned caliphs on Arabian steeds, bows and arrows slung across their backs, chased a leopard peering forever across his shoulder.
8. Use a word [slang?] you’ve never seen in a poem.
8]Tally ho and an arrow is loosed never hitting its mark,
9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
9] suspended eternally in mid-air by silken threads.
10. Use a piece of talk you’ve heard [preferably in dialect and/or
which you don’t understand].
10] A thousand throats can be slit by one man running.
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction: The
[adjective] [concrete noun] of [abstract noun]…
11] The towering trees of thought stand in an expectancy of silence
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative
qualities.
12] and I stand in the trap free of danger
13. Make the character in the poem do something he/she could not
do in real life.
13] my arms sliding around the leopard’s golden ruff;
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
14] Ducky would have run
15. Write in the future tense such that part of the poem sounds like a
prediction.
15] to be hunted forever through threads of colour,
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
16] chased by frozen horses
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that
finally makes no sense.
17] trapped by a web of patterns
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
18] another playmate in the Bokharan fields.
19. Personify an object.
19] The arrows hum through the staring trees
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but
that echoes an image from earlier in the poem
20] and I am trapped in a web of patterns.

With a draft to go on, I stopped worrying about the steps. I listed nouns and verbs that fit with Persian carpets and Middle Eastern fairy tales, circled words I wanted to look up for other possible meanings, and started back through this draft, trimming, adding line breaks, making the story active rather than passive. I got rid of lines that I had in only because the exercise asked for them.

I will use these steps when my brain is not behaving, when I have an idea and don’t know where to go with it. There are steps I ignore, but not many. Below is the final draft as published in Lunarosity, a now defunct ezine.

A Thousand and One Nights

Among the flowers of my Persian carpet
vines sprout curl twine me into fields of silk
and wool. Sliding through warp and weft,
I hear the rustle of thread grasses, and
my nostrils fill with the pungency of feral cats,
I taste the dryness of dust, and the dampness
of a blue silk river runs through my ears.
A blend and blur of color mark the horizon
spots of russet and black resolving into a hunt
undisturbed by my addition to the scene.
Arabian steeds damp dark with silken sweat,
silent as Attic shapes, prance and wheel
through date palms and trees of fiery-fruited
pomegranate. Turbaned caliphs, bows slung
across their backs, chase a leopard forever
peering over his shoulder. An arrow loosed never
hits its mark eternally suspended by woven
threads. Trees stand in an expectancy of silence
as I move within zig-zags of light and shadow.
My arms slide round the leopard’s golden
ruff and I am bound by threads of color
to be hunted forever through fields of silk and
wool, chased by frozen horses, another
player in the weaving fields of Bokhara.

Hair-pulling might be involved, but, hopefully, no exploding heads. Take yourself from step to step without worrying about whole. The draft doesn’t have to be cohesive. Connections and threads can come later.

See you Thursday for something; Friday for the roundup; and next Tuesday for the prompt mentioned above as your assignment.

Happy writing, all. It’s only week one. Pull back those emotions.