Who gave you your name?
Do you know what it means?
Do you like it?
If your name was a shape, what shape would it be?
Would you prefer to have a different name? Why?
Have you ever been called by another name, or names?
Do different people have different names for you?
If your name was the title of a novel what kind of novel would it be? What would the main character be like?
Have you ever had any nick-names?
Free write around your name for about 15 minutes, responding to these questions and anything else that enters your mind.
Let the writing sit for a couple of days, without reading back over it, though continue to think and make notes about any other ideas that come to you.
When you're ready, read back over all your notes to see if you have the material for a poem.
You'll see a poem of mine below, written some years ago when I was alone in a small spanish village on a writing retreat.
Write well.
L x
How Are You?
After twelve anonymous days
I walk into the supermercado and someone says
my name and my heart
ignites with something that feels like heat, light.
No matter that rain is pushing its cold smoke
down the mountains,
that I can smell it coming,
the damp evening air sticking to my skin.
What more is there? My place in the world
confirmed, still hearing it in the street –
Lynne! Que tal? Like a blessing. And I am fine.
I am so fine.
Lynne Rees
12 comments:
Name, Rank, and Serial Number
“The first fiction is your name.”
---Eileen Myles
The first name I recall recognizing was
Butch, my nickname, and that was me,
the little fire plug, the tempestuous toddler
with the fullback’s thighs.
1949--Kindergarten,
that tall dour woman, Miss Something,
called me Arnold,
and I would not respond.
I didn’t know who that was.
“That’s your name, young man,
Arnold Glenn Bryden.”
I sat stoic and stared a hole in her.
“How about Glenn, do you like that name?”
Thinking it over I seemed to recognize
myself in that name, Glenn,
so I simply nodded assent
and never did answer to Arnold.
1950--First grade,
my mother had divorced Mr. Bryden,
an asshole, a womanizer, wife batterer,
a soldier who shot himself in the foot
in the Aleutians to escape going into combat,
who married my mother at 16
because she told him I was his prodigy,
and he gave me his name
and his disdain, and 25 years later,
after my mother died, he and I discovered
that he had only been the first
of my several stepfathers--
but when I was 6 years old,
living in the Navy projects
near Ballard, my mother remarried
and I was blessed
with a new last name, Stilwell;
Arnold (Glenn) Stilwell.
I was still Butch at home,
still Glenn at school,
and still was never Arnold;
my last name seemed irrelevant.
1953--my mother divorced
Mr. Stilwell, who was manic/depressive,
would eat a whole box of dry cereal
for breakfast, and molested me,
we think, and my little sister.
1954--Art Buttkus drove up
one morning in his 1950 black Mercury
fastback, rumbling with twin glass packs,
festooned with twin spotlights,
all handsome in his leather jacket
and Tony Curtis hair
and Cornel Wilde smile,
eager to corral my beauteous Mom,
and to become Stepfather IV,
the last of that ilk, new head of household,
but same old shit on a daily basis,
and I was told that now I was
(Glenn) (Arnold) Stilwell (Buttkus)
and my school records
stymied clerks and administrators.
When I was a junior in High School
my parents decided that Mr. Buttkus,
a felon, bully, child molester,
and Archie Bunker precursor
would adopt we three kids;
and so my little sister,
who was a real Bryden,
and my little brother,
who was a real Stilwell,
and me-myself-and I,
who would never find out
who the hell his real father was,
all became legally and officially
the Buttkus Bunch.
My High School diploma read:
Glenn Arnold Buttkus.
My U.S. Navy discharge
and three college degrees
also did.
1964--early on in college
I was called Cowboy,
because I wore my hair long,
wore western high top boots
and a thick studded belt
on my black Frisco jeans.
1966--while in the Navy
I was called Big Time,
because all my liberty
was spent downtown,
watching movies for ten hours,
having a big time.
1968-1978: During my dynamic
thespian decade, I became
Sancho Panza, Benedick, Macduff,
Starbuck, Becket, Harry, Bobby, Ronnie,
Alex, several Shakespearean mechanicals
and Greek and Roman spear carriers,
the Drifter in a bar with Woody Strode,
the Commendatore and God--
immersing my self in the that lovely
schizophrenic world of an actor,
letting loose cops, cuckolds, queers,
archbishops, and cowboys,
the mutts of the past,
the diverse guises of the ID;
all alive, with short expiration dates,
but all me for a time,
for several times.
As Alexis Zorba once said,
“I have other names, if you are interested.”
Glenn Buttkus October 2010
Erin Lee
It reminds me of a memory
the Irish landscape
—meadow, cliff, fog, and shoreline—
the curved edge of an island
The cold waters kiss my coasts,
break me down and round me out
My name a circle of land—
whole
Name
Early breaths,
suddenly alone
they buried my shadow
in a churchyard womb.
Borrowed time.
Named after some boyhood friend
of an older brother
from another clan.
Borrowed name.
Call me what you will
but my shadow clings
tighter than the name.
We share a life,
each stolen breath
a sentence,
a judgement,
a tear - silent spoken.
Call me what you will;
we have another name
my sister and I
shared
in the womb of eternity.
Rotting flesh and the press of earth
neither separate nor heal
but call our name.
The novella of my name
Baptised at my Anglican Christening
with a Roman name translated as ‘warlike’
Me? A butterfly! A closet poet!
There are cards in the attic;
too son, father, husband, lover.
The taxman merely writes Mr.
Close friends bestowed
a cartoon nickname for me, a caricature
with an innate need to be loved
As an islander I love a full moon.
Being an ‘Ang-el’ means I’m attracted
to a sea breeze. How I’d wish
to carve my name in the ocean waves
like Keats, or copy Flaubert –
Emma C’est Moi.
Given the last rites as a child, why save
this ’Andrea Doria’, would anyone
beyond my birth mother have grieved?
It seams the further I sail
from each new name the faster
I approach my last title – deceased.
Yin and Yang
When I was little, Dad explained to me
the meaning of my name: the first character,
firm on the ground; the next two,
dazzling vermilion. Thus, a land
under the reflection of a red sun.
When I grew up, I learned
how he, with a deep-rooted
southern accent, pronounced land
as green, that sets off the rebirth
of flowers in a bird chirping spring
along a thousand miles of riverbanks.
Now, I place red and green side
by side, like two fish, black and white,
swimming head to tail in a globe,
where I see moonrise and sunset,
west wind chasing east rain,
and rivers embracing mountains.
Glenn Arnold
When I heard that name, my name,
Glenn, uttered for the first time
on the thin pasty lips of my
pre-school matron, some puckish
imp within said yes, that is you;
well put, well said, aptly named
after your own Irish/Scottish selves
and hirsute clan brothers,
a derivation of Glen, meaning
“a valley in the mountains”;
you have spent lifetimes being Gleann,
you have the calves for a kilt, and
you do not mind the onerous heft
of an outlander’s broadsword,
as well as Glynn and Glinn;
and though it is hard to fathom,
one day your daughters will call you
Glennster and Glennerton.
Later, wearing Glenn like a mackinaw
for decades I discovered
some famous Glenns,
whom of course, somehow
I was associated with:
Glenn Gould, Ford, Miller, Campbell, Corbett,
Cunningham, Close, even Strange.
Moving along like roughage on a colonic tour,
I arrive at the midships, the innards, the vertex,
the balancing point of my namous trilogy;
Arnold, and I found it surly, still resentful
of how I had usurped its former stature
as first name, shoving, cajoling, mugging it,
and chaining it behind, in harness,
and in stentorian timbre, in iambic pentameter,
I was informed that Arnold was Old English,
by way of a French matriarch bred with Celts
after the Norman Invasion, and that it meant
“eagle ruler”--passing itself off through the
cavalcade of centuries as Arnau, Arn, Arne,
Arnoldo, Arndt, and Arnoit.
I welcomed Arnold to my affectionous nucleus
and forbade guilt, and exorcised forgiveness,
and introduced it to that helixious imp,
which had imparted the wisdom hidden
regarding the balanced placement
in the medieval mosaic of Me,
entity eternal, when the pecking order
was carved, and then assigned to live
as ink in officialdom, plotting the spiritual
schematic of who I was to become,
and would be remembered as.
Glenn Buttkus October 2010
Thanks Keith and Martin, for your poems
were so good, it drove me to write a
second one just to stand in the'
Applehouse with real poets.
John
was my name
was my father's name
was my father's father's name
so
when my mother from the kitchen shouted JOHN
we all answered.
soon as I could
I changed it.
Signed, Stephen
Some of you may have read this poem but if you haven't you should definitely find a copy of Margaret Atwood's "The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins." It's an amazing poem about a bear rejecting his title of Bear "It was the bear who begain it. Said/ I'm getting out from under./ I am not Bear, l'Ours, Ursus, Bar/or any other syllables/you've pinned on me." etc. I think it is printed in "The Penelopiad". Here's mine:
Yellow Morning
We studied on the old worn carpet
of our rented house,
books and flashcards spread out around us.
We formed strange sounds with our mouths
and tried to remember where are tongues should be.
We taped carefully drawn letters onto everyday things
like forks and notebooks,
without realizing that 'fork' would be a useless word
in a culture without them.
Without realizing that soon we would be adept
at sucking juices and rice from our fingertips,
slurping from our palms.
We picked out certain words with resonance
to call each other,
should longing catch us
rolling over pencils and a foreign alphabet.
'Meri jan,' we murmured,
my life, my love, my soul,
pressed into a belly or
wrapped around a thigh,
a curled toe.
And then, side by side in a market place
breathing in the morning smog of Delhi,
a banana seller who, losing the bargain,
tucked a long, dark and dirty curl behind his ear
with rough, work-worn hands and said,
'Ahhh Meri jan,' in defeat, shaking his head
in a gesture undefinable as yes or no.
With recognition I grinned from ear to ear,
scrapped the bargain and paid what he had asked
just to hear those soft word of love I knew
amidst a city I didn't.
As we stepped away
into the rush of morning bodies,
I heard between the blaring horns
and shouted bargains,
a soft snap
as I broke the yellow skin
of my breakfast.
Forgive me - I'm later than usual in commenting on your poems. I've been creating a website (or a blog masquerading as a website) starting a new writing project and studying for a short history course... but I'm here now :)
@ Glen: (Name, Rank...) I love the narrative quality to this. I wondered how it would work with longer lines,so the narrative isn't quite so 'cut up'?
@ Erin - As soon as I read the title and the first stanza, I said, Yes! You've married a meaning so exactly to the sounds of your name. Lovely image ending the poem too.
@ Keith: This is so poignant. I like the repetitions too. It has a songlike quality to it which suits an elegy really well.
@ Martin: nicely humorous. I didn't get a couple of references: Ang-el and Andrea Doria (I must be missing something) but I really liked the last stanza.
@ Lu: Nicely structured poem. It feels measured and considered. I like the images in the last stanza though I wondered if the poem closes as effectively as it could? Maybe, because of the father/daughter relationship set up in the opening stanzas I was expecting some return to/comment on that?
@ Stephen: master of the understatment. You always make me smile, but its accompanied with a strange sense of loss. That's good, I think.
@ anne: thanks so much for pointing us towards the Margaret Atwood poem. Re: Yellow Morning - I really like how you connect a feeling of home with the sound of one name. The care in which you set up the feeling of home in the first half of the poem prepares me, as a reader, for the emotionally convincing scene in the Delhi market. The image of the breaking of the banana takes on a sense of the sacred. Lovely.
I'll try and get back to comment on any 2nd poems after I've posted the next prompt.
L x
Forgive me - I'm later than usual in commenting on your poems. I've been creating a website (or a blog masquerading as a website) starting a new writing project and studying for a short history course... but I'm here now :)
@ Glen: (Name, Rank...) I love the narrative quality to this. I wondered how it would work with longer lines,so the narrative isn't quite so 'cut up'?
@ Erin - As soon as I read the title and the first stanza, I said, Yes! You've married a meaning so exactly to the sounds of your name. Lovely image ending the poem too.
@ Keith: This is so poignant. I like the repetitions too. It has a songlike quality to it which suits an elegy really well.
@ Martin: nicely humorous. I didn't get a couple of references: Ang-el and Andrea Doria (I must be missing something) but I really liked the last stanza.
@ Lu: Nicely structured poem. It feels measured and considered. I like the images in the last stanza though I wondered if the poem closes as effectively as it could? Maybe, because of the father/daughter relationship set up in the opening stanzas I was expecting some return to/comment on that?
@ Stephen: master of the understatment. You always make me smile, but its accompanied with a strange sense of loss. That's good, I think.
@ anne: thanks so much for pointing us towards the Margaret Atwood poem. Re: Yellow Morning - I really like how you connect a feeling of home with the sound of one name. The care in which you set up the feeling of home in the first half of the poem prepares me, as a reader, for the emotionally convincing scene in the Delhi market. The image of the breaking of the banana takes on a sense of the sacred. Lovely.
I'll try and get back to comment on any 2nd poems after I've posted the next prompt.
L x
Thank you Lynne;
1/ angleterre - english
2/ andrea doria is a shipping accident in the 50's; the brow of one ship dug into the side of another lifting a boy a sleep in an upper bunk bed, they found him on the other ship hours later still asleep. he's parents both drowned.
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