November Poetry Prompt - The Sacred

I like Stephen Dunn’s poetry a lot, and the following one, The Sacred, is no exception.

The Sacred

After the teacher asked if anyone had
.....a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
.....said it was his car,
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he'd chosen, and others knew the truth
.....had been spoken
and began speaking about their rooms,

their hiding places, but the car kept coming up,
.....the car in motion,
music filling it, and sometimes one other person

who understood the bright altar of the dashboard
.....and how far away
a car could take him from the need

to speak, or to answer, the key
.....in having a key
and putting it in, and going.

Stephen Dunn
from Between Angels
© W.W. Norton & Company, 1989

I like it for what it says: how a teacher encourages students to share intimate thoughts, (good teachers are gifts we need to celebrate) and how the familiar (a car) is elevated to the sacred.

And I like it for its form: how the line breaks introduce exquisite hesitancies before we read over to find out what the next line/stanza will reveal; how they put emotional pressure on ordinary language and draw attention to what is being said, and what is being suggested.

It’s a joy to read aloud. Try it, and introduce a slight pause, as if you’re catching your breath, at the end of each line where there’s no punctuation.

The second poetry prompt/challenge for November is to write a poem about a sacred place. But… the place has to be an ordinary place, a place that you wouldn’t normally associate with grandeur… so, no cathedrals, mountain tops, or star-watching in the open air.

The second limitation is that I’d like you to write the poem in the 3rd person – he/she/ they. Now, you might still decide to write about yourself, and if you do you might find that the 3rd person actually gives you a little more freedom to ‘observe’ yourself. Or you might choose someone else’s life and sacred place to write about, and that’s good too: to step outside our own concerns and explore what the world might mean to someone else.

You won’t be hearing from me for three weeks, as I’m taking a holiday, but I’m already looking forward to reading your poems when I get back on 8th December.

Write well.
Lynne
x

November Poetry Prompt - Fire

Fire. It's the time of year that we light them. In our houses and in our gardens. November 5th, in the UK, is Bonfire Night, and fire becomes an entertainment.

Fire keeps us warm. It comforts. It can even, for some people, ward away danger. But fire destroys too - homes, land, lives. But it also purifies.

We can control fire to a certain degree, perhaps like the way we can only control our own passions and emotions to a certain degree, unless we're particularly self-contained. But does everyone have a breaking point? A point when the 'fire' will escape and engulf someone or something? A point when the 'fire' will clear the way forward, or destroy what is in its path.

Free write around 'Fire'. What are the emotions, images, memories, songs, phrases ... anything at all... that spring spontaneously to mind? Follow the thread of one that feels the strongest.

I look forward to reading your poems, and here's one of mine from my collection, Learning How to Fall:

Spontaneous

It happened at the Turkey Farm.
Witnesses heard a woomph like someone
stepping smartly on a bag of air and when
they got there, found the charred remains
of cloth, some bones. And a man
in Minnesota had done it on his deck at home,
mid-morning, the temperature only 54
but the Budweiser in his glass was warm.

If she could do at will what all these people
did in error, she reckoned on a money-spinner,
all sorts of side-lines – self-help books like
How to Find the Warmth Within. She’d start
small, spend days imagining the glow
of an orange ball inside her chest. The weeks
focusing on the hairs along her arm until
she could feel and smell the heat, hear

a crack like a mosquito on an outside light.
She knew she was on a roll. Soon she’d be
hiring halls to accommodate the crowds.
She’d open with a nest of leaves transformed
to a smouldering pyre on her palm,
and build to her grand finale – the full
combust, walls racketing with applause,
the diminishing calls of Encore!

Lynne Rees

Free Writing Ideas

Write about five different things, one for each sense - sight, sound, touch, taste and smell - that you have experienced in the previous 24 hours.

We don’t have to search far for material to write about – it’s constantly around us, we just have to notice it, and remember to make a record of it.

Paint the picture/moment/event in words - really see (re-experience) all the details.

Give yourself 10 to 20 mins for each one. Start writing and make yourself continue until your chosen time is up.

You could do one a day for the next five days. Don't worry about reading back over them. Let them sit in your notebook for a while.

And for a little inspiration, here are some delicious excerpts from Charles Simic's notebook:

Seeing is determined not by the eye but by the clarity of my consciousness. Most of the time the eyes see nothing.

My soul is constituted of thousands of images I cannot erase. Everything I remember vividly from a fly on a wall in Belgrade to some street in San Francisco early one morning. I'm a grainy old, often silent, often flickering film.

Two young birch trees wrestling in the wind. The crow in the snow refereeing.

The day I went to make funeral arrangements for my father-in-law, I caught a glimpse of the mortician's wife nursing the mortician's new daughter. Her breasts were swollen huge with milk.

The restaurant is Greek. The waiter's name is Socrates, so Plato must be in the kitchen, and Aristotle is the fellow studying a racing form at the cash register. Today's special, grilled calamari with fresh parsley, garlic, and olive oil.

From The Poet's Notebook, Excerpts From The Notebooks Of 26 American Poets, WW Norton New York 1995.

Write well.

Happy October

Autumn slips in very slowly, and rather late in the year, in the South of France. The two plane trees in the garden are still sprouting and green, although the small oak has decided that it's time to turn. People are still swimming during the day, but the nights are cooler and we tend to move indoors by around 8.30 rather than our usual 11.

I suppose when we think of autumn we tend to think of change: shorter days, trees becoming bare, fires lit for the first time in months. It's a season of things slowing down.

When I lived in the UK I used to look forward to putting on a thick sweater. There's something quite lovely about being encased in thick wool or cotton when it's cold and blustery outside.

The following poem is from a sequence commissioned by Medway Maritime Hospital to accompany a series of artworks you can still see in the Fracture Clinic Waiting Room - 'The Four Seasons' by Tony Crosse.

Autumn

This is the gathering –
fields grubbed bare
leaf, flower, seed
settled to mulch.
Winds rattle
the garden’s ghosts.

We light bonfires
to tempt the sun
but the day’s too full
of doubt. At night
the fox’s scream –
the first cold snap.

The four panels are abstract representations of the seasons and are made entirely from materials used in the Clinic:



Here are some ideas for a poem:

1. Write a haiku with an autumn 'kigo' (season word). There's a two part seminar on writing haiku here.

2. Write about slowness. Research the word first for associated ideas.

3. Find an artwork that you really like and write in response to it. Here's a post that appeared earlier in this blog.

I'm in the UK between 7th and 17th October (and I'm really looking forward to catching up with a few of you) so I'll comment on any poems posted when I get back.

Write well.
Lynne x

Listening to Prevert

La meilleure façon de ne pas avancer est de suivre une idée fixe. The best way not to move forward is to pursue a fixed idea.
Jaques Prévert

I did have a pretty fixed idea to change the way AppleHouse worked and spent quite a lot of time researching online forums, getting as far as setting up three different ones but then deleting them in turn when they weren't as user friendly as this site, or were plagued by adverts.

It seemed that I couldn't find the right format for what I had in mind, so I've decided to drop my 'fixed idea', give the old AppleHouse blog a new look and carry on posting at least one exercise and prompt every month and commenting on as many of your poems as I can.

I hope you'll join me here for another AppleHouse season. And here's the first prompt for Autumn:


I discovered the poetry of Kay Ryan a few years ago, but only recently realised that she's the current US Poet Laureate. Her poems remind me of pressure cookers - tight forms that hold their words under such tension. One of her ways of working is to take a familiar expression, a cliche, or even an abstract concept and 'unpick' it, or explore it, in a poem. I really do recommend her work to you. Here's one example:

The Best of It

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

My challenge to you is to write a poem around one of the following expressions or cliches:

Putting on a brave face
At the end of the day
All's well that ends well (I know Shakespeare wasn't 'cliche' in his time but this one has been done to death!)
One volunteer is better than ten pressed men
Pushing your luck
Under the weather

Try free-writing to get under the skin of the expression you choose. Dig deep. Find out what it's hiding. Go to a place where the words have more resonance than their familiar usage.

Good luck.