Consider this... a very un-Valentine writing prompt

Barbara Ann Kipfer
Random House 2007

I bought this book while on holiday in the US a couple of years ago. It's not the kind of book you read from cover to cover. You pick it up and glance through the 8 or 10 questions it has on each double page spread, and the occasional large print single pager, and see if one catches your eye. I've noticed that sometimes one does arrest me but I move on because I feel it's asking too much of me at that moment. Cowardly? Lazy? Probably a little of both. But I don't find it easy to think deeply spontaneously. It's is if I have to be shoe-horned into it, and for that reason dinner with good friends often has the right elements - comfortable companionship, good food and wine - to ease me slowly into a stage of, I hope, intelligent reflection. Of course a discussion of beliefs and opinions can become very energetic, even over-heated, particularly when there's a decent quantity of wine around, but if there are enough of you one person is generally able to lower the temperature and pull everyone back to a level of consideration. That's not always possible with family though... at least in my experience. Maybe yours is different?

My poetry prompt for today, and a very un-Valentine one it is too but I'm going on the assumption that there's plenty of Valentine stuff already out there, is to write a poem in response to the following question:

(p. 63) What will happen to the world when you die?

Here's my spontaneous response, raw and unedited but something to work on:

What happens to the world when I die

In the movie
of my life
there’s a moment
of stillness:
a street empty
of traffic;
a cashier’s hand
hovers over
the buttons on a till;
someone looks up
through the bare branches
of a Plane tree,

and then it’s over,
a car-horn blares,
a customer asks
if avocados
are on special,
a sudden gust
forces someone
to clap their hands
against the cold
then fast-dial home
to say they won’t
be long.

How carefully
I read the credits
looking
for myself.

Lynne Rees


I look forward to reading your poems.

Write well.
L
x

May Poem Prompt 1

Larson's Holstein Bull

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

Jim Harrison
from In Search of Small Gods.
© Copper Canyon Press, 2009.

Buy at The Book Depository

The above poem arrived in my inbox courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac. Apart from being astonished at the wonderful metaphors in the first three lines, I was surprised at how ‘real’ the story of the young girl killed by the bull felt to me, even though I didn’t grow up in a rural area and have never known, or heard about, anyone who had a similar accident.

But the phrases ‘on her way home from school’ and ‘she couldn’t read or write’ and ‘she was simpleminded’ resonate with me so strongly that the girl becomes someone I feel I might have known. It’s true that simple language is capable of communicating strong emotion.

The first poem prompt for May is to write a poem modelled on Jim Harrison’s poem, i.e. create three fresh metaphors in the first three lines, BUT use the following opening phrase instead:

Life waits inside us…

Write well.
Lynne
x

December Prize Poem

There were good things about all of the poems posted this month, and I was torn between three, finding different reasons to select one over the others during several readings. I eventually decided on the following poem because its opening line struck me the first time I read it; in fact I stopped and read it again to savour the language and the image. It is so freshly expressed.

Here’s the Prize Poem for December 2007 – ‘No rose bed, no gardener’ by Gillian Moyes – followed by a brief commentary:

No rose bed, no gardener

Light as a child in her bones,
we’re lifting her in linked arms
from bed to commode.

The blue nightie furled to her spine
exposing the red buds of bed sores,
she tenses at the glimpse of a face

in the patio window. It’s OK Mum
just reflections, says my sister. Well,
she replies, now dignity’s intact,

it’s a bloody good job we never
had a gardener

and gives us the old look – that flicker
of laughter in her eyes, her dry
throat rattling with chuckles.

My shoulders shaking, I dare
to glance at my sister
like that morning in school assembly

and she’s tickled pink with keeping it in
which doesn’t help me or our mother
who might slip like a soapy baby.

Stop it Mum or we’ll drop you,
I say, don’t make us laugh.
It hurts.

Gillian Moyes

The mother has become a child; the daughters the parents who care for her. The poem sensitively explores this reversal of roles that will be familiar to many people. The concrete detail creates a strong sense of place and the use of the present tense and dialogue engages us as readers, draws us in to these specific people and this particular moment.

The opening simile sets the scene so economically: fragility, helplessness, possibly a body that has wasted so that it seems little more than ‘bones’ and ‘light as a child’. At the end of the poem the mother is even smaller, compared to ‘a soapy baby’, and this reinforces the idea of the pending, and inevitable, loss through death.

I particularly like the lines and break – ‘of laughter in her eyes, her dry’/throat rattling with chuckles – which combine so movingly, and tragically, ideas of life and death: a dry sense of humour, death rattle.

And finally the understatement and ambiguity of the last stanza: we know as well as the narrator that it’s not only the laughter that hurts.

Congratulations, Gillian, on a very moving poem. I’ll put your prize in the post.

And many thanks to everyone who posted a poem; I enjoyed reading them all and look forward to reading more during January. The first prompt will appear at the end of this week.

December Poem Prompt 1 - The End

My first challenge, as we're coming up towards the end of the year, is to write a poem about endings, or one particular ending.

Once you've decided on your subject matter, allow yourself to free-write around the material before trying to shape it into a poem. Don't edit and select during this process; try to be as honest as you can with the page. Once you've done enough free writing, try and identify the dominant emotional tone and be aware of that as you shape the poem on the page? Is there a tension to the material? Do you need short lines that cut the reader's breath to reflect that? Is there a burst of energy? Will longer exuberant lines support that? Do you need the 'containment' and control of a traditional form, e.g. a sonnet? Whatever you decide, try and work consciously with the form and let it reciprocate with the subject matter.

Post your poems via the 'comments' facility below and I look forward to reading them over the next few weeks.

In the meantime here's a poem of mine about one particular type of ending.

Late

My mother said Girl
you’ll be late for your own funeral.
She was right
but who could blame me for wanting
a last look at the waves
the smell of salt.

And you know the timelessness
of the sea and what was meant to be
a glimpse became three hours.

I picked up the sensible court shoes
and ran along the quay
through the town’s busy streets
regretting the choice
of Friday afternoon, the flesh coloured tights
fraying on my feet
but what struck me most
was the effortlessness of that run –
the silence of my heart
not a single squeeze of lung.

As I cornered the crematorium gates
and saw them hunched together
in the porch I thought of running
straight past their stricken faces
and across the memorial lawns
as if this was what I was made for

as if this was how I’d always
planned to spend the day.

From Learning How to Fall (Parthian 2005)