Capturing a ritual

The following poem is taken from 'Poems on the Underground' :

Loving the Rituals

Loving the rituals that keep men close,
Nature created means for friends apart:

pen, paper, ink, the alphabet,
signs for the distant and disconsolate heart.

Palladas (4th Century AD)
trans. by Tony Harrison

The ritual of letter writing might not be as prevalent in our lives as it was, but we have other rituals, don't we? We might call them habits... although if there's something comforting in them, an aspect of the activity that gives us something - pleasure, delight, comfort - then perhaps we should refer to them as rituals.

At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I've got into the habit of picking up my cat in the mornings and looking out of the window with her. We look at birds, clouds, the neighbours leaving for work. I can feel her heartbeat under my palm. I feel very still.

I have a ritual of never leaving the house without kissing my husband goodbye.

When he worked as a professional entertainer and got home in the early hours of the morning I used to leave out a china mug, with the teabag and sugar already in it, and the kettle ready to boil.

I think we need rituals of some kind in our life, and while they can be religious or spiritual, I don't believe they necessarily have to be in order to connect us to ourselves or other people, or entities.

Can you capture a ritual in 4 lines? Well, perhaps 8 at the most : ) Aim for concentration.

I'll work on one myself.

Write well.
L x

Begin at the Beginning

Thanks to Erin for suggesting a poetry prompt where we start with a title and see what evolves. And in honour of St. David's Day (Patron Saint of Wales), today 1st March, here are some titles from poems written by Welsh poets during the last 510 years : )

Choose one, and run with it. Or choose several and do some relays. And share your final draft with us, please.

The Angry Summer
Blood Donor
Day Trip
Every Single Night
Foal
Getting It Wrong Again
Interlude
Let's Hear It for Goliath
My Grandfather and His Apple Tree (perhaps change apple-tree to something else?)
Sliding
Thoughts on Happiness
X-Ray

Write well.
L x

February Rain

We've had a pretty wet winter here on the Cote d'Azur. And just when I think it's over (yesterday was delivered into blue skies and sunshine and 15 degrees) it starts again. Fine rain, but so much of it that it's like pushing through a curtain.

During the first ever writing course I went on (Poetry and Rock-Climbing, I kid you not!, at Ty Newydd in North Wales) we were asked to write down all the different words and phrases we knew of to describe rain...

...drizzle, shower, flurry, patter, picking with rain (that's South Wales), deluge, driving rain, squall, monsoon, drenching rain, soaking rain, torrential rain, cloudburst, bucketing down...

I'm sure you could go on. So please do go on. And on.

Read about rain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain

Google for images about rain. I love this one.

And then think about and write in response to the following:
1. What colours and emotions do you associate with rain?
2. What memories emerge when you think about rain?

I've just remembered a trip to Paris a few years ago and it started to rain when we were still 20 minutes from the hotel. Monsoon-like rain that rose in waves from the gutters as the cars passed. You can only get so wet. After that it doesn't matter.

I look forward to reading your rainy poems, celebrations, memories, complaints, elegies. All of them.

Lynne x


Rain

Rain is the sky’s way of forgetting.
Mist drags over your face. You can only see
the gaps between trees, can’t make yourself small enough
to hide from yourself and the windows
keep letting in rain.

Write ‘cunt’
in salt on the kitchen table, imagine him
slipping into the hills’ slatey folds, the earth
closing over.

Rain for days.
The river rocked with stones, the bridge carved
with someone else’s name. You walk the lanes
sit on gates and watch sheep
mist shrouding the peaks
the sky trying to forget.

from Learning How to Fall.

December Poetry Prompt 1 - Keeping it Anonymous

A Scandal in the Suburbs

We had to have him put away,
For what if he'd grown vicious?
To play faith healer, give away
Stale bread and stinking fishes!
His soapbox preaching set the tongues
Of all the neighbors going.
Odd stuff: how lilies never spin
And birds don't bother sowing.
Why, bums were coming to the door—
His pockets had no bottom—
And then-the foot-wash from that whore!
We signed. They came and got him.

X.J. Kennedy
In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

XJ Kennedy's poems is a rant, and a defense, and a contemporary spin on the biblical story. I like how no names are mentioned but we are absolutely sure of what we're reading because of certain details: bread, fishes, lilies, footwash...

Can you write a poem about a famous, or infamous person, that does not mention them by name, either in the title or the text, but still make it clear who the poem is about?

To make things a little more challenging, try and keep the poem to a maximum of 12 lines too.

You can either write the poem in the voice of your chosen character, or adopt the voice of an 'observer' as in the case of this poem.

And remember, a poem needs to be 'about' something too. It needs to be the vehicle for an idea, or ideas. 'A Scandal in the Suburbs' is not just about the Jesus story, it makes me think about how easily we judge people, how we find ways to defend our actions. It's about fear of difference. Perhaps of change.

Good luck and write well. And enjoy the holidays.
Lynne
x

April Poetry Prompt: To This May... you add your own poem.

To This May

They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes

W.S. Merwin
Present Company
Copper Canyon Press, 2007

There's something so gentle and rhythmical and profound about WS Merwin's poem. I hope you enjoy it. And once you have, try the following exercise:

1. Write out the poem leaving a free line between each one.
2. Write your own lines between each of Merwin's lines, and one at the end, that link to the one before and the one after. You might have to change some syntax, fiddle with tenses etc.
3. You should end up with an 18 line poem that makes some kind of sense!
4. Leave it to one side for a few days before looking back over it to see if you think there's a poem worth keeping. Or a poem that's asking to be released.

Write well.
Lynne

March Poetry Prompt 2 - What we didn't know then

For the second of this month's writing prompts I thought we could stay with childhood, or at least locate ourselves at a specific time in our past.

This is an exercise in stages. It's probably best to attempt each stage as you read it, rather than reading ahead, but not to worry if you can't do that.

Imagine a photograph of yourself when you were much younger.

Take your time to let it appear clearly in your mind. Take a good look at it.

Begin with the phrase: In this one I am...

1.
Describe what you can SEE in the photo e.g. what you’re wearing, what you’re doing, who’s next to you, what the weather’s like, what’s behind you, anything in scene.

2.
Now describe what happened just before the photo was taken, or even earlier in the day, perhaps what you were doing, or what someone else was doing.

3.
Now use the phrase I don’t know yet... and describe something/s that will happen later in your life, that you have no knowledge of at the time of the photo.

Follow whatever comes up in your memory. If something leads you away from the photo/scene that has a lot of energy then follow it.

When you've finished writing, put your draft away for a few days before reading back over it and seeing if it can be shaped into a poem.

Good luck.

January Poetry Prompt 1 - Wonderful Surprise

Well, here's the first prompt for 2009. I hope you enjoy this and the ones to come during the rest of the year, and enjoy exploring what you want to say, or need to say, or even discover what you never thought you could or would say!

It might be useful if you write in response to each of these instructions before scrolling down to read the poem the exercise is inspired by. That way you'll have your own, imaginative draft to work with during your editing processes.

You don't have to restrict yourself to concrete images, but they will help a reader 'feel' the scenes you create, so think about including things you can see, touch, hear, taste, smell, as well as making direct statements. But most of all, let your imagination run riot.

1. Imagine you are standing in the middle of emptinesss.
2. Fill it with something so it is no longer empty.
3. Now start walking and see what you filled the emptiness with everywhere else you go.
4. Keep walking and seeing it around you in different locations.
5. How long will you keep on walking and seeing it?
6. You will find something else, something that creates a vivid contrast - describe it.

Here's a poem by Kelly Cherry:

Song of the Wonderful Surprise

Start with the fact of space; fill it up
with snow. There will be snow in the sky,
snow on the ground, snow in the mysterious courtyards.
You taste snow's tang, smell snow, feel snow on your face.
If you walk forever, you will not come to a place with no snow,
but one day, looking around, you will find
a green apple hanging from a spray of snow.


Kelly Cherry
from God's Loud Hand
Louisiana State University, 1993

Write well. I look forward to reading your poems.
Lynne

November - Poetry Prompt 1

Often I don't know what I want to write until I start writing, and occasionally I'm surprised by what I discover. Here's a writing exercise in stages that might take you to a place, or encourage you to make connections, you hadn't though of.

1.
Write a list of constants in the world that are general, universal: e.g. the sun rises, tides ebb and flow, politicians keep on lying... be specific and aim for about 10 to 12.

2.
Write another list of constants in your own life: trivial and profound, silly and serious. Again be specific, e.g. I cry at sad films, I wash clothes that get dirty and I have to wash them again, I visit my parents.

3a. Choose one of these personal constants, one that involves some kind of activity/process and explore and expand on it, fill in the concrete details of what happens, what you have to do, what it feels like physically, etc. Start with the line: Perhaps this is how everything will always be…

3b. When you come to the end of this activity/process, look beyond yourself, physically and/or imaginatively and write down what you find, what is there, what you can see, what you feel.

4. Read back over your writing and identify the dominant emotional tone. Does the form (the shape of the poem on the page) support that? Do your line breaks add tension, or comfort? Think about what effect you want the shape of your poem to have on your reader.

Here’s a rough draft of a poem I wrote while creating this exercise. It’s very unfinished but I feel it has the core of something I want to say... though the theme isn’t quite clear enough yet, I don’t think. I’ll have to work on it some more.

Looking forward to reading your poems.



Perhaps this is how everything will always be

I leave my mother’s house
turn left along the sweep of Silver Avenue
and cross the road towards the sea,
over the crazed tarmac on the prom
where the sweetshops used to be
and down the concrete steps
where the tide is in, or out.
And if it’s in I sit and listen
to the waves breaking,
and if it’s out I walk
the flat plain of damp sand
to reach the shore,
my face sticky with salt.
And beyond the horizon someone else
leaves their mother’s house
walks towards another sea
wanting to believe this
is how everything will always be.

It’s a French thing…

Almost everyone here takes a break in July and August, so AppleHouse Poetry Online will be doing the same. It will give me some time to paint more than a few walls in Villa Les Marronniers, and hopefully to get down to some writing myself. And reading… I have missed reading so much. So, all in all, I’m likely to be the palest person on the Cote d’Azur this year!

But so as not to leave you bereft for the summer, and if you have time in between barbecues, airport terminals and shaking sand out of towels, here’s a list of 10 prompts for poems/free writing over the next couple of months. I’ll choose a Best of Summer Prize Poem at the beginning of September from all those posted, and I’ll pop into the comments box from time to time too.

Take care, bonnes vacances, and write well.
Lynne x

AppleHouse Poetry Online Summer School Prompts

1. Experiment with writing at times you normally wouldn’t, for example:
a. the moment you wake up
b. in the dark without the light on
c. in a moving vehicle (but preferably not driving!)
d. while having a bath

2. Write a poem about how you have, or will, forgive someone or something.

3. Write about a time when you were lost, literally or figuratively. Maybe include both in one poem.

4. Open a dictionary half a dozen times at random and write down a word each time. Write a poem that includes all those words.

5. Walk in a place that you think is ugly and find something beautiful there. Write about it.

6. Write about salt.

7. Take the first line of a poem (preferably one you’re not familiar with) and carry on writing your own.

8. Write a page of statements about yourself that are completely false. Now add phrases like: I am, I have never, I will, I believe. Use repetition to try and convince your reader of their truth.

9. Write down five sounds you can hear. Then list the things you associate with those sounds. A car engine might remind you of being picked up at the station. The clanking of crockery of the time you worked as a waitress. See where these associations take you.

10. Brainstorm for associations – words, phrases, images, memories, emotions – around ‘heat’. Keep going until you feel there is nothing left to write. Then make yourself write some more even though it feels impossible. What we need to say often lies deeper than we realise.

June Poetry Prompt 1 - Words and Image

There’s a strong poetic tradition of poems written in response to works of art, and I have a great book, Voices in the Gallery (sadly out of print but available second-hand on Amazon), edited by Danny and Joan Abse, that’s an anthology of poems and their corresponding paintings and sculptures.

The first prompt this month is to write a poem in response to Van Gogh’s painting above. There are several ways of ‘entering’ a visual image in order to write a poem and here are a few suggestions that might get you going. But please respond to the painting in any way you'd like:

1. You can describe the picture. You can say what it makes you think and feel. But remember description is not just about decoration, it needs to be significant too i.e. it needs to mean something, it needs to carry ideas and themes.
2. You can let the picture act as a ‘trigger’. It might remind you of something in your own memory and you take that journey and leave the picture behind.
3. Voice 1 – You can become one of the characters in the picture and give an account of your experience, your pre-occupations and dreams.
4. Voice 2 – You can adopt the voice of someone or something that’s outside of the painting, e.g. a character’s mother, their next-door neighbour, or even the artist himself.

I look forward to reading your work.

April Poem Prompt 2 - Take a colour, any colour

In March I had a haiku published on tinywords:

all this green forgiving the rain

which I wrote as I was driving home from Wales last year (there can't be many literary forms you can write, edit and re-edit in your head as a complete thing!) and anyone who was living in the UK last summer will remember the amount of rain we had between the end of May and the beginning of August.

The green in this haiku is the literal green of the landscape but green has other associations too, e.g. youth, naivety and jealousy.

Here are a couple of groundwork 'colour' exercises:

1. Choose a colour and brainstorm for associations around it: single words and phrases, concrete objects, emotions, songs, familiar expressions, whatever comes into your head. Keep making random notes for at least 10 minutes.

2. Working with the same colour: .......... is the colour I remember. Continue writing for at least 10 minutes.

3. Now look at the colour wheel above and, using the opposite colour to your choice, write freely about what you like and don't like about this colour, what it reminds you of, what it makes you feel. You might even try addressing the colour directly, e.g. you were my school years, or, you're the taste of guilt... .

By this stage you might already feel the theme and shape of a poem emerging. If so, work your ideas and images into a draft then let it sit for a day or two before going back to edit. If you're still stuck, don't read back over your notes. Leave them for about a week and look over them then; it's possible that something will strike you as worth working with when you have a little bit of distance.

Happy writing.

Happy Birthday to Billy Collins

That's not today's Poem Prompt! Although if you feel inspired to write a poem with that title, then please go ahead.

But today is Billy Collins' birthday, as announced on The Writer's Almanac. Follow the link (it's the 22nd March entry in the archive if you look it up after today) or read the text below. My suggestion for your own poem follows.

Today is the birthday of poet Billy Collins, born in New York in 1941. Collins is both a critically acclaimed and popular poet, a unique combination in the world of modern poetry. Collins began writing poems at age 12. He devoured all the poetry he read, especially the contemporary poems in Poetry magazine. In an interview, Collins explained, "I remember reading a poem by Thom Gunn about Elvis Presley, and that was a real mindblower because I didn't know you could write poems about Elvis Presley. I thought there was poetry — what you read in class — and then when you left class there was Elvis. I didn't see them together until I read that poem."

Collins began selling his poems to Rolling Stone for $35 a pop in the 1970s. He married Diane Olbright in 1977 and published his first book of poems, Pokerface, that year, but it wasn't until the publication of Questions About Angels in 1991 that he began drawing critical attention. His other major poetry collections are The Apple that Astonished Paris (1988), The Art of Drowning (1995), Picnic, Lightning (1998), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), Nine Horses: Poems (2002), and The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (2005).

Collins' style is light, humorous, and fond of extended metaphor. He uses mundane situations as diving boards into the larger philosophical questions of life. His poem "Forgetfulness" starts this way:

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Collins said, "Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."

Any my challenge today is to write a poem using The Collins Approach: use a mundane situation as a diving board into the larger philosophical questions of life.

Looking forward to reading your work.

March Poem Prompt 2 - A Simple Wish

It's easy in our sophisticated, fast-moving world to overlook the simple things, and that includes writing too, and we can often read too quickly over what appears rather simple and straightforward. I have to remind myself to read differently when I pick up a book of poems, not to be in a hurry to turn the page, to find out what it has to offer. If I slow down, with the right poems, of course, then there is more of a chance I will uncover riches.

I've had Kate Barnes' collection, Kneeling Orion, for some time now, but I can't remember reading the following poem. I was obviously in too much of a rush. But before you read it, have a go at the following exercise first.

1. You wake up and hear something. What is it?
2. The sound reminds you of something. Describe it using precise concrete language.
3. Make a wish for someone or something. Someone connected to that memory or event.

Once you have the first draft of your own poem, read Kate Barnes' 'Wishes'. Look at how she's shaped her poem on the page, her line breaks, her lovely rhymes - both internal and line end that add music to her poem - and work with the shape, lineation, and rhythms of your poem to reinforce your theme and emotional tone.


Wishes

Waking before dawn, I hear
first one shot, then
three or four, and it isn't even
light yet. I think of how, at night,
the deer lie down in the big field, of their beds
in the rowen hay, the way
they turn their heads when anyone enters
their wide, starry chamber;
................................and I wish that buck
a whole skin, and no luck
to hunters.

Kate Barnes
from Kneeling Orion

Buy now at The Book Depository

January Poem Prompt 2 - Seeing what isn't there

Susan Wicks's latest collection, De-iced, closes with a wonderful series of poems on 'the fictional painter Graham Mickleworth', each poem written in response to an imagined painting, and what I enjoy so much about these is the illusion that the poet, and by extension the reader, is standing before the paintings and examining the details.

The following poem asks us to consider a painting of a leaf that looks like a bird that looks like a leaf. Perhaps we’ve all had similar experiences, both accidental and deliberate: a sliver of plastic on the floor that looks like a slice of sunlight, or mistaking a folded jacket on a chair for a sleeping cat. Why does this happen? Do we have a need, conscious or unconscious, to make connections between things? Or is just our brain playing meaningless tricks on us?

Write a poem in which you perceive one thing as another (either accidentally or on purpose) and explore the questions this raises, what it makes you think and feel, the journey you take.


Portrait of a Leaf as Bird

How good of this small grey leaf
to pose as bird
so still in the middle of the road!

How kind not to fly away
as the artist approached,
to curb its sharp claws and beak

and let him paint leaf-as-bird
and bird-as-leaf
and put his irrelevant questions about flight

and stillness
seeing and not quite seeing
whether or not life is

feathered and wing-tip singing
and bird-brain lifted
small beating heart

or else this crumpled thing
he painted in careful shades
of grey, and brown.

Susan Wicks
from De-iced (Bloodaxe 2007)

Buy now at The Book Depository

January Poem Prompt 1 - Thinking about Couplets

Two lines of poetry working as a unit are known as a couplet. They can be syntactically complete in themselves, or they can employ enjambment and rely on the previous or succeeding couplet/s to complete the thought or image.

Couplets can have a feeling of isolation on the page - there's all that white space surrounding them - or maybe it's not isolation or loneliness, maybe it's aloneness, self-containment. Maybe they can act as a celebration of that white space and what it represents to you.

My challenge to you is to write a poem whose subject matter and theme deserves being shaped into couplets. Your reasons do not have to be the same as any I've suggested above, but try to be aware of the reciprocation of form and content.

And one other thing: couplets tend to draw attention to themselves so make sure that each couplet has some power, something to show or say for itself, even if it does run on to the next.

Good luck. And here's a poem by the wonderful Catherine Smith to inspire you.

Ascension
On 6th July 2005, a fifteen year old girl sleep-walked from her home in East Dulwich and was spotted at 2 a. m., curled fast asleep on the counterweight of a crane.

She doesn’t register
the slap of pavement

underfoot
then the grip

of each rung
as she ascends

towards the sky –
­a mild night,

stars winking
over the library,

the railway station,
the Curry Club.

She’s not dreaming this,
she’s not dreaming

anything. Something
drives her upwards ­

to curl her body
on cooled steel

rest her cheek
against the dust

and pigeon shit,
unaware

she could roll off
like a pea on the blade

of a knife, and her
mouth opens,

bubbles spit,
her limbs still warm

from the tangled nest
of sheets ­–

she’s not dreaming this,
she’s not dreaming

anything, she’s risen
above the tilt

of the earth,
she’s risen

as high as she can,
as high as this.

from Lip
Smith/Doorstop Books 2007

Buy now at Amazon

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)