Poem Prompts for Middle Semester

Several On-going Poetry Writing Assignments 

12 February    

                                                                                                         

Directions:  Over the course of the next few weeks, try writing poems from the following descriptions.

Occasional poems

The occasional poem may just be poems that are inspired from time to time by something unusual or not common (the occasion). They may also be very intentional as with poems written for significant occasions like weddings or ordinations.  They may also be poems to be read on regular occasions, as with poems written for annual holy days or to be read within the regular worship context.

Begin by making a list of “occasions” for which a poem would offer some kind of focus, celebration, or significant observance. 

Then write a poem for those occasions, keeping in mind that the venue may carry its own limitations.

E.g., See "Notes for His High Calling" below.

E.g., "Romance of Air and Bones" may well be a Valentine's Day poem.  It is in my book Living on the Flood Plain.  I wrote it for my wife.

Romance of Air and Bones

Along the dead-end street

you and I walk hand in hand,

listening to the soft snow

drifting through this gray afternoon,

watching flakes light upon

our dark winter clothes.

When you speak,

dark-limbed trees lean in,

the sky brightens.

When you speak, your words

appear in the cold air,

land upon my ears and lashes,

white grows transparent

– your day my day float,

dance in air weightless as snow,

lightened by love and talk

– those ephemeral white crystals,

commonplace of true companions.

 

List poems

A list poem is simply that: it is a list. The list is usually of words that are related in some discernible and interesting way. In a list poem one make rhythm and cadence simply from sound rather than from sound and meaning. A way of talking about a list poem is that it attempts to do for the poetic form what the collage does as a kind of art. One is, in this way, interested in impressions arising from the relationship created by items in the list rather than from linear connections that characterize syntax.

E.g., See "Cairns" below. The "list" begin in line 8. "Cairns" can also serve as an "object" poem, with various stone references being the objects in question.

 

Object poems

An object poem attempts either to collect objects the way one collects items in a list or to begin with an object, nearly always named directly at some point, that is then treated imaginatively.

E.g., the following is one part of a three part poem I wrote for my youngest son's wedding:

 Cairns    1


Consider the hour when fog lies below first sun.
We find ourselves upon a path, familiar
yet new as morning is new.  Patterned
on Creation itself, each morning a new promise,

each calls us to look, to listen. To treasure it.

Fog lingers.  Light opens a way.  We step forward
trusting light, the path, the living of each step –
our journeys directed by the silent witness of stones.
Stones of our generations. Stones of struggle, of life.

Stone of fences, walls, roadways, of foundations and altars.

Gathered stone. Discarded and scattered, rubble of ice age
picked cleared hauled chosen, one stone worked upon another
boundary stones, memory stones, stonework beside cleared fields.
This stone, faithfulness.  That one, endurance.  Support.  Love.

Paving stones, companion stones, milestones.  Cairns.

Quarried stone.  Granite, marble. Pillar.  Foundation stones
laid and fitted. Cornerstone, stone of reference and alignment.
Witness of design.  Direction.  Witness of upheaval and weather. 
Whetstone, each in turn, for honing tools, talents, character.

Keystone.  Conjoining love and faith, the arch of marriage.

Precious stones, gold silver emerald.  A woman chosen.
A man refined. A marriage of partners, of character hewn by God.
Adorn your neck with love. Bind it to your wrist, your waist.
Etch faithfulness on the tablet of your hearts.

Trust.  Wisdom.  Ledge and bedrock.  Lodestone. Living stones.


1  Rough stones piled as memorials or landmarks

Allusion poems

Nearly all poems that fit the great traditions contain or employ allusions of one sort or another.  The allusions may be direct or implied.  They may be triggered from borrowed language, borrowed forms, borrowed ideas after the manner of “sampling” common in some forms of popular music today; or they may be triggered from less direct mimicking of sounds, phrasing, images, ideas, or references.

E.g., allusions in the following poem are fairly obviously taken from what we call the beatitudes. This poem is also a tribute to a member of the Houghton community; a tribute poem is usually a particular form of "occasion" poem.

Notes for This High Calling

                        a tribute to William T. Allen at fourscore

                                Matthew 5:14-16

Let us say:

Blessed are the common places,

                for they shall sustain us.

Blessed are the humble,

                for they shall guide our steps.

Blessed are the reticent, Blessed the quiet,

                for they shall point us to God,

                they shall open our ears.

On a curb at a village cross-

                roads late at night, passing

                among shadows, a trash bin

Painted after Van Gogh, redeemed

                by a copier, nameless artist,

                who turns our thoughts upward

                                in great darkness to starry songs of light,

Called to bear witness in this troubled world.

                We travel homeward through night –

                our journeys, somehow, enlightened.

Let us say:

Blessed are the un-likely,

                for they shall be called by name.

Blessed are the deep coals,

                for they shall be fanned to flame.

Blessed are the willing, Blessed the servant hearts,

                for their hands shall be calloused,

                they shall be given, abundantly.

Joy of spring dawning

                sun dazzling, bush burning,

                forsythia in bloom!

Joyously red at its heart

                all but hidden in aureolin, 

                a cardinal declaims

                                his song, pulsing, a many noted aria.

Called to witness, unwitting wonderers,

                we stand, arrested, air vibrant –

                our very souls aflame.

Let us say:

Blessed are the uncommon places,

                for they shall breathe life.

Blessed are the restless minds,

                for they are heir to the God of Creation.

Blessed is the deep welling, Blessed the music maker,

                who has brought us nearer to God

                and bids us listen.  Children, listen.

Landscape portraits

Keeping with our progression from paragraph to poem, description to poem, and image to poem, we want to vary our technique just a little to produce a poem that resembles a water color rather than an oil painting.

               Let’s begin by examining landscape photographs, thinking in particular of what we want inside the frame.

To do this examine the landscape photographs in the hall ways of the 2^nd and 3^rd floors of the Ch C. [What is “in” the picture?  What lies beyond the boundaries?]

Then go to several locations on campus to find and “frame” a landscape.  It may have human things in it but they must not be the only or even the central element of the landscape you have framed. Sketch it quickly (with words, probably) on paper.  One should involve one fairly close frame, one a distant frame, and one somewhere in between.

 This task is similar to the description task you were given before.  What is different primarily is the presence of a frame (a boundary or limitation to the descriptive subject itself) and a faster process (you are to "sketch" rather than "study" what is in the frame).

From these sketches, write a poem whose intention is to render the landscape.  You are interested in precision, economy, and telling details. What the poems mean ought to be descriptive. The poems themselves ought to be spare, economical, descriptively dynamic but not narrative.