Exercise
I needed to get something (anything!) written quickly in order to meet my two-poems-per-week quota. Click below for the exercise itself:
The evening smarts like a wet towel on skin—
the mockingbird in her cage above my desk
doing the Charleston, kicking up feathers
that smell like seed, belting a cherry tune.
Ethel Waters you called her, and called her
wrought-iron cage the Speakeasy. Only she isn't
a mockingbird at all. I don't know what kind of
bird she is. I know the stars are doing their
thing again now that the clouds have shoved off.
Sky-bling someone called them because
the season for planetarium hopping had passed.
How do you spell w-a-t-e-r-l-o-g-g-e-d?
the boy asked me, as though I were the dumbest
contestant in life's quiz show. The foyer was
long as a mouse hole, and I folded it up like
an origami bird—Miss Two-Step with an extra
foot just for laughs.
When Ethel falls off her perch
it will rain diamonds for weeks. The bars will turn
licorice. The world will begin to wobble. I'll know
you by the phrases you never use in conversation.
Sic transit gloria mundi. Ethel crooning from
the other side. The feathers in your headdress flying
back to their resurrected birds.
-------------------------------
By Jim Simmerman. Collected in The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises by Poets Who Teach. Eds. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. NY: Harper Perennial, 1992.
- Begin the poem with a metaphor.
- Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
- Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
- Use one example of synesthesia.
- Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
- Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
- Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
- Use a word (slang?) you've never seen in a poem.
- Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
- Use a piece of 'talk' you've actually heard (possibly in dialect and/or which you don't understand).
- Create a metaphor using the following construction: "the (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)..."
- Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
- Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in real life.
- Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
- Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
- Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
- Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
- Use a phrase from a language other than English.
- Make a nonhuman object say or do something human.
- Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that echoes an image from earlier in the poem.
Comments
I love this, Ginger! I've done this exercise before, but yours is WAY better than mine was... doesn't read like an exercise at all...
Posted by: Nate | April 29, 2006 01:28 PM
Thanks, Nate! I'm flattered.
Posted by: Ginger | April 30, 2006 10:03 PM