Prose, poetry, pantoums and possibilities

I recently tried out this multi-part prompt of my own invention while subbing for a colleague in a writing group she leads. I often try new things that don't work, so I was delighted when this one generated at least two interesting results for each participant. I'll go through the prompt step-by-step, using my own results to illustrate what can happen...


Read aloud this excerpt from the novel Written in the Ashes (Balboa Press, 2011) by K. Hollan VanZandt:

Hanna crawled into bed that night beneath a shaft of moonlight that spilled through the little rectangular window high in the wall. The day had gone as well as could be expected, and yet she felt even more imprisoned. The cold bronze collar at her throat choked her tears. This beautiful place with its kind women would never really be her home. How could it?

Home was a field without a roof, and the sound of goat bells tinkling in the afternoon as the black-faced sheep and sprightly lambs trotted across the rugged slopes, her father calling to her across the meadow. Home was a thousand stars trailing through the sky in late summer above the humped shoulders of Mount Sinai as the locusts whirred in the night.

Home was far away and never, never again.

Create a character, complete with a name, and write a narrative piece that tells us about this character without using straight description, as the writer does in the example provided. I wrote:

Home to Maggie was yellow. A kitchen painted yellow because it was the only conceivable color besides beige to pair with the turquoise countertops the house came with. Home was the frantic search with her mother for just the right print that combined the two colors for the kitchen curtains. It was the smell of muslin, mercerized cotton thread and wet wool in her nostrils—her mother's smells—and a bench with a lid that lifted up to reveal a bounty of scraps Maggie would cut and wrap and tie with ribbons onto her dolls.

Home was yellow pads of ledger paper her dad brought home from the office for her to draw on. It was the warm glow inside when he called her "my little Margie," like the TV heroine.

Home was yellow fireflies blinking in the summer night as she dashed after them with her emptied-and-washed-clean mayonnaise jar. "Good job, Mags," her oldest brother would call out after she trapped one. "I bet I can get more than you, Naggie," her middle brother would tease. 

Home was also the "yell-o" from her mother that began with "Now Margaret Elizabeth..." not to run with glass in her hands. She'd slow her pace until mom looked away and drink in the yellow smell of the just-cut grass, as the steam set to rise from it in the early summer morning lay in waiting like welling tears beneath the snipped blades.

When Maggie moved here, to her own house, with her own family, she painted all the walls yellow, pale yellow—candleglow, the paint chip said—but it still didn't feel like home.

Outside, the grass had yet to germinate. And in the morning before the workers began pounding on the other houses in progress, the air was still and empty—no birdsong, no squirrels or chipmunks, no neighbor kids on swings or bikes. At mid-day, to stand on her new back porch was to feel as if she'd landed in the middle of a desert where all the houses looked the same on the outside and none with turquoise countertops inside, she bet.

Some teenager even bounced a basketball up her front sidewalk, rang the bell and asked why her house was so different from the others. So different to the other homesteaders, yet still not home to her.

Go through your narrative piece and underline about a dozen phrases or sentences that you feel call forth the strongest imagery. If the passage contains two or three images, count them individually. Write these selections on a separate sheet of paper, and skip lines between each. You may edit out small words or names that interrupt the image. I chose:

• the frantic search for just the right print
• the smell of muslin and wet wool in her nostrils—her mother's smells
• a bounty of scraps to cut and wrap and tie
• yellow pads of ledger paper to draw on
• fireflies blinking in the summer night
• she dashed after them with her emptied-and-washed-clean jar
• the yellow smell of just-cut grass 
• as the steam set to rise from it lay in waiting like welling tears beneath the snipped blades.
• candleglow, the paint chip said.
• Outside, the grass had yet to germinate.
• the air was still and empty
• in the middle of a desert where all the houses looked the same

Now cut apart the lines and rearrange to create an abstract poem. Create four-line stanzas, and in each new stanza reuse one or two lines from a previous stanza and add in two or three lines of new material. Write at least four stanzas, and make sure all the repeated lines stay the same. Here’s what I came up with, though it’s far from a finished piece:

Candleglow, the paint chip said…

The yellow smell of just-cut grass
waiting like welling tears
beneath snipped blades.
Yellow pads of ledger paper to draw on

beneath snipped blades,
the air still and empty,
the steam set to rise.
The yellow smell of just-cut grass,

the frantic search for just the right print,
a bounty of scraps to cut and wrap and tie,
fireflies blinking at dusk.
She dashed after them

with her emptied-and-washed-clean jar
the smell of muslin and wet wool in her nostrils—
her mother’s smell—a bounty of scraps
to cut and wrap and tie.

Outside the grass had yet to germinate,
a desert where all the houses looked the same:
yellow pads of ledger paper to draw on.
Candleglow, the paint chip said.

Follow the link to read about the poetic form called a pantoum, which involves an intricate pattern of repetition, and to read a modern-day example of a (broken) pantoum, "On Beauty" by Nick Laird, which also inspired the novel On Beauty by Laird’s wife, Zadie Smith.

As you rework your piece, does it call out to be structured as a pantoum? Which did you like better—the narrative or poetic version? What were the good points of each? The group I shared this prompt with thought their poem versions concentrated the images and told essentially the same stories as the narratives, but in a more emotion-packed way. At the least, it’s a lesson in approaching the same material from different angles.

Feel free to play with your results from this prompt over and over. Rearrange, add stanzas or choose different lines from the narrative. You can also use the image/poem part of the exercise with a prose piece you’ve already written. If you like what you come up with and want to share, email it to me and I'll post on the Your Words section of my website.

Have fun!

A Writer's Art

A tip of the hat to Beverly Crawford for allowing me to use her homage to Sherry Parker as my blog nameplate for a while.

Bev is a familiar face at my library writing workshops--one of the west side gang who often shows up on other sides of town as well. What she writes usually has the entire group laughing or crying or both.

I only recently learned about her whimsical digital art creations and challenges. Check out her full portfolio at  http://indybev.blogspot.com/.

I plan to change and/or rotate the art/photo in my blog header as the spirits move me. If you'd like me to consider something you've done, please email me. 

'History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman...'

The NPR news program All Things Considered has a new feature: Each month it will take on a "poet-in-residence" for a day. The poet will shadow workers, attend news meetings, become familiar with the stories of the day and how they come to be stories on air. Then, the poet will write a poem using that day's news as a prompt.

January news poet Tracy K. Smith was moved by the story of Nigerians fleeing violence in the north of their country, which she heard about at the morning news meeting. She told All Things Considered's Melissa Block that news events are often "things I am thinking about and wrestling with and trying to understand better." And what better way to do that than to write about them?

Smith had to write her poem "in a hurry," not unlike how writers write to timed prompts in my workshops. But she had the "luxury" of an entire day! Her poem written in a a hurry begins: 

     History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman
     Corralling her children onto a crowded bus.

Smith discusses her writing process with reporter Melissa Block. To read and/or listen to the interview and to read Smith's entire poem and hear her read it, click here.

Any day the glare of the empty page gets to you, try checking out your favorite news source. Scan the headlines from that day or the day before, read the stories that seem to reach out to you. Give yourself some time for ideas to dance around in your head, couple and rise to the surface. Then write whatever stirs your feelings the most. Free write at first, giving your thoughts free reign. There's plenty of time to edit later. You'll write your way into that place all on your own.

The Wolf is the Thing

PROMPT: Close your eyes and listen to the recordings of wolves at Wolf Park in Battle Ground, IN, near Lafayette. Let your mind wander. What thoughts, images, feelings present themselves to you? When I visited Wolf Park several years ago, I purchased a CD of these howls in the gift shop and used them as an audio prompt at a workshop. Stories emerged with widely varied themes-everything from peace and safety to fear and loneliness. What would happen if you let yourself really howl? I drew on my understanding of the wolf in dream imagery as the animal in us who cannot be ignored, who holds our heart's desire and wrote this...

Called

The wolf is the thing, you know—

that beast brooding in the switchbacks 

of every body's gut. 

He's the one we think will eat us up 

if we let him howl
who turns out to be 

the one who eats us up 

when we don’t.

Let him howl.

The Eyes (and Noses) Have It!

PROMPT: This poem had its origin in a strong image--rain and wind in spring making a shower of petals from flowering trees, which then collected in drifts where the sidewalk met the grass--and a strong, nearly over-powering scent. I sometimes ask writers to each contribute a strong image or scent to a list, then each writer can choose to write about his/her own suggestion or one someone else made. If you try this prompt, let the image, or smell, or both, take you to a new place, as in my poem the narrator moves from nature outside to a person inside. The "you" of the poem didn't literally smell like the apple blossoms, but the feeling evoked by the embrace and the unique smells accompanying it created the same sort of headiness--a figurative similarity. 

The Morning After

Rain stole the last of the apple blossoms

yesterday afternoon. I watched

still darker clouds gather overhead as

wind waltzed the petals from tree

to the grasses’ greedy arms.

Soon the wind grew jealous and

pitched the petals to the desert of sidewalk where

when it would not reign its temper in

grass gathered the petals to itself in drifts

like a fence in winter will snow.

I staggered up the straight path to my front door

so punch-drunk with the breeze that I 

thought I saw Krishna dance before the cow maidens,  

luring them with the music of his flute

toward the sheltered spot

under the tree.

The morning after was when

you stepped from the shower and held me.

And the scent of soap and damp

where my nightgown met your skin was

the same.

Writing from Sandpaper

PROMPT: A well-worn scrap of sandpaper. Often I put out a collection of objects for writers to choose from, but this particular object is apt to draw a very different response from each person. It reminded me of my husband, whose shop I confiscated it from, and the many things he's made for me--including dinner!

Writing from Sandpaper

His smell whiffs from

the bracken of grit     halted

on this scratched scrap.

It’s the part of him that's

buff and press and snow—

his pattern as it smooths its way

into my tables

     my shelves

          my chairs.

Into a cabinet of earrings singing secrets.
Into an island where herbs chiffonade

in time with the melting sun.

Smooth, so smooth this shaven skin

limber with sweat and callous:

his, mine, this life.

Beneath the Roar of the Grinder...

PROMPT: A sound and the emotional response it calls forth in the writer. The sound I chose was a coffee grinder, but others may work better for you--a tea kettle whistling, an alarm clock or clock chime, a train whistle, footsteps on stairs or a sidewalk, a knock on a door, a dripping faucet or hose, splashing in a pool, rain. I usually suggest several but allow writers to choose one of their own. Or you could go around the writing table and ask each person to contribute one to create a list of sounds all can draw from. Write in the direction of uncovering something new about yourself; see if a metaphoric quality emerges. Concentration on one of the senses may make you more aware of other sensory data as you write. For instance, my example begins with sound but appeals to sight, taste, smell and feeling as well. My title also serves double-duty as first line of the poem, but it's not necessary for yours to do that.

Beneath the Roar of the Grinder…

Beneath the shoosh
     and splutter
          of scalded
               spit-out water…

Beneath the
     schmush of the scoop
          like the child’s
               tin-painted shovel in sand…

Is the coffee 

dark and bitter

like me:

Pressed from a hard shell.

Perfume of first light.