Writing Prompts: Immediacy in Poetry

When I went back to poetry after so many years of just reading children’s poems to children, I had old forms in my head. Every line started with an upper case letter, proper sentence structure mattered, and I wasn’t aware of so many new ways to use poetry as art. Some things I learned over time were:

1. Initial caps on a line when it’s the middle of a sentence distract the reader and make it harder to understand the flow of the poem.
2. Begin and end a line on strong word if possible.
3. Write the poem, then go through and remove as many prepositions and conjunctions as possible. Slim the poem down to its essentials.
4. Use rhymes and meters only when they fit the subject and word choice. Try not to get trapped in them.
5. Build images by choosing good adjectives and adverbs. Don’t assume that your reader will visualize what you see if you don’t fill in the details.
6. If you can’t figure out how to make a line or verse work within a poem, use it in another poem. Sometimes, limiting complexity is necessary.

Working with myku on www.mykuworld.com is great for practicing an economy of words. If I use too many words, my line wraps, and the poem loses some of its visual beauty. Each myku teaches me more about expressing concepts in a nutshell. Writing haiku and senryu are similar, but there’s more freedom in a myku, and a little more space.

Here’s the first verse an early poem of mine about the local farmer’s market and the incredible women who work there, followed by one possible edit that is closer to the way I write today.

At the Farmer’s Market –First Verse

At the farmer’s market, women ply their wares,
Fruits of their labors- bread, honey, homemade soap, flowers.
Some days a profit made, some days not,
Yet they cannot cease their artistry.
Producing goods for others lets them keep some for themselves -
The money plowed back into fertile ground to grow more tomatoes,
To raise more chickens, goats and bees.
Some domestic art stays at home,
Stocking their sweet-scented larders,
Feeding their families and friends,
Communities knitted together with the wool spun from each woman’s spinning wheel.

At the Farmer’s Market –First Verse Rewritten

Farmer’s market women ply their labors’ fruits-
bread, honey, soap, flowers-
artistry unceasing.
At home, women plow
fertile ground to grow tomatoes,
raise chickens, goats, bees,
stock sweet-scented larders, feed families and friends,
knit communities together,
wool spun from each woman’s spinning wheel.

1. Try re-writing a poem that’s a year old. How would you do it now?
2. Use a simple visualization to remember somewhere you’ve been.
3. Write down all the details in prose.

Edit the lines by deleting prepositions and conjunctions. Take them all out, then put back only the ones that are essential. You may need to change some word order for each line to be understandable.
In the example above, Fruits of their labors transforms to labor’s fruits.

1. Change the verb tenses to simple present or past whenever possible.
2. Write a poem with a maximum of four words per line. Try three words.
3. Read some myku, haiku, and senryu to see what you think works well.

Anything can be a prompt for poetry. Last night, I wrote to my friends’ chatter on facebook. I wasn’t aiming for anything except to give them pleasure in a poem. One friend had earned a trophy in a facebook vampire game. Here’s what came out in his poem:

Vampire wars call him
to battle; triumph over
evil is so much simpler
than living his life.

Another said “Nitely-Nite!” as she headed off to bed. Here’s her poem:

Nightly, she climbs stairs,
climbs into bed,
climbs into herself,
climbs into his heart.

Tiny poems- micro-poetry- simple and plain, but poignant to me since they remind me of our friendships. They, and the others I wrote, are on mykuworld now.


Katherine A Minden ©2009