Twenty Little Poetry Projects

AGENDA:

Please look at previous post and post a response regarding Gendler's vignettes.  Which two do you find most effective as a writer?


Fool around. Enjoy. Don’t feel obliged to make
rational sense. This is an exercise. It’s not as difficult as it sounds at first, and you will surprise yourself!

1.  Begin the poem with a metaphor.
2.  Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
3.  Use at least one image for each of the five senses.
4.  Use one example of synaesthesia (mixing the senses)
5.  Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
6.  Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
7.  Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
8.  Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
9.  Use an example of false cause/effect logic.
10. Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect         and/or which you don’t understand).
11. Create a metaphor using the following construction; “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)…”
12. Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
13. Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in real life.
14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
15. Write in the future tense so that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
16. Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
17. Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.
19. Make a non-human object say or do something human (personification).
20. Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes’ an image from earlier in the poem.


Example Poem:

Glass Floats


1. My heart is a drowning dolphin
trapped in inattention’s drift nets
2. while your wife tries to interest me
  in an affair.
3. I sag against meshes,
numbed by the Arctic cold;
hear drum beats slow,
taste salt blood where
honey once sprang sweet.
4. Failure tastes like AC/DC
playing loud at the wrong speed.
5. Dr. Chico in Chicago
prescribes drugs, names with
6. lots of Z and X. Your wife’s not
really trying. It’s just me,
being needy.
7. Daytime TV, mindless, soporific
plays songs almost known, déjà heard
8. to a herd of numb, dumb stumblebums
9. who see and hear, therefore they are
and they know the answer when asked
10. “Who’s your baby now?”
11. The pretty parrots of play
12. fly like lead in my head.
I am as still as spit on a hot griddle –
13. I’ve invited your wife over for drinks.
14. DeeDee is not coping with rejection.
15. I will wash up on a strange beach soon,
stranded but still alive, eyes blind
from salt and sand, grateful for the
kindly care of well-intentioned strangers.
16. The rubber origami of my love
17. will always remember to forget you…
18. plus ca change, plus la meme
19. As rock carvings get new wardrobes, hairdos,
take planes to Paris for spring,
20. the glass floats at the ends of the nets
bob in the endless ocean.

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