Writing the Life Poetic

The Write Direction: December Poetry Prompt

By M and Steve Williams

As practicing poets, we work hard on our craft. As we toil, sweat, and agonize over our words, we can all take ourselves and our writing too seriously at times. So this month, we’re going to give ourselves a much needed break and play a party game -- one we found in The Everything Writing Poetry Book: A practical guide to style, structure, form, and expression by Tina D. Eliopulos and Todd Scott Moffett.

These kind authors introduced us to a poetry form we’d never heard of, and we hope it will be new to you too. It’s called “Bouts-Rimés,” and it started as a party game. Literally translated from the French, it means “end rhymes,” though the form doesn’t have to include rhymes at all.

The rules are simple. The foundation of a Bouts-Rimés poem is a list of words supplied to you by someone else. You must place these words at the end of each line of your poem. For example, if the word list supplied to you is suddenly, mouth, gut, eye, solar, in, more, indifference, cheek, then the first line of the poem must end with suddenly, the second line with mouth, and so on down the list. Given that list of words, you could end up with a nine-line poem like this:

All of a sudden passion suddenly
slaps you across the mouth
punches you in the gut
spits right in your eye
then cuts left of your solar
plexus and you take it in
and you ask for more
and your indifference
turns its other cheek

One of the rules of the game is that you can’t change the spelling of the words on your list – for instance, if you’re give the word light, you can’t alter it to lights or lightly. However, you are free to use the word as a noun (“I turned off the light”), a verb (“He’ll light / the fire”), or an adjective (“She has a light / touch”)." 

Following is a list of nineteen words we chose completely at random from a number of different poetry books by poets who have widely divergent styles, and therefore, widely divergent vocabularies. We simply closed our eyes, opened the books to any page and pointed, so we refuse to take any responsibility for these words: 

1. stragglers
2. clink
3. vulgar
4. reading
5. sundown
6. number
7. apricots
8. solar
9. wearing
10. park
11. California
12. sandwiches
13. ears
14. gray
15. walk
16. felonies
17. cadence
18. inconceivable
19. episode
20. ?

Your challenge this month is to write a 20-line poem using the list of words given as the ending words on each of your lines, i.e., stragglers should end line one, clink should end line two, etc. You can’t change the form of the word, but feel free to get creative with parts of speech (use the word as a noun, verb, adjective, etc.). What about the twentieth and final word? That one’s up to you. It can be any word you like or one you select at random. Just open any book like we did, close your eyes and point.

Since this is a party game, have fun. Don’t take the exercise too seriously. Be spontaneous. Strange things can happen when you let loose, and when complete control over the final product has been taken out of your hands by someone else’s list of words that you otherwise might never have thought to use. Think about children’s marvelous ability to be creative and free when they’re playing games.

You just might surprise yourself with how much you like the work that comes out of this exercise. While you may not end up with the perfect, finished poem, chances are good that you’ll get at least a line or two that you can use again.

If you're a member of a regular poetry-writing group, feel free to play this game at your next meeting. Just have everyone make their own list of words, and then pass them to another member of the group. It’s a great game to get your party started!

* * * * * 

M has served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past one hundred years or so. More than a few editors have found her poems acceptable, and included them in their journals. She received her B.A. in Literature so long ago, she’s pretty certain her diploma has crumbled to dust. She also serves as an administrator of on online poetry workshop called Wild Poetry Forum. If you cannot find her (she never answers her cell phone), call Powell’s Books. The employees there know exactly what room she’s in. And most importantly, she is very grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.

* * * * *

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Suffering from blank page-itis?

Join Writing the Life Poetic zine columnists Steve Williams and M for a workshop that will fill your page. These gurus of the poetry prompt say, "We will focus on new work generation and provide you with a jumping off point not only for that day, but for months to follow."

Mapping Your Childhood

How well do you remember your old neighborhood? And when was the last time you thought about what happened there during your childhood? For this Mapping Your Childhood Workshop, we will be journeying back in time to those places, people, and events that played a significant role in your development. Using maps you will draw (no prior drawing experience required), and prompts you will be given (such as “think back to a time when you couldn’t stop laughing”), you will bring the place alive again and use what you find there as fertile sources to jump start your writing. If you are suffering from blank page-itis, and no matter whether you prefer fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, poetry, young adult or children’s writing, this is the workshop for you. You will be given time for free writes based on the maps you’ve drawn and the prompts you’re given, and you will be encouraged to share what you’ve written with other workshop attendees. Please join us. We think you will be amazed by what you will find hiding in that old tree house or down at the playground!

Sunday, December 13th from 1-3pm
Cost: $25

The 100th Monkey Studio
110 SE 16th Ave
Portland, OR 97214
503-232-3457

Learn more!

The Write Direction: October Poetry Prompt

By M and Steve Williams

Ever heard the saying “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure?” Well, we took it literally to come up with this month’s prompt for you. If you’re anything like us, your junk mail folder fills up on a daily basis with all kinds of missives from people you’ve never heard of. 

Dietra Eelexup wrote us just the other day to tell us that Hollywood stars threw up! (the exclamation point was Dietra’s – we suspect she feels quite strongly about this) and Hanifi Seu wanted us to know he had a wild kingdom in his pants (lions and tigers and bears, oh, my).  

Yes, junk mail can range from the highly amusing to the entirely aggravating. But before you press that delete key, consider that some of those e-mails can spark ideas for poems you might never have thought of on your own.  

As administrators of an online poetry workshop, our e-mail addresses have found their way onto some very weird and wonderful lists. Following are some of the best subject lines that we’ve received, and they run the gamut from absurd to strangely evocative. We offer them to you in hopes that they will trigger your own poetic process:  

• Create Perception (via Area Rugs)
• I’ll show you how far the rabbit hole goes
• And I don’t care if he does limp
• The fishwife was not paying him the slightest attention
• One of the voyeuristic booths in the affectionate bar
• We’ll all be armed with pistols, one in each hand
• Check one-two. Is this thing on?
• Old Beppo sat down again
• Much like the unicorn, it is also delicious
• The eight-passenger train on the electric monorail
• infected short order cook
• Due to the improved flavor and texture, this is the best thing that ever happened to me
• accidental fundraiser
• Facetious behavior adopted by an accused man in the mistaken belief that this will endear him to the judge
• Try foolhardy phrasemaking
• Hang pictures with no tools or use of studs
• Impromptu cream puff
• Join millions of men in the revolution
• Very-very magic stick
• cluttercontrolfreak
• miserly onlooker
• At first this all sounds reasonably secure, but there are still a few problems with the fundamental design
• wobbly cashier
• We must go and get some things first
• Soft Eden
• ungodly apartment building
• Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions – it was just so much crap to me
• As it was, I felt as if I stood in the midst of a large map, surrounded by vague areas wherein were penned visages of particularly nasty-looking random variables
• A pretty-pretty fly
• secretly a midwife
• Did you get that on film, man?
• Maybe that’s them now
• Brother Flock Higher
• It’s what I painted on my wall
• When the string is rendered into an image, it will be struck through
• All girls like the big guys
• unseemly ball bearing
• Contact Victor Sly
• Therefore, a non-static inline function is always compiled on its own in the usual fashion
• There was still a threat, but now he understood it better, and, as was true of all great threats, it held great promise

Your mission this month is to use one of the above junk mail subject lines as the inspiration for a poem. We suggest you try to use it as a title and see what develops from there. Titles can be directly tied to a poem’s content, they can loosely apply, or they can have nothing to do with the poem’s subject matter. The choice is up to you.  

And to make this prompt a bit more challenging, write all of these subject lines on little slips of paper, put them in a hat, and select one at random. Write a poem based on the first subject line you choose, whether it initially appeals to you or not. Often, when you remove conscious choice from the equation, the results can be extraordinary. Something that held no interest to you on first glance can begin to evolve into something truly exciting the longer you turn it over in your mind – leading you to thoughts and language even you didn’t know was buried within you.

* * * * * 

M has served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past one hundred years or so. More than a few editors have found her poems acceptable, and included them in their journals. She received her B.A. in Literature so long ago, she’s pretty certain her diploma has crumbled to dust. She also serves as an administrator of on online poetry workshop called Wild Poetry Forum. If you cannot find her (she never answers her cell phone), call Powell’s Books. The employees there know exactly what room she’s in. And most importantly, she is very grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.

The Write Direction: Summer Poetry Prompt

By M and Steve Williams

Whether new to poetry or creating poems for a lifetime, all writers fear the blank page. There it sits – that huge expanse of white, like a frozen tundra, just waiting for us to come along and fill it with something.

What are we going to say and how are we going to say it? We stare, we tap our pencils on our desks, we start to sweat. Where do we start?

Often, looking to some very offbeat or unique sources can help get your first words onto the paper. For example, take a look at the following fortune cookie fortunes. (Yes, these are all real fortunes that popped up in real cookies). Fortune cookie sayings were originally based on bible verses and proverbs, but these days almost anything goes:

You find beauty in ordinary things. Do not lose this ability.
Your everlasting patience will be rewarded sooner. Or later.
Be mischievous and you will not be lonesome.
A modest star never talks to itself.
Don’t ask. Don’t say. Everything lies in silence.
You can always find happiness at work on Friday.
A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.
The old pot is best around the kitchen.
Stay off the back roads.
A nice cake is waiting for you.
The blonde at the next table is eyeing you.
Much more grows in the garden than that which is planted there.
It’s about time I got out of that cookie.
The rubber bands are heading in the right direction.
Don’t kiss an elephant on the lips today.
Now is the time to make circles with mints.
You love Chinese food.
You will receive a fortune, Cookie.
Do not follow the instructions of this fortune.
Help! I am being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery.
You have unusual equipment for success. Use it properly.
Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom.
The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.
When planning your future always include pretzels.
Never believe what a mime tells you.
Don’t ask strangers questions in an elevator.
Be as willing to take napkins as to give them.
Never reach for the stars. They are hot balls of gas and will give you bad burns.
The current year will bring you many light bulbs.
The next fortune cookie you read will be better than this one.

This month’s prompt is to use one of the above fortune cookie sayings as the inspiration for a poem. The only other requirement is that the fortune cookie saying you have selected must appear somewhere in the poem in its entirety. You may use it as the first line, the last line, or somewhere in the middle. You can work it into the surrounding lines as part of the narrator’s thoughts, or even have one of your poem’s characters speak the phrase as a piece of dialog. You can use the saying to create any mood -- serious, humorous, ironic, sorrowful or joyous.

The subject of the poem may be anything you wish. It can be a topic suggested by the “wisdom” the fortune cookie saying is trying to impart, or it can be totally unrelated to the actual saying. Some of the sayings might automatically call a certain setting and scene to mind; for instance, “The blonde at the next table is eyeing you,” could be used in a poem that has a restaurant or a bar as its main setting.

The choice of how you use this saying and how you incorporate it into the poem is yours. We think some of these sayings are so wacky and inspiring, you’ll probably want to write more than one poem. Go ahead and stuff yourself. These cookie inspirations are guilt- and calorie-free!

* * * * *

M has served as an Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past one hundred years or so. More than a few editors have found her poems acceptable, and included them in their journals. She received her B.A. in Literature so long ago, she’s pretty certain her diploma has crumbled to dust. She also serves as an administrator of on online poetry workshop called Wild Poetry Forum. If you cannot find her (she never answers her cell phone), call Powell’s Books. The employees there know exactly what room she’s in. And most importantly, she is very grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.

The Write Direction: May Poetry Prompt

By M and Steve Williams

We were browsing through the Portland Urban Pages some weeks ago and noticed a tendency of business owners in the Portland, Oregon area to give their restaurants, hotels, bars and other establishments very witty, unusual names. Which led us on a search to find poems on this theme. We found a terrific book entitled Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Bars, edited by Kurt Brown and Laure-Anne Bosselaar. It is a compilation of 125 of the best contemporary poets as they roam from greasy spoon diners to the swankiest hotels. Here is an excerpt from the back cover of the book:

"They are places where we meet to celebrate, to be alone, to seduce, to argue, to get loaded, to get away, to get happy. Be they burger joints, bistros, cheap motels, or resorts, they are the quintessential American hangouts, and in Night Out our best contemporary voices celebrate our homes away from home . . . Collectively, these voices create a look at ourselves in places where, as Gerald Stern says in his introduction, 'ordinary events -- ordering a meal, spilling a little wine -- take on a significance that can only be called mythical.' Surprising, hilarious, and touching, Night Out is often less about places themselves than about who we become in unguarded moments of joy, sadness, or comfort."

Here is a poem from the Night Out collection:

At the Waterloo Hotel
by Peter E. Murphy

Here dreams are interrupted by a woman
who screams so loudly she cracks open your death-like sleep,
yet fails to ruffle security or the front desk
which never answers the telephone, never responds.
So you bang on that awful door that wails Stop it.
You're hurting me! Stop! and it finally stops.

Later when sleep is again broken by the persistent tapping
on your door, you pull on your pants and look through the peephole
at the nightgowned woman who startles when you crack it open,
is confused when you say Yes? She doesn't realize
she's walked in her sleep in a hotel known for its exotic obscurity,
its Victorian sense of loss, its love-thin doors and walls.

As she stumbles toward other rooms
you close your door and wonder if hers were the screams
that had earlier awakened you.

You wonder if she moves toward abuse or toward love
that doesn't bruise, love that sleeps in a lost room
unaware she is searching among all the locked doors.

You return to your bed so exhausted you hurt
and lie there for hours in stubborn wakefulness,
practicing over and over how to close your eyes,
how to keep them closed, practicing until you finally turn
away from the stony light into the rising darkness
of your own rooms.

* * * * *
Now it's your turn!

Here's our list of very unusual establishment names from the greater Portland Metro area:

Reel M Inn
Vicious Cycle Motor Scooters
The Brazen Bean Coffee Bar
Flying Elephants Delicatessen
Ugly Mug
Prima Diva Hotel
The Low Brow Lounge
Cruise in Deli
Hot Lips Pizza
Sacred Grounds Espresso
Naughty Naughty Cakes
Shrunken Head Massage
What the Wind Blew In Motel
What's Up Stairs Boutique
Dr. Skin's Tattoo Parlor
Outlaws Nightclub
Piece of Cake Bakery
Be Zinful Wines
Wild Abandon Roadhouse
The Gilt Club
Wok N Roll
The Bitter End Pub
Rice Junkies Eatery
Rock Bottom Brewery
Curl Up and Dye Salon
Who's On First Sports Bar
Skinnidip Ice Cream Parlor
Bad Monkey Music
Olive or Twist Martini Bar
The Boom Boom Room
Dancin' Bear Saloon
Anna Bananas Coffee Shop
Howl-i-day Inn
Voodoo Doughnuts
Daddy Mojo's Diner
A Painted Lady Guest House
Typhoon Thai Food
Dirty Little Secret Salon
Optic Nerve Art Gallery
Dog Day Afternoon Grooming
Food Fight Grocery

This month's prompt is to use one of the establishment names we've provided (or one of your own) and write a poem that uses your selection in the title, i.e., At the Waterloo Hotel, or some variation. As to the content of your poem, attempt to capture, as Murphy did in the example poem, the flavor, mood, and atmosphere of this establishment. You can do so by exploring the place itself or you can choose to concentrate on its patrons.

The poem can be serious or humorous, or a little of both -- just because the name of the business is a bit wacky, don't assume the content of the poem must be. A serious poem can be written with a humorous title or vice versa; this contrast is unexpected, and can be used to your advantage. Remember what Stern said about the poems in the book -- that they are often less about places themselves than about who we become in unguarded moments of joy, sadness, or comfort.

* * * * *

M has served as Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past one hundred years or so. More than a few editors have found her poems acceptable, and included them in their journals. She received her B.A. in literature so long ago, she's pretty certain her diploma has crumbled to dust. She also serves as an administrator of on online poetry workshop called Wild Poetry Forum. If you cannot find her (she never answers her cell phone), call Powell's Books. The employees there know exactly what room she's in. And most importantly, she is very grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.