Littles:
Can you think of one thing that happened in your house over the last week?
Write about it -- include as many senses as you can. What did you see? Hear? Touch? Taste? Smell? Who were the people involved? What were they wearing?
How did it make you feel?
When we respond to something, we react -- we take it and make sense out of it in a way that creates something satisfying...
Can you write a poem in reaction to what happened?
Middles:
Last week a singer died -- John Prine -- I love this song of his song with Bonnie Raitt: HERE
There were a lot of reactions --
HERE's a song I really love that's been going around. A response.
When you respond, you offer something into the world that incorporates some of the thing and some of yourself...
This singer weaves in songs of Prine together with her own idea of how to feel a little better about the sad fact of the singer's death.
You can also react to something positive!
So here's your prompt --
think of something -- it can be in the news, in your home, in your dreams... but pick something that has stuck with you -- that you have been thinking about.
First: Journal about it -- explore it and how it has stuck in your head. Why do you think it seemed to have the weight it did? Was it because of the past? Was it because of the present?
When you are done, write a piece in response to the original thing.
Bigs:
I can't say anything much better than I did in the other two prompts -- Definitely check out the tribute song to John Prine in the middle section of this post. I love it so much.
But here is one of my very favorite poems, which is also a response:
The Day Lady Died
BY FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
How did the poem make you feel?
When you think about the thing you want to respond to, think about the feeling you have. What type of format would suit the emotion you have about the thing you want to respond to?
Go!
As always, I'd love to read what you come up with!
You can also submit your poems to Rattle in the Poets Respond section.
A pen! What for? To see it dance.
No comments:
Post a Comment