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Playing Around With a Story Line in Different Literary Genres
Hello out there all you writers,
Writing Leap #17 Creating Poetry
For me reading and breathing in a poem can take me to a place deep inside from where I can swim into fiction. Emily Dickinson’s “…page(s) of prancing poetry” can open our writer’s sensibilities to the evocative essence of words, the purity of flow, exquisite economy. Poetry can teach so much to us writers.
Who with just a few words wouldn’t fall in love with Roger the Dog and by extension any dog that might have snored his way into your heart?
“He hogs the fire, he bakes his head, As if it were a loaf of bread.
He’s just a sack of snoring dog, You can lug him like a log.” By Ted Hughes (A Family of Poems compiled by Caroline Kennedy)
My dear friend Carol Bell, a widely-published poet from Colorado, can expand a moment into a shimmering truth. Here is her wonderful poem, CROWS
Main Street.
Frothing panting
jackhammers ranting
road crew cursing
sweating beside
a cottonwood
alive with crows.
Noah’s crows.
Iridescent crows.
Mesmeric wings
taunting beaks
black and bawdy
scavengers’ bodies
catch the sun.
Their Ariel magic
plucks me
from the heat,
holds me
in its hands,
and the city
shrivels
like a spent iris blossom,
a dark circle falling away.
Crows was published in Bayou Magazine, Issue 54, 2010
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“Moments” is our story line. Take the leap and think of your own moment and evoke it in a poem. Yes, yes, you can do it. Or, find a poem that inspires you, by its flow, by its subject, by its metaphors. Use your own flow, your own subject, your own metaphors and express your moment in fiction.
Happy Writing Everyone,
LINKING THE ARTS
Here is Carol Bell’s poem “written” in watercolors
A Good Word: kindle, as in igniting words in your poetic imagination–perhaps in metaphor, perhaps in free verse, perhaps in rhyme, perhaps in narrative.
A Book I Love about Poetry
poemcrazy freeing your life with words by Susan G. Wooldridge Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1996.
