Twenty little poetry projects

Writing prompt by Jim Simmerman from "The Practice of Poetry: Writing Projects from Poets who Teach", edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell.

The morning glory vines climb and drown the porch pillar
like the tide moving in, wave by wave.

It’s time to dust off the sun. Bring a visor.

How odd that my ear can know 
that the trembling thunder outside is just a plane. 
Maybe three hundred years ago, 
I would have thought it was an angel approaching. 

Semantic vacuum hypothesis is the reason why the number seven 
seems like it might be yellow. 

Does Louise Penny know that my vintage Sesame Street figures 
form a protective ring around her books? 

I was just kidding about the sun and dust. 
The sun makes us dust, we don’t dust the sun.

The morning glories have grown over our porch pillars 
and move along the porch floor, 
winding up the legs of the two chairs where we sit. 

Slay the day is a phrase I’ve seen before, 
but it still seems like a joke to say.

Maybe the only reason this pillow is blue 
is because the blue chairs want it that way.

We’ve read the brief and the deposition, 
but the summary judgment motion might not be in till Friday.

The gritty quilt of anger wraps around my shoulders without my consent. 

We were as silent as static, 
buzzing at the highest frequency.

The little ones know how to fly now, 
lifting up the maple branches so they can reach for the lost frisbee.

Maggie doesn’t always know the right way to go.
But someday she will, and it will be 
like curtains of darkness are being torn in two.

The aching bicycles can figure it out for us, 
two wheels moving down the path. 
She can ride a bike with no hands.

It won’t be difficult to see the night when it is finally dark.

Et si je rêve, je rêverai de toi. C’est la seule façon.

The books clap their hands from the shelves, 
a pattering shower of applause that breaks over my bed.

The morning glories, spade-shaped leaves and tendrils of vine, 
stretch up past the roof-line and into the laundry room window. 
They wait to be washed clean.

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Simmerman’s prompt, if you’d like to try it yourself!

Give each project at least one line. You should open the poem with the first project, and close it with the last, but otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like. Do all twenty. Let different ones be in different voices. Don’t take things too seriously.

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, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.

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 a piece of false cause-and-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, such 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 finally makes no sense.

18. Use a phrase from a language other than English.

19. Make a nonhuman 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.

The ones go best that let go, over and over, of whatever one thought to mean. Simmerman comments:

I created this exercise for my beginning poetry writing students who … seemed to me overly concerned with transparently logical structures, themes, and modes of development at the expense of free-for-all wackiness, inventive play, and the sheer oddities of language itself.

I created the exercise in about half an hour, simply listing, in no particular order, a lot of little sillinesses I had seen and liked, or had not seen but thought I would have liked, in poems here and there.

Here’s a poem by Simmerman that completes the twenty projects in order.

Moon Go Away, I Don’t Love You No More

1. Morning comes on like a wink in the dark.

2. It’s me it’s winking at.

3. Mock light lolls in the boughs of the pines.
   Dead air numbs my hands.
   A bluejay jabbers like nobody’s business.
   Woodsmoke comes spelunking my nostrils
   and tastes like burned toast where it rests on my tongue.

4. Morning tastes the way a rock felt
   kissing me on the eye:

5. a kiss thrown by Randy Shellhourse
   on the Jacksonville, Arkansas, Little League field
   because we were that bored in 1965.

6. We weren’t that bored in 1965.

7. Dogs ran amuck in the yards of the poor,
   and music spilled out of every window
   though none of us could dance.

8. None of us could do the Frug, the Dirty Dog

9. because we were small and wore small hats.

10. Moon go away, I don’t love you no more

11. was the only song we knew by heart.

12. The dull crayons of sex and meanness
    scribbled all over our thoughts.

13. We were about as happy as headstones.

14. We fell through the sidewalk
    and changed colour at night.

15. Little Darry was there to scuff through it all,

16. so that today, tomorrow, the day after that
    he will walk backward among the orphaned trees

17. and toy rocks that lead him
    nowhere I could ever track
    till he’s so far away, so lost

18. I’ll have to forget him to know where he’s gone.

19. la grave poullet du soir est toujours avec moi—

20. even as the sky opens for business,
    even as shadows kick off their shoes,
    even as this torrent of clean morning light
    comes flooding down and over it all.