Day Eight
Our featured participant for the day is Poems by Sidra.
Today’s resource is “Public Access Poetry,” an online feature from the Poetry Project, presenting digitized audio files of a poetry-themed public-access TV show that aired in New York City in 1977 and 1978. Listen to stalwarts and shining lights of the late-70s NYC “scene” such as Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, and more!
This is another oldie-but-goodie. I remember being assigned to use it in a college poetry class, and loving the result. It really pushes you to use specific details, and to work on “conducting” the poem as it grows, instead of trying to force the poem to be one thing or another in particular. The prompt is called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. And here are the twenty little projects themselves — the challenge is to use them all in one poem:
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 synesthesia (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 or 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 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.
Process Notes:
I adored today’s featured poem, An Incomplete List of Places I Have Cried. I think the secret of a good list poem might be to not feel like a list and despite the repetition and the genre clearly being a list poem, it feels like you are reading more. I really liked the atmosphere this poem creates, very relatable.
Curiously, I’ve never cried in an art museum. I fear the portraits would not be understanding.
I then moved onto Public Access Poetry. What a fabulous concept for a TV show! I chose this one.
Followed by this one.
I only discovered the work of Eileen Myles about 4 years ago, have been fortunate enough to attend a workshop reading she did but have never read or heard earlier work. Glad I had the chance to.
Then I moved onto today’s prompt. Which I knew would take an age (and I wasn’t wrong). Nearly as long as my list poem yesterday. I love and hate listed prompts like this one – by the end of the poem I felt I had written rubbish and it is true I am unlikely to do anything with the writing in this form — but embedded in there (to find in May) will be nuggets of something else worthwhile – 20 little poetry projects to explore maybe!
It’s not about Germsville, nothing here/ is contagious. You can’t catch this luck.
awritersfountain 