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Poem Tryouts: What Does This Smell Like?

7:26 a.m. — Atlanta

listening to Maui Hawaiian Sup’pa Man sung by Iz

Hello, all. Two posts today. I shall give you the prompt now, then, later, send out the calendar for the summer. I want to keep the two elements separate.

We start our summer program with an exercise to do with imagery, one of the most important aspects of poetry because that is one of the main links between the poem and the reader. Whether the poem focuses on story, theme, or description [or any combination of the three], imagery, sensory imagery, is the bridge to the reader.

Something many writers forget is that imagery includes all the senses, not just the visual. While visual imagery is strong because most people are image oriented, the sense of smell is powerful because it is the one sense routed through the memory area of the brain. Tactile imagery attracts all those people who have to keep their hands in their pockets in a museum [I'm one - I learn and make my bridges through touch]. And we are bombarded by sound everywhere. If you employ imagery, your reader can step into the poem. Check Keats’ poem “The Eve of St. Agnes,” if you want to read a master of sensory imagery: Forty-two stanzas and worth every minute you spend reading.

We will try several exercises which may, or may not, result in poems. Don’t worry if all you end up with is a list of images. They become a resource pool for you.

by Chris Pirillo

“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.” Helen Keller

Smell is the most evocative of the senses. Of all our senses it is the one which will most immediately transport us to another place and time, because it routes through our memory. There are odours that spark passion and sensuousness and others that repel us physically. Our culture produces thousands of products to alter a person’s scent or that of her surroundings. Animals use scent to mark their territories. We use scent to mask and manipulate.

Smell, scent, odour, fragrance, bouquet …what other words do you associate with smell? Go around your house, place of work, or choose a route to walk. Focus on smell only. Do your perceptions of a place change with smell? Below, we have several possibilities for using smell in a poem.

John William Waterhouse

Describe smells. On the left side of the page, list significant smells; and on the right side, jot down what you associate with these smells. Pick two or three and expand into a vignette.

by Kevin Ertell

Describe two or three places using only your sense of smell. Don’t mention the places.

Describe a person using only your sense of smell. Don’t mention the person.

Describe your most vivid memory evoked by a smell.

Flikr user Ashok

Enjoy focusing on smelling things this week. Smell even things you know the scent of, but now focus on the smell. What does this thing smell like? How do you put the smell into words that another person can smell? Dip into your spice jars. If there were no names for herbs and spices, how would you describe their smell?

According to summer rules, you may write on this, this week, and post here, or you may choose the topic for three weeks from now, even though you will go into it without my bit of chat. Should you choose the latter, post here anyway, but tell people your poem is for the prompt three weeks down the road. You can slot smell in somewhere else, or ignore it and redo another prompt. It’s summer. I don’t really have rules but even they are at the beach.

Happy writing, everyone.

10 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 04/06/2013 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: imagery, poetry prompts, sense of smell, sensory imagery

Tuesday Poetry Tryouts: Look Closely

19 Mar

7:33 a.m. — Atlanta

listening to the washing machine, maybe music later

Hullo, everyone. I hope you are well. Welcome new readers. It has been a while since I have done that and I know I have several new names. Please, if you have any questions about the way the blog works, pop into comments on any day. If you have not read the poems from last week’s contributors, visit for a while. There is always a lot of conversation so look for the red links.

I was wandering through Steve Kowit’s book In the Palm of Your Hand and came across this exercise, which I thought you would enjoy. I’ve adapted it a little, at least, put it into my words.

Imagery is the representation in words of a sensory experience. A poet uses imagery to make the reader see, hear, taste, touch, and /or smell what the speaker of the poem senses. Okay, that’s basic stuff, but sometimes we forget to include it with our stories, memories, narratives, even descriptions of a place. Our exercise today is one of detail. It’s a list poem. It does not require story. The objective is to provide a sensory experience.

You are going to create an inventory of everything in a particular place. I used to send my students out and tell them to find one place on campus and sit for twelve minutes, before writing a list of everything in their area they could describe in a sensory manner. Twelve minutes is a surprisingly long time, time enough for the surface stuff to disappear and to become aware of what is beneath.

Place is up to you: a park, the beach (some people are in the other hemisphere!], your yard, a room where you work, a file cabinet, or a desk drawer. Kowits says: Perhaps if you are ingenious or ambitious (and I know you are both), you can take something as small as a flowerbox and describe dozens of minute objects and creatures–from small pebbles and ants crawling on the leaves, to the colors of a single weed and the curled form of a desiccated leaf.

As with any list poem, you can’t start the poem before you have a list. When you have your place (and I’m thinking the smaller the more fun, because of the challenge), list every single thing in it. Then go away and do something for a few minutes. It doesn’t require long, but it does require a completely new view for your eyes. You will be amazed when you return, the amount of things you missed. I should know. I’m a Hidden Object game devotee.

As you choose what you want to include in the poem, you can spread what you choose among all the senses: sight, sound, taste (go ahead, lick that pebble), smell, touch; or, you can choose a single sense by which to describe the items. Another possibility is a ‘it looks like‘ list. Take that pebble and look at it through a magnifying glass. Hey! It looks like the surface of the moon. Go further. How about a list of metaphors for what you have discovered: the pebble is the surface of the moon, a lost planet, a fossil…

Yes, I am asking you to play, but to work at it. With poetry we have the chance to describe things so that, as poet Francisco X. Alarcón writes,

A poem

makes us see
everything
for the first time.

(found in Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy). This applies to both reader and writer of poems. Go, find, absorb, list, turn into imagery that allows us to experience things for the first time.

Format seems to go without saying; it’s a list. But, I have learned that you are a wild and crazy bunch, so if you think of a way to present your list in an un-list form, do so, but only if that form supports the content.

I will see you Thursday for something on The Poetry Giveaway (yes, it’s that time again), and the poetry challenge I am involved in with The Found Poetry Review. If any of you have a National Poetry Month announcement they wish me to add, let me know: margoroby[@]gmail.com. I’ll see you Friday for the prompt roundup;and, next Tuesday is our image prompt.

Happy writing, all.

listening to Randy Travis singing Deeper Than the Holler

19 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 19/03/2013 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: imagery, list poem, poetry, poetry prompts

Reach Out and Touch Something: Tuesday Tryouts

04 Dec

7:19 a.m. –Atlanta

listening to Gumboots with Paul Simon

Hello, all. I hope everyone is well, as we head into the particularly crazy month. Whether you do Christmas, or not, it’s hard to not be affected by it in some way. My inclination this year is to head for the hills and find a nice cave [no, I have not started ordering... I guess I need to get on the stick].

rusted chair

Today is an image prompt. I am sending you to one of my Pinterest boards. One of the senses that is often overlooked in writing is the sense of touch. I know it’s an area I want to work on as I am a tactile person [hands in my pocket when we go into a museum is a must]. As I looked over the board yesterday, I realised that every image is mostly tactile — how I know is when my fingertips feel an object’s surface, as I look at it. The coloured pencils? I want to touch their pointy ends. The C-clamp? Cold, iron, slightly rusty.

rusty, peeling door

The challenge is to let one of these images spark a poem. Let your fingertips talk to you. As you look over these two images, run mental fingertips over their surfaces.

Possible modus operandi is to, as you look over the board, select a few you like and jot notes on each. Does a specific memory surface? Does the image remind you of something? Does the tactile sensation itself remind you of something? You do not have to have the image anywhere in the poem. Once the poem takes off, you can forget the original image, or you can make the image a focus.

The real challenge: incorporate texture into your poem in the way of imagery and, also, in the way of word choice. Words have texture. Joseph’s exercise, this week, is about the effect of a word’s sound. That sound is what gives a word texture. Not sure about that? Let me list a few words and as you read each, what texture do you assign it because of how it sounds?

Kyrgyzstan [prickly, right?]
feather
undulate
paper
tomato
muddy
glue

So, pick an image, or two, or as many as you wish, and see what happens. Let us know which image sparked the poem. It’s always fun to see. If you have your own tactile photograph which you want to use, go for it. I look forward to reading the results.

I shall see you Friday for the roundup; and next Tuesday for a prompt about your road less traveled.

Happy writing, everyone.

33 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 04/12/2012 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: creative exercises, creative writing, imagery, poetry, prompts, sensory

Lying in a Hammock for Tuesday’s Tryout

07 Feb

7:30 a.m. — Atlanta

Hello, all. We are going to approach place a little differently today.

Resist the temptation to read the poem. Uh huh, I saw the eyes drifting down.

We will read and talk our way through James Wright’s poem “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”. First, will you look at that title! Look again. Poets, if they use a title, usually go one of two ways: they choose titles that are neutral, reflective of what the poem speaks of; or, they add vital information that the poet does not want to use poem space for. In this case, Wright establishes that the speaker is in a hammock [lying down], on a farm, on an island, in Minnesota. So much information about place, without having to use poem space.

Now you may read the poem! Just read it without, if you can, letting your poet brain start working. I’ll meet you below.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
the cowbells follow one another
into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
in a field of sunlight between two pines,
the droppings of last year’s horses
blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Yes? Reread the poem and look for every single sensory image. Then, come back here.

Okay?
Visual is almost entirely colour: ‘bronze,’ ‘black,’ ‘green,’ ‘golden’ and implied in ‘shadow,’ ‘sunlight,’ ‘blaze’ and ‘darkens’.
Tactile: ‘blowing’ = breeze
Sound: ‘cowbells’. You can argue that ‘empty house’ implies silence.
Smell implied: last year’s ‘droppings,’ cows, horses.

Now list verbs and verbals: ‘see,’ ‘blowing,’ ‘follow,’ ‘blaze,’ ‘lean,’ ‘darkens,’ ‘comes,’ ‘floats,’ ‘looking,’ ‘wasted’. While we are here, note the phonetics of Wright’s choices. After Joseph’s phonetics exercise, I am more aware than I already was of sound and its effects and found the use, or lack of use, of certain sounds supports the content in this poem [as it should]. Almost every sound is open, as is the speaker to his epiphany.

While we are at it, notice the strength of Wright’s nouns: ‘butterfly,’ ‘trunk,’ ‘ravine,’ ‘house,’ cowbells,’ ‘field,’ ‘pines,’ ‘droppings,’ ‘ horses,’ ‘stones,’ ‘evening,’ and ‘chicken hawk’.

What is the mood of the place, for you? How does Wright achieve that with the words he has chosen?

Writer Maxine Kumin says, “In a poem one can use the sense of place as an anchor for larger concerns, as a link between narrow details and global realities. Location is where we start from”.

The hammock, in this poem, is the anchor; the global reality is the speaker’s realisation that there is more to life than whatever he had been doing before coming to William Duffy’s farm. Wright has established this with a minimum of words that give us a wealth of detail.

Let me pull myself back on track. Once you have absorbed the poem, jot down places where you have had an epiphany, remembering that, while epiphany is a word usually associated with positive outcomes, an epiphany can be about anything, and they can be tiny. While you are listing places, jot notes about whatever you remember about each place: what happened, sensory details, specifics, and mood.

Choose one place you want to write about. Freewrite everything you can remember about the what and the where. Consider the anchor for your event and the larger concern.

My challenge is that you structure your poem as Wright has. The poem breaks into four tercets, each tercet being a full sentence giving us a sensory image, except the last tercet, which has three sentences, growing increasingly shorter, leading to the epiphany. The four tercets are divided in half by a short directional phrase, “To my right” [and what is that about?].

Did I lose you among the tercets? Write a poem in any form that gives us a place and then establishes an epiphany that connects to that place. Feel free to make up details if your memory is fuzzy. Make them up anyway. If you are not following Wright’s form, consider others you know, to decide what best suits the poem’s content.

As always, I look forward to reading what you write. You have forever to post [although readership may decline to me]. Take us through the process if you can. It’s a good habit and helps if you are going to revise the poem at any point.

See you Thursday for announcements [you can send them to me up until Wednesday night my time]; Friday for our romp through prompts; and next Tuesday for a break in place [no, that's not another type of place prompt, but a prompt that is not focused on place].

Happy writing, everyone.

61 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 07/02/2012 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: imagery, James Wright, poetry, prompts, Sense of place, Writers Resources

A Sense of Place: Tuesday Tryouts

24 Jan

7:28 a.m. — Atlanta

Hello, all. How are you this new new year? For those dragons among us, we already rule, but this is our year. If you wanted to write a poem and instil a sense of dragon, how would you go about it? Think about it for a few minutes…

Notice how I segue into our topic for today: How do we go about instilling a sense of place in our poetry? Place is huge. Several of the prompt sites, that many of us frequent, have touched on place. I will try not to duplicate exercises, but this is an area we will play in for a while.

Think about what you mean when you talk, or think, about place in poetry… feel free to jot notes to yourself as we go along. Notes warm the brain up. What is place?

Does a place have an identity before we identify it, or give it a name? Once we identify the running water keeping us from the other side, as river, we begin to give it a more specific identity. Large river. Large muddy river. The Mississippi. The mighty Mississippi. Ah, now we are getting somewhere. The places that we identify, name, and give meaning to, have a strong sense of place. Our goal is to figure out how to establish that sense of place in our writing.

We need to know what we each mean by sense of place. Is it merely physical? Does an emotion need to be attached to the place to establish the sense? Paris. An oasis. The Yangtze River. Stonehenge. The desert. What images and feelings popped up as you read through the list? Mull for a few minutes [you continue to jot notes] about how you might establish a sense of place if you were to write about one of these places.

But let’s start with your own baseline landscape: The special bond which develops between children and their childhood environments has been called a ‘primal landscape’ by human geographers. This childhood landscape forms part of people’s identity and constitutes a key point of comparison for considering subsequent places later in life. As people move around as adults, they tend to consider new places in relation to this baseline landscape experienced during childhood. Wikipedia — article worth reading, should you have the time. It is short.

Identify your baseline landscape. You may choose a larger whole, such as a city, or an aspect, such as surrounding mountains. Whichever you choose, it should possess that which cannot be replicated in any other place. Consider that your audience has never been there [even if you know they live in that place]. How are you going to convey the sense of place so that your readers have an idea of the truth of your place? More notes.

The structure is up to you. Much depends on whether free verse, or a more formal form, is more suited to establishing your place. Remember that form and content go hand in hand. You will need to consider concrete details and sensory imagery in your quest to establish the sense of place of your baseline landscape. This week we have been playing with symbols with one of Joseph’s ‘Reverie s‘. Consider symbol as a way in.

You may decide that your piece works better as prose, and that’s fine too. Don’t keep yourself from posting because you think you must have a poem. The objective is establishing a sense of place in your writing.

I can’t wait to read and feel your landscapes. Remember that you can and may post anytime.

I shall see you Thursday for announcements — anymore to go in? Friday will be our roundup of the week’s prompts. And, next Tuesday, since you seem to enjoy them so much, a painting from which to write.

Happy writing, everyone.

P.S. Should a sense of dragon poem arise, post. We dragons have our own sense of place.

74 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 24/01/2012 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: imagery, poetry, prompts, Sense of place, sensory, Writers Resources

Surrealist Imagery Poem: Tuesday Tryouts

03 Jan

7:33 a.m. — Atlanta

Here we are in our brand new year and the jet lag [west to east is murder] had me still up at midnight, watching CSI: N.Y. and David Tutera and his wedding show…it was late. There wasn’t much on. As I sat thinking pleasurably about writing the first TT of the year and trying to feel sleepy, the thought slipped through my mind that there are fifty-one more weeks. That would be fifty-one more prompts. Good grief! I banished the thought hastily while planning to find more images, quickly.

I hope you all are well. I had planned to take it easy on you, until I saw the flurry of poems, comments and general all-round ready to go-ness in the past couple of days. So, no mercy. Alright, maybe a little. Let’s play.

In comments on one of her poems, Irene, of Lost in Translation, and I thought doing something with surrealism might be fun. Back in the twilight days of Wordgathering, when I had only a couple of followers, and noone posting poems yet, I offered an exercise based on the Surrealists, as a type of list poem. I am updating the post for today’s prompt. I would love to see what you do with this.

I want you to focus on the Surrealists’ use of imagery, which bordered on the absurd, but to them was a truth.

Some of the images below are James Penha’s* and some mine. Read through this list of images of the kind the Surrealists enjoy:

a sink full of Brussels sprouts
a dripping faucet
a young girl sings a song in the attic
the sound of someone swallowing
a wall made out of fur
the smell of wet dog hair
a bell ringing once every ________
a knife covered with sugar
cobwebs breaking across a face
a scorpion inside a head of lettuce
a doctor with a head that looks like a cabbage
a voice shouting, “One more time for our dead friends!”
a voice whispering
the sound of cotton wool being pulled apart
a boy watching static on television
a mother and child sharing a cigar
a hairless dog
a ball rolling down a hallway
a girl who has no tongue trying to speak
an upside-down tree
a black lake

In the next 12 minutes, make up as many of your own surrealistic images as you can, to add to this list. If you have difficulty, look at some surrealist paintings which to you may look wacky, but to the artists represented a truth about what they depicted. Look closely. Look again. Jot down what you see.

Why practice surreal imagery? Because it is fun. More importantly, if you, like I, have difficulty letting go of convention and the real, this is good practice.

You can go one of a couple of ways. Select a series of images from the now expanded list that seem to you to work together in a surrealistic way and create a poem. Or, choose one image to place within a poem, or to spark a poem.

Here’s my stab at a series of images:

A Walk Through the Park

Mickey Mouse in the nude
walks a balloon dog
along a red river
runningrunningrunning
uphill to a black lake
and an upside down tree
where an egg hatches
a mushroom and cheese omelette
with hash browns on the side
of a pink tiled wall
behind which a young girl sings
“We’re off to see the Wizard”.

Can I do something with the poem? No, but the exercise forces me to be unconventional with imagery and I need that, so take up your pens, pencils, and keyboards and let’s see what Surrealism does for you.

I shall see you Thursday for Thoughts, and Friday for the roundup of this week’s prompts.

Happy writing everyone.

*The exercise is one originally given by my friend and former colleague, Jack Penha [writing name James Penha, poet, and publisher of The New Verse News]

59 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 03/01/2012 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: creative exercises, creative writing, imagery, poem, prompts, Surrealism, Writers Resources

Tympani, Tambourines, and Toots: Tuesday Tryouts

15 Nov

8:53 a.m. — Atlanta

Whew! That was close. I had started in on genealogy and once that happens I don’t lift my head for several hours. Hello all! In a continuation of stress-free prompts, let’s try a musical prompt.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be musical, and, if you like this exercise, you can use it anytime you are feeling sluggish with your writing. This accesses a different part of our brains, or our brains think it does, and happily respond. I first tried this a year ago, when going through the different senses, on Tuesday Tryouts.

The only rule: no words [in the music]. You don’t want someone else’s words suggesting a story to you. I recommend pieces roughly four minutes long; if you have a longer piece, set a timer, or if you have been grabbed by inspiration, write on. This is a slightly different take on a freewrite. Like freewriting, you are not worrying about form, or grammar, or sense. You may find a story as you write. I often write scenes my mind sees when listening to a piece, but if what you get is a collection of lines, or images, that’s wonderful. More resources for your pool.

Ideally, don’t mention the music. That’s your spark. But, if you read ViV’s and go to Yousei’s link and read hers you will see a second option.

Below, I have included links to a couple of pieces, to get you started. Get your pen and paper ready. Start the music and start writing. Do not stop. What do you hear, see, smell, taste, feel in the music? If you need to keep writing after the music stops, do so. In your music choices, try for different tempos and types.

And, no looking at the accompanying videos. You don’t want someone else’s images, before you have a chance to form your own. Click on link, write.

Vienna Horns

Fur Elise — Beethoven

Vivaldi Four Seasons — Winter

Brandenburg Concertos — Bach

Remember to post a link to your poem, or to leave the poem itself in comments, if you have no place to publish the poem. Revisit and read other poems. The greatest fun I have is reading the diversity of responses to the same prompt.

I shall see you Friday for the prompt roundup, and Tuesday for another visual prompt. Yep! I am keeping things easy-going for now.

Happy writing, all.

21 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 15/11/2011 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: creative writing, freewriting, imagery, poem, prompts, Writers Resources

Poem in Response to We Write Poems

28 Sep

We Write Poems, and Yousei Hime, asked us to write a poem about scent, or that uses scent. Choose an abstraction and write a poem (of whatever form pleases you), Yousei says, that builds scent into your chosen concept.

laid out on a plate lemon slices of self
emotions stripped leaving a still life of lemons
a bite from a lemon meringue pie
a lemon sour acid bath

loss

Notes: This is one of those times that many of you have experienced, when the poem came unbidden [and pretty quickly on the heels of reading the prompt].

I was tossing concepts around in my head and loss stuck. Once it stuck, lemons came immediately, as did the lines of the poem. My contribution was the order of the lines. Not using punctuation wasn’t even my choice. You all know I am the punctuation queen, so you know that decision wasn’t mine. But the part of the brain from which many poems appear, said, No punctuation…and maybe, no title.

The interesting thing about lemons is that I wrote with the scent in mind and realised only later that so much of the imagery will evoke the taste of lemons. I like that, having the scent be subtle and this taste being more on the surface.

I will see you over at We Write Poems, reading others poems.

27 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 28/09/2011 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: imagery, poem, prompts, We Write Poems, Writing Exercises

Tuesday Tryouts: A Poem on Then and Now

27 Sep

7:52 a.m. — Atlanta

Hello! I hope all is well with you. One half of us is looking forward to an approaching Autumn, and the other half to an approaching Spring. What lovely times of year for a writer to look forward to. But, then, so is winter. Summer = vacation.

Yes, I was going to introduce you to a form, but on researching, I discovered there is a fair amount that goes into explaining how this form works. It’s not that the form is so difficult, but rather, that explaining it is. Give me another week to absorb what I am reading.

This week, instead, focuses on place. Place is a topic no poet can ignore, and I will write more about it in one of the Thursday Thoughts. We have had several prompts, in the past few months, on place and on memory. I’m going to ask you to combine the two.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent ten days in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It is one of my favourite places in the world, because I spent concentrated amounts of time there, growing up. Every third year of my twenty years growing up, in Hong Kong, we went on a six month vacation. One of the places we always went, and where we spent a month each time, was Rehoboth Beach.

Because the visit was long and repeated, my memories are indelible: the boardwalk, salt water taffy, sand dunes, shelling, Coin Beach, the WWII watch towers, Funland, the shell shop, Pop [who came around selling fresh vegetables], our housekeeper Mary [who brought scrapple for us children], Rehoboth Avenue [the Main Street], and the porch at 6 Park, where everyone gathered during the day and evening.

I see each of these things, not just as an image, but as a running scene, a movie short, complete with sensory details. This trip, as I walked down Rehoboth Avenue, and along the Boardwalk, while I saw much that has changed, I saw many things still in place from fifty years ago. As I saw my childhood coming back to me in short scenes, I thought: there is a poem here.

I want you to list specific [you want micro like a pond, or a beach, or an ice cream shop, not macro, like a town] places you were in, or visited, in your childhood, that have left strong memories. These places need to be ones you have visited recently and can draw a strong picture of in your mind, then and now. You can use photographs to help, after you have tried your mind on its own. Choose one of the places to work with.

Reach for the childhood memory first, so the newer one does not blanket details. Let the place you have chosen inhabit your mind. Remember what it looked like, what it smelled like, the sounds you heard, things you touched, tastes maybe. Jot all the sensory details you can remember down [if you aren't sure about one, write it down anyway].

Now freewrite what you remember happening there when you visited. Write about how you felt when these things happened. And, while nostalgia often implies happy, your memories might be of something traumatic, or fearful, or you might have had an epiphany. These memories do not have to be in any kind of order. You might choose details from three different visits, when you come to write a poem.

When you have mined your memory for everything it has of the old days, bring yourself back to the present. Take a break to clear your mind.

Follow the same procedure, for what your place is like now, jotting down sensory details, what happened when you visited, how you felt.

Once you have everything jotted down, write a poem about the place in the past, or write a poem about the place now, or write a poem which includes both. Make sure to include some of the sensory details you have listed.

We have been given several forms in the past weeks. Before writing your poem, check to see if conveying the experience is suited to a form, or to free verse.

I shall see you Friday for the roundup of prompts; and next Tuesday for the form, which I will have conquered. Thursday Thoughts is now an as needed post. If I think of something I want to write about, or you send me a topic you wish me to write about, we will have a Thursday Thoughts.

Happy writing!

15 Comments

Posted by margo roby on 27/09/2011 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: creative exercises, creative writing, imagery, poems, poetry, Writers Resources, Writing Exercises

Tuesday Tryouts: Picture to Poem

16 Aug

10:12 a.m. — Atlanta

Hello everyone. My, I have missed you. If you have hung in there, waiting for my reappearance, thank you.

A wonky computer + a malaise + traveling + a time lag = a longer than intended absence. So, let’s get right to an exercise. I will keep it simple, as I am easing my way back into computering.

This comes from something my daughter said when she talked with me last night. She was trying to get me out of the house and suggested a walk with a purpose. I know that over at We Write Poems, we are being asked to walk this week. My walk has a sightly different twist but, if you have not walked yet, the two can be combined, walkwise, if not poemwise.

I am setting us a time limit of forty minutes, give or take five. You might consider your route before you leave the house, or let your feet take you where they will. Carry with you a camera in whatever form you have one, or a paper and pencil on which you can sketch [no one will see it -- don't worry about whether or not you can draw. The sketch only needs to make sense to you.].

Here’s the tricky part: you may take only one photograph/ sketch one thing. Once that photograph, or sketch, is done, finish the walk, but no more pictures, or sketches. It will be surprisingly difficult, as you will immediately spot six things you want to record. No!

Like the walk, you can make the picture-taking serendipitous, or set out with a plan, such as, you are going to photograph something pink, or a sign, or an animal, or a flower. You may wish to jot down notes on sensory imagery, other than visual, you might not remember. But remember: once the picture is recorded, that’s it. No cheating! One thing you can do is to mark what you want to record and take the picture on you way home. This may save you seeing something else you want.

When you return home, upload the picture, or tidy up the sketch and decide what it is about what you have chosen you want to write about. It can be the whole picture, or you may notice one aspect you want to write about.

I have missed your poems almost as much as I have missed you, so do post what you write and leave a link, or post in comments. Remember, that you can post at any time. There is no late.

I am still easing, so I will give Thursday a miss, but do send me a topic if you have something you want me to discuss. That option is always open, especially as I’m not sure which direction to go in next with my Thursday Thoughts. I will see you Friday for a roundup of this week’s prompts; and Tuesday might be the next form — no panic. It’s a piece of cake.

I am so glad to be back among you. Happy writing.

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Posted by margo roby on 16/08/2011 in exercises, poetry, writing

Tags: creative exercises, imagery, poem, poetry prompt, Writers Resources, Writing Exercises

Margo Roby: Wordgathering

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