Poetry

Last night I went to a local creative writing workshop held in Greece B&N. It was a smaller group than normal, probably because it's Poetry Month and our exercise was in Poetry. I have to admit, the terror swamped the inner writer in me as I thought of writing poetry. But Pat, who is Kim's mother made the exercise understandable and worth while. I can actually see applying the creative process to my own writing.


The exercise was on Metaphors. Metaphors are and not like. You don't say ran like a deer... you would say he is a deer.

The exercise was tremendous in learning how to relate you thoughts into deeper thoughts. We tackled emotion related to noun.

For instance her first example was a sentence:
I am cold.
I am a .....(fill in a noun.) snowman, ice cube....

We did the following emotions: greedy, angry, frustrated, pretty, sad, and happy. The varies responses were humorous and on point.

Then we took the process further, by breaking down the noun into feelings about the noun.
For instance: the noun... writer. What are the first thing you think of when you think writer?

pen, ink, pain, passion, slow, timeless.....

Afterward we took the process further and broke down the descriptive words into thoughts related it the words.
Pen-fountain of words; ink-blood of the story, pain-torture of failing, passion--bursting elation...

The final step was to take our descriptive phrases and words and create a short poem to describe the original emotion without stating the emotion.

I must say when I completed the project I thought I had a jumble of words, but this morning I reread my poem. And maybe I shouldn't have worried about writing poetry. The piece wasn't half bad for a first draft. And the process helped me dive into the five senses of writing, describing the emotion behind the words making a flesher thought. We all strive to get to that fleshy, meaty part of our characters and writing, this is just a tool. So here’s to learning something that makes your inner writer scream in terror and want to run away. Sometimes you got to try poetry.