Week 2
In which we continue on our journey, and talk a bit about adverbs
Welcome to The Public Domain Poetry Project where we deconstruct an older poem by using each line (one per week) as a jumping off point for a brand new poem. Participants are encouraged to share their poems in the comments below, or to leave us a link so we can read them elsewhere. If this sounds like fun to you, please consider subscribing for free so you don’t miss next week’s prompt. Thanks for visiting!
It’s week two of The Public Domain Poetry Project. Very exciting. Thank you to everyone who joined in last week. Whether or not you posted a poem in the comments or elsewhere, if you read the prompt and let it take you somewhere, that’s just perfect.
I have three index card taped to the wall in my office, right where I’ll see them each time I look up from my computer. The first one says, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” I mentioned that in my introductory post to The Public Domain Poetry Project. It’s attributed to Isak Dinesen, and I find it very comforting. Even I only write a couple of lines, jot a few notes on my phone, that’s something.
The third note was a bit of advice from a creative writing teacher: “Omit Needless Words.” My first round of poem editing is usually a pass through following this advice. Are there words I can get rid of? A more concise way to phrase a thought? A single potent word that could replace a whole string of verbosity?
But I think the second note, the one sandwiched in the middle, is the one that I pay the most attention to. It comes from Stephen King: “…the road to hell is paved with adverbs…” The full quote, from page 125 of King’s essential guide to writing, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, is “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.”
Reading that was a revelation for me and I have become a disciple of this philosophy, at least when writing poetry. I try very hard not to use adverbs (those pesky -ly words that modify a perfectly innocent adjective). Of course, they sneak into my poems and occasionally refuse to be banished. But I think using them very sparingly, and even then exposing them to extra scrutiny, makes for better poetry.
If you haven’t read King’s memoir, On Writing, you must. It really is one of the very best, most useful books of it’s kind. Plus it’s funny.
And now, today’s prompt, the second line from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Travel.” My attempt follows today’s prompt. I took my own advice from last week and used each of the line’s words as the starting word in a line of my poem. It does a handy thing if you’re pressed for time. Your poem can only have as many lines as there are words in the quote. I also scoured my poem for adverbs and deleted all I could find. If you spy one I missed, congrats. You have a sharper eye than I do. If you’re game, maybe try to write your poem with no adverbs. See if you think it helps or hinders. I’d love to hear your take (and read your poems!) in the comments.
And the day is loud with voices speaking
Memory
And when I tell you that she cannot remember,
cannot meet you there in the middle,
The thing you must know and hold in your palm,
the thing you must tell yourself each
Day, is that memory is a country lost in time,
walled off by mountains, its border
Is closed to all travelers; if she cannot go, you
cannot go, and the mountains grow taller each day
Loud may be the call of the past as you stand
on the shore looking for sails on the horizon, yet
With her transmissions cut, her visas revoked, she cannot
board any vessel and you cannot sail alone
Voices are like water running through a sieve,
and spiraling down a drain, and you will find you are
Speaking to one who no longer knows her mother tongue
and looks at you like a visitor from another world
Happy writing, everyone. See you in the comments!
I went with two directions--what the line made me think of, and then trying your method with the beginning words.
.
“And the day is loud with voices speaking”
.
We always planned my oral surgeries for a Friday morning
followed by hours of sedated living, not awake
but not asleep, the pain moderated more by ice
switched every twenty minutes, the nails hammered
into the roof of my mouth easing out as the meds took hold
then hammered back in with a pound pound pound
the minute meds ended.
The room wasn’t just dark, but blue
the underneath of the ocean pushing
the ink of octopi, the scrape of coral
as I fought to rise to the surface.
.
.
Unrequited crushes crushed me
.
“And” was always how I started my poems when I was in junior high
the drama flaring from my skin like a pheromone all its own
days spent mooning about one boy for months or maybe years.
.
Is it sad to look back at that self, all the time wasted, all the tears
loudly pouring down my cheeks, in my heart, writing diary entries
with no end in sight about those feelings? Yes. I heard his
.
voice even when he wasn’t around, always looking up when I heard a boy
speaking, even when it wasn’t him. It was never him, anyway, just
the idea of him.
Here is a first pass. It sort of feels like the middle of a poem. I wonder what it’s about. =)
and no matter the hour
the air howls through these rooms
day and evening, this granite house
is unsettled
loud with boots in the street
with creaks on the floorboards
voices rising in the stairwell
speaking quarry language, igneous elegies