Today I got to hear great poems and discussions about archival processes and hybrid collaborations. My head is too full to untangle, so I apologize if this post is even more disorganized than usual.
Richard Siken’s poem embodies the feeling I had as the tagalong little cousin, the youngest, at reunions, all the others so much older and bigger and more important. I often played by myself somewhere out of the way, lost in my head, in the clouds, invisible.
For the first prompt, choose a line from a move and let it become a powerful metaphor as the poet did with the quote from The Matrix. I like that the narrator says his stepbrothers wouldn’t take him to the movies but later quotes a movie he’d seen to describe himself.
For the second prompt, juxtapose a series of opposites as the poem does, “hypotheticals” and “real,” “capacity” and “nothing” and “full” and “empty.
The third prompt is to use the poem’s question “What did I know that no one else knew?” as a ghostline. Remember to erase the line after drafting your poem and credit the poet with an after statement or in the title.
The last prompt is to build a poem using the following list of words: “blades,” “pressing,” “tools,” “solid,” “bounce,” ”absence,” “hands,” “shapes,” “blurry,” “capacity” and “invisible.”
Bonus prompt: write whatever this photo of the sky inspires.
Good luck!