Saturday, May 26, 2007

Poetry Monday

Picture This



Should a new day start

With lines of bad poetry

allusions to the obscure

illusions of grandiose dreams?

or

Should I trumpet my promise

to write lean and mean

keeping words to a minimum

metaphors clear and clean?

maybe

If I try really hard

I can break the habit

of stringing words into pictures

only I can see.



I wrote this about a pet peeve when I read other peoples poetry who have images that only they can see. I have this thing about communication. If something fails to communicate, why write it?


Writing Prompt: Choose a favorite picture book from your childhood. Pick an illustrated page and compose a poem about it.

4 comments:

Rhian said...

This is a great poem Carol. I'm guilty of: "stringing words into pictures only I can see" sometimes. Not intentionally but because at times i seem to view the world differently than most people. What are obviously connections to me are loose strings flapping in the wind to others. The challenge for me is how to take myself outside my experience and perception and open the window to everyone.

Rinda Elliott said...

I believe that most poetry is highly subjective so yes, it's written from a personal perspective. Maybe the trick is to try and see it from that different perspective. :)

Susan Helene Gottfried said...

Rhian said it well -- I, too, see the world differently. Maybe that's what makes us truly creative people, and that's what makes us so important to the world. I don't know.

But I know that it takes all kinds to rock the world. Sometimes, the more obscure poetry makes me think a bit harder; sometimes, it makes my eyes glaze over.

I think I'll try to write both: the obscure stuff AND the clear stuff. I think that I'm better at the clear stuff, myself, but if you never try, you never grow.

Neat food for thought! Thanks!

Ann said...

I studied the obscure stuff, and stretched my muscles. Wondered over new words, and my vocabulary grew. My vision and my world expanded, and poems bloomed.

Blog Archive