Freewrite Prompt 2

Improv-ing: The best way to learn to write poetry is to study a poet you love and the ones you don’t. My favorite poet is Gabrielle Calvocoressi. She has a skilled mastery of the grotesque, class and gender studies, and history. She has many qualities I admire and when I began writing poetry, I would work with her poems often. (Now I have changed styles and built upon those foundations). But, I still use this technique with my newfound poets. Improv-ing takes many forms. We’ll review all of them later. For now, the most basic—stealing. Find that line you love (or hate). Steal is outright, use the opposite, change it slightly. Pick a single line from a poem you love and use it to write your own. When you’re finished, it shouldn’t matter that you stole that line. You can remove it later. Just use it to copy a style or image that you can use and your poet didn’t.

Although, as mentioned, you can steal a favorite line from a great poem, I stole and inverted a line from a poem I don’t enjoy: Elizabeth Bishops’s “One Art”:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I took the line “The art of losing isn't hard to master” and flipped it. Then I began writing. At the time, my family was tiling the kitchen floor. My draft:

Tile

The art of losing is hard to master

and sounds like creaking knees

as I bend to tile a floor.

Drips of water saws drown the whir of blades

ripping squares of kitchen tiles.

Swipes of dulled blades to mortar

and plastic pegs to separate

my work from yours.

I ease my way out of the back corner

one edged tile at a time, and

remind myself of the games we’d

invented. Dinosaurs and astronauts soon

paled to the magic of angolo and

counter rails, majolica and formella. Yet no

running bond could keep us together—

you, with your no-childhood face

glaring at me as we swipe yet again.

A lifetime apprenticeship for you, my son,

the only token I had. Not enough for your

mother, not for you, and your eyes

smoke of her. Your hair shrouds the gray of

that eye, and I wish again I’d had a girl.

A girl to sweep and butter after

your mother left to open a

no star restaurant with linoleum floors

and empty walls where our picture should

fall. A girl to remind me of her, to

fashion and crackle better than you

ever would. My son, with your feminine

hands, keep your chin to mortar and

mastic, and smile a tune to me.

The line is slightly different. Yet, the piece varies incredibly from Bishop’s. So much that I didn’t need to remove it. It was no longer similar enough. Yet this line provided a poem I wouldn’t have written otherwise.

Note: Remember how to begin analyzing a poem? This title sucks. It’s not one that furthers the piece (we know it’s about tile). Rather it’s one for me to quickly reference. Also note how Bishop’s poem signals differently than mine. Hers follows a form, rhymes, and heavily depends on abstract concepts. Mine, however, doesn’t. Which method suits you better?