And now for our penultimate (optional) prompt! The poet William Wordsworth once said that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” For Wordsworth, a poem was the calm after the storm – an opportunity to remember and summon up emotion, but at a time and place that allowed the poet to calmly review, direct and control those feelings. A somewhat similar concept is expressed through the tradition of philosophically-inclined poems explicitly labeled as “meditations,” – like Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” the charming Frank O’Hara prose poem, “Meditations in an Emergency,” or Charles Baudelaire’s “Meditation.”
Today, I’d like to challenge you to blend these concepts into your own work, by producing a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement, like Hass’s “All the new thinking is about loss,” or O’Hara’s “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.” Or, like, Baudelaire, you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to. There are as many approaches to this as there are poets, and poems.
Happy writing! I get my prompts HERE!
Today, I’d like to challenge you to blend these concepts into your own work, by producing a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement, like Hass’s “All the new thinking is about loss,” or O’Hara’s “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.” Or, like, Baudelaire, you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to. There are as many approaches to this as there are poets, and poems.
Happy writing! I get my prompts HERE!
Life Sucks and is so beautiful
Life sucked so bad when all I wanted was a big brother. As an only child, I asked my Mother, begged and pleaded for a big brother. "That's not how that works." I remember her saying. Which ever way she responded each time I asked was the equivalent to "No."
How beautiful life is when I was United with a son my father had with another woman, not my Mother. He's older than me. We've grown to be very close. We get along famously. He is my big brother.
Life sucks and is so beautiful.
Life was beautiful in the beginning. Full of wonder, joy, peace, excitement, newness, comfort, Mommy, home, love, playing, learning, different, new, home, love, more, future, change, same, same home, same Mommy, same love. Striving for a plato of same while every now and then venturing off to new, to always come back to same.
Change.
Along the way I lost the will to wonder, I lost joy, peace, excitement, and comfort. Only newness was the same. I became uncomfortable, Mommy seemed so far away, home was far away until one day there was no home anywhere, anyway. Love felt lost, no more play. Still learning. Rapidly different, always new. No Mommy, no home, no love, no more, seemingly hopeless. Lost. Some unweighed portion of me still striving to come back, to what? I don't know, except the feeling of comfort, Mommy, Home.
Change.
Life sucks, I'm still not awake to be comfortable while Mommy still waits for me to come home.
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