Week 1: Creative Writing Assignments
Review the “ideas for writing” at the end of Chapter 1 in The Poet’s Companion, p. 28-29.
You should have already read the introduction and chapter 1.
Try these three. Take a playful attitude here: we’re exploring.
Exercise 4: Love/Hate poem. Make the lists and write the poem as suggested. Have fun.
I’m looking for twenty lines, or more. Play with the structure as you see fit.
Exercise 5: “I don’t know…” poem. For inspiration, you might look at Allen Ginsberg’s poem
“Things I Don’t Know,” published in White Shroud, p. 84-85. Here’s the last few lines:
How do you hang a door, frame a window? Hold a light chainsaw?
How fix a broken leg? Ease a heart attack, deliver a baby? Breathe in
the mouth of a man dying at Oceanside?
What kind of government ever worked? Who wrote English Choriambics?
This isn’t Trivia (how play that?) this is my life, I can’t remember
the name of the lawyer my fellow student, friends with me in college 40
years ago—
How make a living, if I couldn’t write poetry?
Would I know how to plant peas, tie up tomato stalks?
Exercise 7: A poem instructing the reader on how to do something you know how to do.
See the detailed directions in your text.
Submit all 3 poems to your instructor by Monday, April 11.
Submit to your group: Just 1, perhaps the one you like best. Also due Monday, April 11.