The Poetry Marathon

Directions:

1. Take a piece of paper, and fold it in half.
2. In the left-hand column, make a list of your 26 favorite words, 1 for each letter, A-Z.
3.  Using Google or a thesaurus, find a synonym for each of the 26 words.  The synonyms need not start with the same letter as the original word. Write each word’s synonym in the right column next to it.
4. Use the righthand-column words as a limited vocabulary with which to craft a poem. The only additional words you may add to the poem (for the sake of clarity) are: the, is, are, & and.

DO feel free to pluralize words (i.e. “sun” versus “suns”), deviate from proper syntax (i.e. using a noun as a verb or an adjective as a noun), to reconjugate non-verb verbs for the sake of clarity (i.e. “turntable” to “turntabled”), and use wordplay (i.e. “sons” versus “suns”).

DON’T re-conjugate preexisting verbs (i.e. “love” to “loved”).

Note: This prompt was inspired by the concept behind Aaron Kunin’s book The Sore Throat, a collection of poems crafted from a limited vocabulary of approximately 50 words total.  Its subtle power is epic. I highly, highly recommend it.

once upon a time
men spoke only in whispers
fear of wolves, shiver
they tried to blow the house down
buried. big, bad, backfire.

__ar.

(this is a tanka. also it’s hard to understand but let me know what you think it means? interested in hearing other people’s perspective since it’s not entirely clear.)

she doesn’t give the plants
carbon dioxide
she gives them art
and an apology
she’s incredibly useful,
but never doing the
supposed-to-do of things
she’s the kind to ask people to
bring ponchos to parties
instead of potato chips,
in case she’s a waterfall that day
she would shrug it off to her
unpredictability
or her ex-boyfriends
drawing incomplete circles
instead of their bodies
because it was
all the same thing, to her
she ties ribbons onto
a tree trunk
so it doesn’t forget
she climbed it
and clipped a few branches
and made pencils
out of them
she pulled the lead
out of a lover,
she wasn’t a waterfall that day
but maybe still
things could drown because of her.

__ar.

the worst of her is in jars
she calls collecting them a hobby
she learned her scales before
exactly how to talk
the music and her laughter,
while her father held the latern,
all the way through cancer
one hand on a piano
and the other on her jars
she wears rain boots on
clear days and they
tell her she’s a pessimist
but really she just
loves the rain

she keeps an umbrella beside a guitar
no good songs are born from sunshine
except when you treat it
as the calm between the rains

__ar.

(this is the prompt to use 5/8 words)(sorry about it being rhyme-y)

write a letter-poem to your favorite poet / writer

perhaps include questions

or metaphors / allusions to their work

i.
everything happens for a reason,
except when
it doesn’t
ii.
only the good die young,
do the bad die golden?
they usually die as
poor writers
iii.
tragedies happen to
good people
everyday
poets are not usually
one of those good people
they are usually one of
the tragedies
iv.
depression. (noun)
the hospital in which
poems are born
and given to
the wrong parents
v.
i spent a lot of time
wondering why
nobody taught me
how to swim
if there are
so many other
fish in the sea

__ar.

to think without language
would be to perceive
a reality
unwrapped of fabrications,
the true of things
the image
if we forget to talk
we forget every page we’ve read
in the “how-to” for liars
language creates monsters
who write themselves out of
their monster bodies
with things that look like poems
but are really just another way
of pretending
let us be mute and deaf
make us immobile
the truth would
no longer be
slant

__ar.

(“slant” is emily dickinson reference.)

I wonder which voice
my poems sound best in
at what hour
to which person
I imagine they
are most true
always after midnight
and always to people who
only exist as passers-by
until I write them into
permanency.
man-made memorandum.

__ar.

When I first started dreaming that you
never left
you still believed you hadn’t
that partial inclusion entitled you to exist entirely
and somehow the thought of you made it to the top of the stack,
every time
The dreams were warm despite
taking place in an imaginary January
because I was running from your abandonment while carrying you
the additional one hundred and twenty seven pounds of dead weight and
you pretending not to blame me, anymore
I get it
once I became the monster under your bed, and the shadow that a
nightlight makes against the hallway walls
I could never not be just that
even if I slept beside you and we painted happy adjectives on my body
Even in my faintest whimper
you still heard me roar
in the back of your head,
you knew there was no cure for rabies.

The dreams stopped being wonderlands
(although it played in the background
in low resolution)
and began to mimic bus terminals
Our sunrises began to shape themselves into yellow tinted lamps
that collect flies and mosquitoes outside of train stations and twenty
four hour convenience stores
they flicker and die every few months
I swear I’ll replace them
but I’m outgrowing the experience and all of your gifted sweaters
yarn cocoons
I wrapped myself in their knitting and you,
thinking I would come out
still yours
like that was the thing that made me beautiful
in my new dreams
we hold hands at the bus stop
you ask me what song I’m listening to,
but I wipe you off my shoes in the grass

__ar.

“add-orexic”
she was a straight-C math student
who hated graphing fractions,
in a flood of A’s and extracurricular
until she started skipping
lunch
the excuse sounded something like
the half an hour to do homework
was more mandatory
than the menu
in two months she brought her
math grade up ten percent and dropped
ten percent of something else,
the way she was
learning to divide her body
made her understand why she had to find “x”
each meal taught her to add
and she invented new ways to subtract
in five months she
became the fraction
and the only thing on the graph
was two digit numbers
and red circles to mark
every
wrong
answer.

(Indubitably, this is not my strongest poem. It will need workshopping. But, here I begin!)

__ar.