Friendship

And I thought you arrogant,
at first.
Now I know you just lack
All social grace necessary
For eloquence and I think about
your slow smile,
Slow like a self-inflicted wound.
Drawn out with pronunciation.

Poetry Exercise #16: Memory Poem

Summertime Killer

Dancing from the wasps,
On the roof she sets down every bowl with precise measure—
A mixture of soap and raw meat,
The bane of summer wasps.

And we dance on the grass away
From each other,
Glaring from a too-bright sun
With our midday summer water clothes,
Attacking with squirt guns—

“Bang. You’re dead.”

Poetry Exercise #15: On Art

On Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe

You are what we call a nude,
Because a goddess lacks clothing.
What were you thinking?
This is not the sixteenth century—
This is 1863, and the pastoral is dead.
Women don’t dance
Nude, with sheep,
While a horny shepherd plays a flute.
We don’t eat nude, anymore.
You’re setting us back a couple hundred years here,
You know.
Now we have something called ‘morals’
And ‘ethics’
And we eat clothed.

Poetry Exercise #14: Ironic or Concessional Structure

Global Warming

We will have curly-limbed,
Speckle-faced, flower-lipped
(bloody with berry juice)
Children whose skin will tan
Like frying potatoes,
Crinkling in hot oil.

In forty years they will be
Dead from skin cancer.

Poetry Exercise #11: Exquisite Corpse REWRITE

On the day of the explosion
your fire coated me like paint.
It left the skin recoiling in pain
and the skin’s body winced
like a lobster from the cool recess of a tank
suddenly cooking on the stove.

Your damage is done—
now my harlequined skin
is thirsty and only the river
Phlegethon can quench it.

You had resigned yourself to the wicked ways and
I think you liked the darkness.
But lights turn on and space gets filled.

Poetry Exercise #13: Unsympathetic Poem

You know the rat, but this is not a rat.
He is covered in fur like the butterscotch pudding you scarf,
But don’t try to taste him.
If you do, his cut will burn you,
Like the lamp did that one night.
Do you remember the pink ribbon trailing the rat?
This rat has one too,
But it is covered in things that poke and sting like
When you stepped on Barbie’s dream car.
Unlike the rat that you know,
This rat climbs trees
Like you stack your unwanted legos—
The ones you never use.
The ugly ones you never use.

Poetry Exercise #12: Diction Poem

“7 Ways of Looking at a Kiss”

Touching mouths of lust
make us fall into
the shadowy path.

A precursor to copulation,
two humans join themselves
at the mouth.

Like when mom pours my
cereal
and the milk touches the
cheerios
and they get soggy and
gross.

Kinda a cross between
a star, exploding
or a drunk knocking out
my headlights with a
baseball bat.

Sudden, unnoticed movement—
my heart beats a warning and his lips cut into mine.

The two teenagers reach together,
overcoming feelings of shame, lust
and anxiety.
They succumb to peer pressure.

I tasted the salt on his lips.
His tongue merged with mine.
Our bodies quivered as one.

15 Words

List fifteen words that you may want to incorporate into a poem.

Marble
Twig
Gravel
Jellyfish
Blade
Stem
Finger
Key
Box
Pine
Salt
Stone
Hat
Champagne
Paint

Poetry Exercise #9: Sonnet

Exposed

The hard and shelled off-color nails, the tips
of fingers (peach, or “flesh,” whatever shade
that indicates) on top of that pink strip
of bubblegum that is my finger, laid.
They sometimes change their color, veil or cloak,
while I alone underneath know the truth.
The rock-like nails just cover flesh unbroke
that cracks and ages coming from their youth.
The nails are orange when I tango, blue
on melancholy or elated days,
lime when I do not care, or that one hue –
the glitter purple amidst prism rays.
If fingertips aren’t careful, nails can chip
Revealing flesh that can break off and slip.

First Meeting

I had my first meeting with my professor to go over my poetry last Friday, and it was pretty helpful. She liked most of my poetry (or at least didn't hate it) and gave me a check plus on my descriptive sketch of the television (check pluses are rare). She said I have a gift for humor that many of the girls in our class don't posess, and said that the type of poetry I should develop my skills in is haiku.

I like haiku, but I'm still not sure about this poetry stint. I have a hard time talking to people about my poems, and even instilling my true thoughts into them. I always write in regards to how other people see, and how they would see me.

Poetry Exercise #4: Metaphor Poem REWRITE

Pectopah in Saint Petersburg

The Russians like to trick
unsuspecting tourists;
it’s mostly the Americans
who confuse the alphabet.

The letter ‘д’ a hat,
Lincoln’s lofty stovepipe.
‘И,’ to the glancing eye,
surely a backwards ‘N.’

‘Ё’ with two dots above,
Uncle Sam watching you.
‘Ч’ – is that a number?
And ‘Я,’ echoing ‘R.’

‘C,’ a ruse – the sound not
an English ‘c’ at all.
‘П’ is a skyscraper
and ‘Ц’ could be a state.

When tourists stop, asking the way,
most on the street are tourists too.
But the Russians shake their heads
in mock confusion and walk away.

The Russians all speak English,
but only to each other.

Journal #4: On “Near Halloween”

“Near Halloween” confuses the reader – at least it confused me, at first – because Boruch never explicitly explains what is hanging “by the neck” (3) on a “star-eyed gable” (8). It relies on the reader’s power of implication to figure out what the poem is about by using textual clues. Because it is entitled “Near Halloween,” I thought it was referring to a scarecrow with “stuffed jeans / and flannel shirt” and a “pillowcase head” (3-4). There are several details in the poem that make the question of “is it a scarecrow?” worth asking, though. “Like a bad thought, someone else’s / bad thought, it hangs / by the neck” (1-3) makes me think of someone thinking about committing suicide by hanging. The poet also writes that “It could be / anyone up there” (16-17). The thing that really confuses me about this poem is the last two lines: “Not that anything’s eternal / or exactly like any other thing.” Is she saying that life is not eternal, and that the proof is in this dead corpse? Or that this scarecrow is not eternal because it only lives around Halloween?

Line nine – “all misery–ha!–to you and you and damn you!” – could be translated two ways. If the thing hanging is indeed a scarecrow, the “jubilant drunk” (7) may have put it up to unintentionally mock those in misery with its sinister, grinning pillowcase head. If it is a person who committed suicide, then perhaps they are yelling “damn you!” to misery and depression with their act.

Poetry Exercise #3: Bad Love Poem

W is for the way your mismatched legs make you waddle cutely as we walk down the street together...
I is for your endearing, but icily sweaty grip you have as we hold hands walking down the street together...
L is for your nickname, Lovey Dovey ducky wucky, my little Willardkins…
L is for the Little Mermaid nightlight you keep in the corner of the bedroom…
A is for your favorite movie, A Walk to Remember…
R is for making me wait outside the theater in the rain with you for 3 days before the movie premiere…
D is for that thing you do with your lips when we kiss, kind of like a duck recklessly diving into a lake for insects…

Journal #3: “First Death in Nova Scotia”

When I read this poem it took me a few tries to understand what was going on. I think that is because the poem is written with such simplicity in mind, as it’s written from the point of view of a child. It was hard for me to figure out what was going on with the loon too. The poet says that little Arthur looks like a “doll” and describes his coffin as a “little frosted cake,” as the loon watches it from its “white, frozen lake” that is the marble table it stands on. I think that within the poem, Bishop uses colors to indicate life and the lack thereof. For instance, the parlor is cold, and holds two dead things: Arthur and the stuffed loon residing on his frozen lake. The lake is “white” and the words “frosted cake” make me think that Arthur’s small casket is white as well. Jack Frost paints Arthur white, leaving just a “few red strokes” (perhaps representing the few days or months that Arthur lived). The royal families are shown as “warm in red,” indicating life against the stark whiteness that is the parlor.

Journal #2: Concrete Images

A half-full, lime green box of Kleenex tissues

A bright orange pumpkin carved with a smiley face

A white and blue osprey diving into a clear river for a fish

A yellow mountain lion with glowing black eyes in the foliage along the gravel road

A fat grey cat spread across a cream-colored couch

Buttery yellow popcorn in a metal bowl with steam rising

An old maple tree with the remnants of a half-finished children’s treefort

A graveyard bathed in sunlight with yellow warblers flitting around the tombstones

Poetry Exercise #2: Three Haiku

In the endless ocean
I see crawling towards the shore
A piece of driftwood.


A hot day in July
Scorching in daylight;
At night snow falls.


On a wooden boat
I cast my line for hours
For one small fish.

Journal #1: First Loves

In First Loves my favorite two poems were “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “The Flea” by John Donne. I have read them both before, and the fact that I remembered them specifically means that they spoke to me then as they do now. I remember reading “My Papa’s Waltz” in high school, in a class full of kids who didn’t want to have anything to do with poetry. The only poetry I had read before was Shakespeare, and so I was struck by the simplicity of Roethke’s words. I could smell the whiskey as I read it, and heard the pans clattering as they fell. It really formed images in my brain that Shakespeare, as much as I tried, could just not conjure until a few years and English classes later. I think in that sense my experience was much like Sherman Alexie’s; “My Papa’s Waltz” was probably the first poem I truly understood, too. Unlike Alexie, however, the violence depicted in the poem is (fortunately) alien to me.

Donne’s poem speaks to me in a much different way. His prose is more complex and inaccessible than Roethke’s poem. Donne is one of my favorite poets, and this is probably my favorite poem of his. When I first read it, it made me feel angry at first. I was mad at Donne’s exorbitant attempts to sway a woman into sleeping with him. When I read it again I began to understand the concept of the flea and I fell in love with Donne’s metaphoric argument. This poem makes me feel passionate in a way no other poem has ever done. Maybe passionate isn’t the right word. Alive. Yes, alive, that’s better. The flea is so unimportant in the first stanza – “And pampered swells with one blood made of two, / and this, alas, is more than we would do” (8-9). What the flea does is much worse than such a little thing as sex, because the flea “swells” with two types of blood and Donne assures her that she will not swell like the flea (become pregnant). Then in the next stanza the flea becomes as important as a marriage bed. As the flea’s importance changes from stanza to stanza it reminds me of someone trying to persuade someone else. If one angle proves useless, the persuader switches to a different argument.

Poetry Exercise #1: Descriptive Sketch

When the silver remote stopped working, the slender buttons on the television’s frame remained: power, volume, and channel. Eventually the television swallowed them into its frame, and after that we used a fork to pierce its mechanical guts and turn the television off at night. When the buttons became so lost inside that even a fork or carefully placed ink pen could not stop its dirge, the mute button became our savior. But while the sound was temporarily stopped, the trance-inducing images on the screen were always present in their IQ-lowering splendor. The glittering commercials were there when we woke up, the cartoon characters joined us for lunch and the generic sitcom laugh tracks followed us to bed seven nights a week. The strategically placed furniture in the living room watched the machine dominate our phone conversations, homework and minds, but remained impartial.