Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Poetry Club's prompt for October 19 (issued a week before) was to write a "Next Time" poem. As in: what would you do differently (or the same) next time? The line we were given to work off of was "Next time what I'd do" from the following poem.
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Mary Oliver - Next Time
Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.
When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.
And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.
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Mary Oliver - Next Time
Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.
When anyone talked to me, whether
blame or praise or just passing time,
I'd watch the face, how the mouth
has to work, and see any strain, any
sign of what lifted the voice.
And for all, I'd know more -- the earth
bracing itself and soaring, the air
finding every leaf and feather over
forest and water, and for every person
the body glowing inside the clothes
like a light.
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1 comments:
When I first started to write a poem off of this prompt, I couldn't get past the fact that the phrase "next time" implies a future tense, but "I'd" is of course the contraction of 'I would', which is past tense.
This grammatical screw-up (as I saw it) was eating away at me. This was my first poem prompt, and for some reason I felt that I had to use the prompt line exactly as it was given, tense confusion and all. So I wrote the following poem about it.
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Next Time (snarky draft)
by Turtle Shell
Next time, what I'd do
will be to have refused
to build a sentence off a phrase
I will not have gotten
a sense of ... the tense of.
Tomorrow, everything was written in future-past tense.
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Then I decided that that was a really petty thing to have done. Our poet laureate gives us a prompt to help inspire us to write something poetic, and what do I do? Spit on it because the grammar wasn't good enough for me?
So I tucked that first attempt away and went ahead and changed the "I'd" to "I'll" and wrote a proper poem about the subject of the prompt rather than about the prompt itself.
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