Volume VI, Issue 49 December 4, 2017 Dear ,
My mother, Patricia
Ryan, loved to cook. (And she loved a good sale, too.) Here she is in 1957, shortly after I was born, cooking up some nourishing dish for her growing family. (Maybe mashed potatoes; hers were
legendary.) Out of my parents' five children, I'm the only one who doesn't like to cook. But that doesn't stop me from constantly using food metaphors to describe writing. Like the way I refer to multiple writing projects as
"pots on the stove" and talk about one I'm stirring like mad on the front burner, another that's on simmer, one that's on the back burner for now.
And the way I refer to components of poems as belonging to three different "food groups": Content, Sound, and Form, and the components themselves as "ingredients."
If you're local to Charlotte and free this Wednesday from 6 to 9 p.m., I'd love to have you join me for a
workshop on "How to Cook Up a Poem." It will help you with your prose, too! (Details here and below.) And if you can't come, you can get a nice taste of it through this week's featured writing and prompt, and/or my online poetry course, Poetry
Rocks, which you can take at any time that's convenient for you. Hope you cook up some great writing this week! Love and light, Maureen Upcoming WordPlay
THE FINE ART OF COOKING UP A
POEM A Poetry (and Prose) Craft Workshop
Everything you need to know about writing outstanding poetry is embedded in the poems of the poets you love—in the form of “poetic ingredients” that comprise their outstanding
poems. Learn how to use any poem you love to inspire and instruct you in crafting your work in this hands-on workshop. Bonus: These ingredients will make your prose stronger and more lyrical, too!
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(Writing as Renewal / Creating New Writing /
Tools for a Writing Life)
Renew and delight yourself. The Winter Writing Retreat is an opportunity to
create new pieces of writing and/or new possibilities for our lives. Enjoy various seasonal prompts; they elicit beautiful material that can be shaped into essays, poems, stories, or articles. After a communal lunch, you’ll have private time which can be used to collage, work with a piece of writing from the morning, or play with a number of other writing prompts and methods. You’ll take home new ideas, new drafts, and new possibilities.
$97 includes lunch and supplies.
WHERE: South Charlotte area. Details will be provided upon registration.
WHEN: Saturday, December 16th, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Featured Writing
This is a poem I created through a tool I call "The Observation." Simple. Just like it sounds!
I went on a late afternoon walk with my ears and eyes open, and encountered a charming tableau between a mother and daughter, which I rendered onto the page with a bit of imagination, metaphor, and wordplay.
Note the words that communicate these poetic ingredients in the "food group" of "Content" that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin coined: "geography" (a sense of place), "chronology" (a sense of time), and "furniture" (sensory details). And note the way I use the additional "ingredient" of figurative language by weaving in various “horsey” words throughout the poem.
Note, too, in the "food group" of "Sound," how I use the slant rhymes "close," "horse," and "voice" in close proximity. (There's other sound play through repetition of vowel and consonant sounds in here, too, that you can look for.)
Lastly, in the food group" of form, note how I've chosen short stanzas of irregularly numbered lines, each a little "leaf pile" of words that volley back and forth between mother and daughter, rather than a more formal poetic form.
Under a Sky of Mare’s Tails
As I walk by, a woman is raking autumn leaves
into piles with a grim vengeance – so much to do by sunset.
Mom? A girl calls from inside the house, Mom!
Her mother’s answer is to rake even harder, and which mother among us could not forgive the tightness in her
lips?
MO-OM!
Here it comes, the snapped whip of the mother’s
What?
Is it n-e-i-g-h?
The rake pauses as she
puzzles. Nigh? Like the evening drawing close? Nay.
For the horse! You can hear the cantering in the girl’s voice.
The woman smiles in spite of herself. Yes, she calls, n-e-i-g-h.
Her raking resumes, gentler now she is gathering hues of chestnut, roan, bay.
WordPlay Now! Writing
Prompt
This is WordPlay -- so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after another? This week, it's "cook."
PROMPT:
Try a tool that I call "The Observation."
Take a small observed moment and turn it into a poem by writing it out as it happened, playing with content, sound, and form as you
go to find what pleases you and suits your subject matter. Check out the poem above for ideas.
I'd love to see what you come up with! Email it to me at info@wordplaynow.com—you could be featured in a future Word-zine.
MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and two collections of poetry, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one
another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for
joy. Here's to yours! |
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