FEATURED CRAFT ARTICLE

INSTANT POET
Penelope Stowell Copyright © 2002

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I do not write poetry, but sometimes I wish I did. Writing poetry seems so romantic, so intuitive, so right-brain. Plus, it looks interesting if somebody happens to glance over your shoulder in a coffee shop at what you're scribbling in your notebook.

Poet Miriam Sagan offered the following Instant Poem exercise at a workshop I took last spring. If you follow the instructions, you will write a poem in spite of yourself.

1. Take yourself to an interesting location--a boulder in the woods, a table in a cafe, a museum. On a clean sheet of paper, write a description of an object or the setting, using all of your senses, for ten minutes. You may write this as a narrative, or in the form of a list. You are not writing down your feelings about what you are describing, or trying to interpret the inner meaning of what you are saying. You are simply describing, in relatively objective terms, an external experience.

2. When your ten minutes are up, take a short break. Walk around, drink some coffee, browse. Then reseat yourself and start on a fresh piece of paper.

3. This time, you're going to write about your internal experience. What are you feeling or thinking? What are your emotions in this moment, your psychological state? You're not expected to write anything that has to do with step #1 of this exercise. Go where your heart leads you. Journalize. Again, you may use either a narrative form or a list form. Take ten minutes for Step Three.

4. Stretch, sigh, smile, and take a fresh sheet of paper. Now we're going to construct a poem.

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Take the first line or the first sentence from the description you wrote in Step One and copy it down on the fresh piece of paper. Now take the first line or sentence from Step Three and copy it down. Next, copy the second line or sentence from Step One, and then the second line or sentence from Step Three. Keep going, alternating lines from Step One and lines from Step Three. Don't worry whether or not you're making sense--you're constructing the first draft of a poem, after all!

It helps to get in the mood by breaking up the lines so that what you're copying out "looks" like a poem.

You need not be completely strict about this step of the process. If you feel (for no particular reason) that you want to copy down Line Three before Line Two, or put two lines from Step Three in between lines from Step One, go for it. Logic is not required--do what feels right when you don't use your head too much.

5. Now, read what you have written (aloud if possible) in your best Shakespearean/Allan-Ginsburg-at-a-reading voice. Pause dramatically at odd moments. Smile cryptically at the end of a line. Pretend you're a poet.

Notice how the external descriptions and the internal reflections, separately created and then randomly interspersed, sometimes conjure up a level of meaning of which you were unaware until you paired the two different elements in your poem.

Read through what you've created. Yes, some of what you have doesn't work very well--but I'll bet that you find a few lines you like. Copy those lines you like onto another fresh sheet of paper and read it aloud. This is your poem for the day.

Now title it. If you don't have a good title, use today's date or the location where you are writing.

Congratulations, fellow non-poet--you just wrote a poem!

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PENELOPE STOWELL has lived on four continents but now calls Santa Fe, NM home. Declaring herself a writer at age five, Stowell instead became an arts administrator and single parent. Near the prime of life, writing reemerged. Penelope aims for publication for her children's novel "...once I overcome my Fear of Finishing."