While I promise this book writing and publishing blog will not turn into a poetry blog, I felt I left you with a rather intense image with yesterday’s post/poem and thought a little word play might lighten things up.
I wrestle a noun
I wrestle a noun till it yells “Uncle,”
Lasso a verb and reel it in.
Tussle with tenses,
Find a few prepositions
Within a box in a closet under the stairs.
Can’t resist and reach for the stars
Where I nab a sparkly adjective
Despite Frank Conroy’s warning,
“Don’t touch that.”
And oh-those-tempting adverbs.
Slowly, hesitantly,
I turn away
And they whisper “Take me” “use me”
Until I can no longer bear it.
Reluctantly, I reach for one, no two, no three.
It can’t be helped.
More nouns, verbs, toss in a couple of prepositions
and one conjunction to hold it all together:
Poetry Soup.
To think I started with only a stone.
Very clever! Brava! Thank you for posting this — I’ll be smiling all day with this in the back of my mind. 🙂
Thanks, Jennifer. Between your comment and a coaching client comparing me to Oprah today, I’ll be smiling all day now as well. And you just gave me a great idea. I think I will dress up as a poem for Halloween: I’ll paste words, have a few metaphors as props, this will be fun!
Lisa,
I love both of your poems and especially love that you shared them.
Two suggestions: Change the second “reluctantly” to “hesitantly” so you have one, two, three adverbs.
And insert “of” between “couple prepositions”–that makes two. “in” is the first.
Hope I’m not being anal. Just suggestions. Of course, poets can take poetic license. I’m always amazed that poets, like any writer, keep revising, except Shakespeare apparently.
Again, many thanks. I enjoy all your blog posts.
Rhonda, I LOVE your suggestions and they are great improvements. I made them as you can see above. I had been lamenting that I don’t have a poetry workshop or seminar to go to for editing and feedback as I did when I lived in Boston–a lifetime ago. I don’t remember how to edit my own poetry (plus others will always see things we don’t). So, thank you for creating a virtual poetry seminar experience for me.