1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Excerpt from the Preface of
The Liar’s Dictionary

Perhaps you have encountered someone who browses a dictionary not as a reader but as a grazing animal, and spends hours nose deep in the grass and forbs of its pages, buried in its meadow while losing sight of the sun. I recommend it. Browsing is good for you. You can grow giddy with the words’ shapes and sounds, their corymbs, their umbels, and their panicles. These readers are unearthers, thrilled with their gleaning. The high of surprise at discovering a new word’s delicacy or the strength of its roots is a pretty potent one. Let’s find some now. (Prefaces to dictionaries as faintly patronising in tone.) For example, maybe you know these ones already: psithurism means the rustling of leaves; part of a bee’s thigh is called a corbicula, from the Latin word for basket.

—Eley Williams
http://www.eleywilliams.com

Note: Forb, corymbs, umbels, and panicles are all terms from botany referring to types of flowering plants.

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Note: Next Read Around is January 22, 2021
at 4:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

I did not need to read any further than the preface to Eley Williams novel, The Liar’s Dictionary, to find the prompt for this week. The excerpted paragraph is a fine piece of prose poetry in itself. Williams deftly uses the imagery of a grassland meadow, inserting little known terms from botany, to evolve the metaphor of a browsing dictionary reader as a grazing animal, a metaphor which could easily apply to poetry, both as a writer and reader of poems. The story line is about two lexicographers in different times. The first, tasked with updating and revising a standard dictionary, decides to be creative morphing definitions of existing words and adding new fictitious entries into the mix. The second, a modern day lexicography, must tease out the lies and twisted definitions before the work is digitized. The excerpt and the premise of the book offer a rich set of choices to use as prompts. And it seemed to me, given the role of “lies” in current events, that it might be timely to explore the rigidity and fluidity of words and definitions. 

Prompt Menu

  1. Williams uses the metaphor of certain kinds of readers as grazing animals in a meadow. How would this metaphor apply to you? How do you graze? What kind of animal are you?

  2. Williams later describes such readers as “unearthers, thrilled with their gleaning.” What are you currently unearthing in your life? What compels you to “unearth,” to dig a little deeper in life or into an experience? Or describe your process of gleaning.  How do you glean wisdom or value from your experiences in life? What have you gleaned in the past that thrilled you.

  3. Create a different metaphor than grazing for reading/writing and write a poem about it.

  4. Pick some discipline or field of study, (chemistry, anthropology, body-building), research terms specific to the topic, and write a poem that incorporates those terms. As a stretch, use this with the previous prompt based on your chosen metaphor.

  5. Pick out a few words from the dictionary and change the definitions (see Ambrose Bierce’s The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary for lots of examples). Then incorporate the word/definitions in a poem.

  6. Let the “shapes and sounds of words” play into your writing.  What words and sounds make you giddy? 

  7. What might it be like if you were to take on the task of clearing your own personal life dictionary of “lies:” of fallacious terms and incorrect definitions that were added in the past? Find at least one such fallacies and a write about it. For instance, I grew up with the definition of a man as a “an aggressive, muscular hairy biped with a heart of steel and lacking tear ducts.”

  8. Williams uses a meta-commment (The line in parenthisis opining about prefaces in her preface). Write a poem that includes meta-comments about the poem, or its topic, or the metaphors used in it.

  9. Write from whatever else inspires you from the Eley Williams prose-poem or from elsewhere in life.