Writing From The Inside Out 2021 Week 40 Prompts
Based on Ted Kooser & Jim Harrison’s Braided Creek
Read the poem
Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you
Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…
Use the selection of prompts below the poem
Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…
Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes
Excerpts From Braided Creek:
A Conversation In Poetry
After carefully listing my 10,000 illusions
I noticed that nearly all that I found
in the depths was lost in the shallows.
Raindrops on your glasses;
there you go again,
reading the clouds.
Dew drops are the dreams
of the grass. They linger, shining,
into the morning.
If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it strange
you need never leave home.
—————————-
How lucky in one life to see
the sun lift a cloud from a pool!
This slender blue thread,
if anything,
connects everything.
—Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison: Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, available through Copper Canyon Press:https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/braided-creek-a-conversation-in-poetry-by-jim-harrison-and-ted-kooser/
Please join Writing From The Inside Out by attending the read-around sessions on Friday afternoons. It’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional. If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:
Note: Next Read Around is:
Oct 8, 2021 at 4:00 PM PST
My Thoughts
Two Poets, Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, had exchanged poems through letters to each other for years. But they stepped up their game when Kooser was diagnosed with cancer and his poetry intensified into short vivd bursts. The letters turned into haiku-like verses they shot back and forth between each other and then compiled the collection into a book: Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. They chose not to attribute the specific pieces to the respective authors. The result is a powerful, dreamlike semi-narrative poem that sometimes flows like a river and sometimes jars like an avalanche.
The two pieces I excerpted struck me as worthwhile prompts for this week because they encourage us to “awaken inside the familiar and discover it strange” and to find the slender blue thread that connects everything. That, in itself, is a great intention to take on as you go through the world and cull words from the sights and sounds you encounter in your travels. I lifted these two sets of verse out of the river using my own arbitrary sense of punctuation. The authors offer no such demarcations—the versed sets simply run from beginning to end, straight through, without apology or explanation. The thought occurred to me that whatever we write has beginnings before we begin and grows from roots in conversations with others, real or imagined, people or otherwise (and for poets, anything “otherwise” for that matter). What poems might spontaneously arise as you converse with the world around you? What might you pluck from the stream?
Prompt Menu
Task yourself to write a series of short (two to four line) poems throughout the week based on small observations. Don’t try to make them related. Compile them into a set.
As a writing prompt, make a list of your 10,000 illusions; start with, maybe, twenty!
Write a poem or journal about something you found in the depths but lost in the shallows.
Write about the “raindrops on your glasses.” That could be whatever blurs, obstructs, or alters your vision or gets you to read new meaning in things; or you could write about the actual perception and experience, or imagined experience, of having raindrops on your glasses.
Using the structure “dewdrops are the dreams of grass, write your own similar structures: blank are the dreams of blank then elaborate on that connection.
Write a poem or journal with the stem: “I awaken inside the familiar and…“
Use the opening line, how lucky in one life to… As a prompt for writing. You can either follow the metaphoric as the authors did or write about something good fortune in your past.
As usual, write about anything else from the poem or life that inspires you