The Everything Writing Poetry Book (30 page)

This difference in relationships leads you to behave differently in your work and home environments. Unless you know your coworkers well, you probably don't allow them to see parts of your personality that you would allow your family to see. At work, you may come across as shy and reserved, but at home, you might be fun-loving and open. But occasionally, you might find the boundaries between work and home being crossed. Perhaps you will one day marry a coworker. Maybe your office mate will become the godparent of your first child. Explore these relationships and highlight the similarities and differences between your home life and your work life. These ideas and themes could make for fascinating poetry.

Chores

You probably spend some portion of your life maintaining and repairing the areas where you live, work, and play. In many ways, the chores you take on define your role in your family and create an identity for you, much like your job. Daily and weekly chores can become such a routine part of life that you might not even notice when you're doing them. Less frequent chores, like seasonal ones, generally require more effort, planning, and materials. Reflecting on your chores and the way you feel about them can provide you with strong poetic material.

Living on Your Own

If you live by yourself, then you will have to take care of all the chores around your home. However, you will likely have a list of chores that you prefer to do, those that you don't like to do, and those that you will (or must) pay someone else to do for you. Your chore strategy will reveal much about your personality, and this pattern can be one that you use when creating a character within a poem.

For example, say you have a character in a poem who lives in a messy bedroom but who spends two hours each evening preparing a meal, eating it, and cleaning the pots and the dishes. That person's priority is clearly placed on having a well-cooked meal as opposed to a neat living space, and a reader will gain a certain impression about that person. If a character keeps a manicured lawn, trimmed trees, and crystal-clear pool but doesn't pick up the newspapers cluttering the dining room, a reader will identify a different sort of person. Characters who live alone drive readers to question that status. Why does the character live by herself as opposed to with roommates? Why has the character never married? These details will help you create an intriguing image in your poem.

Living with Others

When you live with others, whether with roommates or family, you will likely divide the chores between the residents. The chores each person chooses to do—or those that the person will accept if assigned—will give insight into that person's personality and skill level. For example, one person in the house might be good with plumbing and will therefore fix any leaks or other plumbing problems that arise. An artistic person might choose to create seasonal decorations, sew curtains for all the windows, and buy pieces of art for the walls. Someone who enjoys cooking might volunteer to prepare the meals for the other members of the household.

This division of labor might be handy, but it also establishes an identity for each person living in the home. If these identities are not altered or switched every once in a while, some members may become dependent on others, and some might get frustrated with their responsibility. Brainstorm about these dynamics for your poetry. Draw from your own experiences and from others that you have read about in books, magazines, or newspapers. Also, it might be a good idea to steer clear of traditional or clichéd chore assignments. A female character need not always be the stay-at-home parent or laundry person, and a male character should not always be given the tasks of outdoor chores and household repairs. If you mix it up a little the characters will be more interesting for your reader.

Repetitive Tasks

If you are performing a repetitive, manual chore such as lawn mowing, you may find your thoughts wandering. It is very possible that you will have an idea for a poem as you are doing your yard work or some other tedious task. Don't ignore these thoughts! Even a seemingly unrelated thought could be useful in a poem. For example, Jeanie French's “Thinning” explores an act the speaker has done countless times but which she suddenly perceives in a new light. French takes the action of gardening, a hobby associated with nurturing and life, and turns it around by recasting the gardener in the role of killer.

Reluctant, I sit down between rows
faint lines of valiant green marching
between aisles of straw, the sun hot
on my head, burning the tips of my ears
and the back of my neck. I separate
the seedlings gently with my fingertips
feeling for the strongest, thickest shoot
in the clutch of tiny succulent leaves,
for that is the one which will survive
my tender care. I can't wear gloves—
I need all the delicacy of unimpeded touch,
nothing but the ridges of my fingerprints
and the pulpy-soft, new-sprung stalks.
I grasp a spindly clump of seedlings and pull
gently, sever roots from nurturing earth,
lay them aside to die in the strong spring sun
.

Murder lives in my cells
as I reach for the next sacrifice
.

Reprinted with permission of the author
.

One good idea for a poem would be to make a chore a metaphor for another action. For example, write about mopping the floor as though holding back a disastrous flood. Or write about washing your windows as a way of seeing things more clearly and changing your perspective on life.

Tinkering with Tools

Your job and chores have their own rhythms, from the clack-clack of a keyboard to the squeal of an electric drill and the grumbling of a lawnmower. Capturing the music of these rhythms in your poems will require a good ear, a strong feel for the sounds of words, and a good grasp of the metric forms discussed earlier.

A Child's Perspective

As a child you were likely fascinated by tools, gadgets, and machines. They can look funny, frightening, or fantastic. Jeff Knorr, in his poem “Taking Notes on Storytelling,” exemplifies this childhood fascination:

The tractor down the road is stopped, cold.
It has been here empty for two days now.
My son and I break from my work
and go out in the cold in his wagon.
He bellows
, tractor,
as we come close.
Wide-eyed and pleased as a colt
in an open, spring pasture,
he drives his eyes over the machine.
He steals grace from the engine,
from fat tires caked with mud and hay.
We bounce down the road,
so he looks over his shoulder, smiles,
and begins the unintelligible story of tractors
while tracing the veins of a single maple leaf
flaming red in his hands
.

Reprinted with the permission of the author
.

Knorr is careful with his rhythms as he portrays the child's emotions. The first line, for example, rolls the reader into the poem on an iambic beat. A comma replaces a missing unstressed syllable in front of the final word,
cold
. This forces the reader into a pause to make up for the dropped beat. In describing the child's reaction to the tractor he begins critical lines with the same iambic beat: “He bellows,
tractor
”; “he drives his eyes.”

Knorr also pays close attention to the sounds of the words. Note, for example, in the line “He bellows,
tractor
, as we come close” how “bellows” and “close” repeat the long o sound—almost as if reproducing the long “Oh!” exclamation of a wonder-struck child. The words “drives his eyes” repeat the long
i
sound as if to emphasize what the eyes are seeing and doing. The last two lines repeat the long
a
sound—“tracing,” “veins,” “maple,” “flaming”—to reinforce the shift in attention from the tractor to the leaf.

Finding the Rhythm

Perhaps the best thing about tools and machines, however, is that they make weird and impressive noises. Walt Whitman, in his poem “To a Locomotive in Winter,” expresses a childlike joy at the sounds of a train:

Thee for my recitative!
Thee in the driving storm, even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measured dual throbbing, and thy beat convulsive,
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,
Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling
    at thy sides,
Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,
Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front,
Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,
The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,
Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy
    wheels,
Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily-following,
Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering;
Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!
For once come serve the Muse, and merge in verse, even as here I see thee,
With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow,
By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes,
By night, thy silent signal lamps to swing
.

Fierce-throated beauty!
Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music! thy swinging lamps at night,
Thy madly-whistled laughter! echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing
    all!
Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding,
(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)
Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd,
Launch'd o'er the prairies wide, across the lakes,
To the free skies unpent and glad and strong
.

Like Knorr, Whitman is also sensitive to the rhythms of his verses. The heavy repetitions at the beginnings of his opening lines (called
anaphora
), for example, echo the chug-chugging sounds of the train. He also depends on iambics to gather steam in many of his lines: “By night, thy silent signal lamps to swing”; “with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night.” Most notable, though, are the long, languid lines themselves, which mimic the echoing sounds of the train and even the length of the train itself.

Whitman also takes full advantage of the sounds of his words. He makes ample use of alliteration: The s sounds in “silvery steel” and “smoke-stack” echo the hiss of steam, the
t
sounds in “tremulous twinkle” echo the sound and the flash of the wheels, the
r
sounds in “rumbling” and “rousing” mimic the “earthquake” created by the train's passing. He also chooses words, such as “throbbing” and “shuttling,” that imitate the sounds he is re-creating (onomatopoeia). It's clear that the speaker in Whitman's poem takes great delight in reproducing the sounds he hears.