In the book I Am Writing a Poem About . . . A Game of Poetry, Myra Cohn Livingston writes about three of the assignments she gave to students in her master class in poetry at UCLA. A while back, Elaine at Wild Rose Reader and Janet Wong, one of the students in Livingston's master class, challenged folks to write ring/drum/blanket poems. This is one of the assignments that is described in the book. The third assignment Livingston gave was to write a six-word-based poem. Here is a description from the book's introduction.
About the last assignment--a six-word-based poem--there was some debate. Everyone agreed that hole, friend, candle, ocean, bucket, and snake presented possibilities, but a few preferred the word scarecrow to bucket, so a choice was given. Hole, friend, candle, ocean, and snake were mandatory, but one could choose either bucket or scarecrow as the sixth word.Now, that is a challenge! We are going to follow Livingston's directions, so your job this week is to write a poem that contains the five words hole, friend, candle, ocean, and snake, as well as either bucket or scarecrow as the sixth word. Leave me a comment about your poem and I will post the results here later this week.
5 comments:
Tricia,
I don't know if I'm up for this writing challenge. I'd have to hope that I'd be struck with some real poetic inspiration for this poetry stretch!
Digger
As a friend,
I dug a hole in the ground,
where high tide will rush in
sometime later,
I felt like a scarecrow
inside sand, as I placed
the bucket over my head,
a candle in my hand sizzled,
without air to support its lungs,
high tide came, and the sand
around me hardened like concrete,
my arms and legs crushed under water,
and I got stuck as a snake,
until I was fully submerged.
This is just the sort of thing I need to have in my hip pocket. Thanks for the prompt!
I definitely saw a poem in these words today!
http://havingwrit.blogspot.com/2008/05/with.html
I tried to write a sestina but had to give up and write a diamante. Good challenge!
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