I've been reading Richard Wilbur lately, but that's not exactly the opposite I was thinking of. In The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises From Poets Who Teach, Stuart Dischell writes about The Attraction of Titles.
(1) Choose a pair of words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. Primary choices such as "hot and cold" or "good and evil" might be avoided, although sometimes the obvious can be a good place to begin. Try instead to find a more suggestive or playful pairing such as "calm and calamity." (2) Write a poem titled and based upon the word you have chosen.So, that's it. Your challenge is to write a poem that uses opposites in poem and title. Leave me a comment about your piece and I'll post the results here later this week.
Not sure this is what you were going for, but it's what I've got!
ReplyDeleteNews/Noise
The ticker tape parade
masquerades
as news, but it is not.
Instead,what we’ve got,
is a noisy celebration,
elaborating
on polls, bumper stickers,
twitters, tweets,
buttons, sound bytes,
effluvial bits
that are merely guesses.
News regresses
quickly into noise
when there is no science
behind it, or math.
What hath
God–or at least Hearst
and the pundits--
wrought?
Writing on a dirty wall,
graffiti
with graphics,
the moving hand,
mene, mene, teckle uparsin,
and that is all.
copyright 2009 Jane Yolen
“Love or Loath”
ReplyDeleteLo . . .
It’s easy to fall in
Yet the hardest game to win
I've loved then lost
and loathed the cost
It's such a wicked price to pay
when love is free to give away
Kim--those last two lines are keepers!
ReplyDeleteJane
Order/Disorder
ReplyDeleteTo order
A torte, Sir,
Isn't a tort, Sir.
Unless, of course, Sir, you order disorder--
In which case we need a disorder-
distorter
To make an ordered hors d'oeuvre
To order.