The following exercise presented by Writing It Real in Port Townsend Writer’s Conference faculty member Susan Rich is from a poetry-writing workshop she presented at our 2007 writers’ conference. We publish it this week as a finale to our celebration of National Poetry Month. We hope you’ll email us your results from this exercise and from Meg File’s exercise about writing poetry of home for future articles showcasing subscriber writing.

Writing poems requires careful observation, thoughtful analysis, and ineffable leaps of the imagination to consider the mystery imbedded in our everyday worlds. Why do chairs work best with four legs? What makes the curved edge of a wardrobe or the grain in bird’s eye maple, pleasing to the eye? It is amazingly satisfying to find a poem in the relationship between a night table and steamer trunk, as one of my students did last year, or in the construction of a built-in bookshelf, as in my poem “Reclamation”:

Reclamation

I’ve never had it before —
a place to rip up the floorboards,

disappear the interior wall
through to the stairwell below.

How naked the house seems —
exposed beams and dark cool air —

cracked, vulnerable, and, still
breathing. Irresistible

this allure, to look behind-
the-scenes to phlegm green

carpet and mouse leavings.
What is it that I’m seeking

behind this ex-closet door?
A memory vault of what

my parent’s might have built
if not for fear of bursting

pipes, falling trees, their children?
Each year the litany began:

gardening, fires, flood —
aren’t we put on this earth to love?

Tomorrow, my carpenter
will come bringing with him

bird’s eye maple and golden fir.
He’ll create a frame, build-in

a bookcase for this empty space,
this theater that’s been dressed

and redressed for some fifty years.
This home moving forward —

along with the inhabitants —
to its next demolition or desire.

From Cures Include Travel, White Pine Press, 2006

Look around the room you are sitting in right now. The bedraggled sofa or the enduring desktop may have something to disclose. Singing about objects in a house or a room is a useful way to “tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson might say. What follows is a “poemography” to encourage you to experiment with various doorways into a poem. Whether the exercises prompt you to take a second look at the bed you’re sleeping in, remember a sofa from your first apartment, or create a poem out of a piece of furniture in a local antique shop — the poem these exercises inspire will be uniquely your own.

1. Let the sofa, as in Seamus Heaney’s “Sofa in the Forties” or my poem “Reclamation” act as an object trigger to something about your past. These two poems use childhood, but you could also use the trunk on the sidewalk following your divorce or the bedside table in a hotel room.

2. Following the idea at the end of Linda Pastan’s, Ars Poetica, choose a piece of furniture that can stand in for your ideas about poetry. Would your poetry chair be a rocker or an Adirondack chair? Perhaps it isn’t a chair at all but a kitchen table or a washbasin? Choose a piece of furniture you know well (or meet at an antique shop in town) and write your own ars poetica. Is your poetry waiting in a pool table or old armoire?

3. Build your own furniture poem. Design the ideal kitchen table or a lovely loveseat.

4. Borrow from a magazine to find the furniture of your dreams; use the visual as a jumping off point for a poem that uses the object as a metaphor. You may also want to Google architectural furniture and see what you can get.

5. Thank a piece of furniture or an appliance as Robert Pinksy does in To Television.

6. Explain, as Zbigniew Herbert does, what the true and foiled nature of a piece of furniture is:

Armchairs

Who ever thought a warm neck would become an armrest, or legs eager for flight and joy could stiffen into four simple stilts? Armchairs were once noble flower-eating creatures. However they allowed themselves too easily to be domesticated and today they are the most wretched species of quadrupeds. They have lost all their stubbornness and courage. They are only meek. They haven’t trampled anyone or galloped off with anyone. They are, for certain, conscious of a wasted life.

The despair of armchairs is revealed in their creaking.

****

Dear Reader,

I hope that you’ll try your hand at these exercises and let me see what the exercises yield for you. I am eager to write more revision diary articles and would be happy to help you continue working on a poem in exchange for allowing me to share the revision work with WIR subscribers.

Yours,

Sheila