Poets: Prepare to Start Your Engines - Poetry Pre-Writing Tip

Note in the title I did not say START your engines. We have ten days left until the “big” day appears.

Car racing is part of the life blood of the family I was raised in and is even showing up in parts of the next generation of Jordans. When I was a young girl, I would spend hours and hours and hours in the garage, handing my brother, the race driver, tools. You know, sort of like a doctor asks for scalpels.

All that gorgeous, seemingly without effort grace on the race track doesn’t start when they raise the flag, it starts long before, when the drivers work on their cars and finally warm up their cars during the days before the big race.

I am going to share with you one of my favorite poetry writing warm ups.

I use my old fashioned notebook and simply write lines of poetry. Not poems, but lines of poetry, sometimes smoothed together into several lines, but usually just lines.

Because I love the haiku form, I often write lists of five syllables and lists of seven syllables and then I randomly put them together.

This has two effects: one is it sharpens my observations and helps me write clearly and concisely with carefully chosen words, it also allows me to the space to see the grace in simply showing up at the page to warm up.

Sometimes those non-effort haiku have actually been better than when I was trying.

I just saw a play, so I am going to revisit some of the scenes in a list of five syllables:

Stripes of glitter

His ears were not his

Gold dust  all around

Thees, thous, Entreats, huh?

Only one in white?

Bookish Helena

“Hermia” now blonde

Thin Lysander

Bottom stole the show

After Puck, he died

And now, how about some seven syllable lines?

Demetrius, more wispy

Dead Poets society

Plays in my head while I watch

Love the feathers in that crown

Feathers, can they sing like birds?

Pixie like face glitter smile

Down home music strums, struts, pounds

Yee haw, let’s try some moonshine

Animals always woo us

 + + + + +

The first time I made up this exercise I was sitting in a coffee shop, just writing what I saw, lines like:

Red deck sneakers squeak

Mommy takes baby

Baby takes Mommy

Purr, computers, purr….

Espresso smells so….

Who does she wait for?

Textbooks in a pile

Awkward laugh hovers

“Forgot my back pack!”

It is more fun than it looks – I guarantee it.

I also guarantee that warming up through using this very simple exercise over the next few days will assist you in being more attentive and writing more concretely, with more details and fewer “fluff” words.

If I happen to see one of you at a coffee shop scribbling in your notebooks or pretending to text on your phone, I’ll know what you are doing. I won’t tell a soul!

-- Julie Jordan Scott