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.

Poetry Writing Prompt for OctPoWriMo Day 13: Laughter, Laughter and More Laughter

It has been an interesting writing and living day here in Bakersfield.

How has it been in the place you call your home, even if you are traveling and this is just “home for a day?”

I did some writing that turned into quite a huge barrel of a-ha flakes poured over my head.

Naturally I think I did some tune-up by writing my pantoum the day before so images from my early childhood were ripe for the plucking, but a high school football game memory is the one that reached out and grabbed my heart in the most soulful way possible.

Here is what I wrote:

“In Fall 1979 I was a senior at Dana Hills High School in Dana Point, California. I have no idea who we were playing because I didn’t care about our lousy football team which rarely won a game. I went to the games to socialize. On this night, I was flirting with a boy with curly blonde hair. I think he was a friend of a friend. I was due to graduate early, I was working at a job I loved, I was finally feeling comfortable in my skin.

For some reason the blonde haired boy whose name is lost in memory found something ridiculously funny and we sat on the bleachers and laughed and laughed and laughed and it was, all of a sudden, like we were in an invisible bubble and no one else was there.

You might think this moment would end with the cliché high school kiss or something, but it didn’t.

Instead it just ended with laughter and the bubble going away but me, feeling almost overwhelmingly content in that moment. There were no expectations, no explanations, no possible heartbreak, no reason to be afraid, no awareness of what was to become of my life. I was no one’s sister, no one’s mother, no one’s best friend, no one’s babysitter, no one’s student… for that bubble moment I was just me and that blonde boy laughing.