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 #17 - Bringing a Place to Life Via Your Poem

In Rainer Rilke’s “Diaries of a Young Poet” (not his more often sited “Letters”) he was making careful notes to his lady love, describing his travels as he ventured into Italy.

Please note Rilke's technique:

1.        He considered his audience: he is writing especially for an audience of one. A woman he is in love with who highly values the words he is writing. She is hungry for rich, ripe narrative.

2. Consider his writing voice.  Can you hear his voice and his heartbeat as he writes for his
  “audience of one? Keep your voice authentic no matter how large – or intimate – your “audience.”

3. Consider the overall metaphor.  What does it speak to of these two cities?  How does Rilke make these places feel like people?