novapsyche | Entries tagged with poetry exercises

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Reload page in style: light

So I'm limping along as far as NaNo is concerned. I noticed not too long ago that I was resisting in direct response to the amount of internal pressure I placed. I need to get to a place where I say to myself "I get to write a poem today" instead of "I have to".

Leafing through a lit journal today, I had the idea to reverse the literal meaning of each individual word, thus coming up with a vastly different poem than the one I was reading. So far, this seems to be a valuable vein to mine, though it's not as simple as I would have imagined. I'll post the first fruit of this labor as soon as I'm finished transliterating.

How go your writing goals?

Last month at the Poetry-Free-For-All, in response to a cliched post, one of the moderators advised the novice to consider never using the words "nightmare, bleeding, tears, stars, memories, moon, weeping, aloneness, dreams, soul, life, or shame all in the same poem."

So I decided to use these as the material in my most recent word matrix. I filled out the list to sixteen words and came up with the following:

The nightmare soul lies alone, moon-
faced, his memories a soup of dreams. Bread or manna, he clothes
the stars in spritely blood. The pixy martyrs weep, their paths
sparkling with shame as they remember a life before tears.

Nightmares are memories gone awry, stars shamed
into collapsing their whole souls. Dreams are the blood of life:
alone they are the bread that fills us as we weep before the dawn.
The moon still shines, clothed in fog. The air has taken the path of tears.

( word matrix )