What a Great Idea for a Poem! (cont.)

3 – On the side of the highway, a brief stretch of small woody, evergreen plants looked kind of like a miniature forest. I thought it might be fun to write about furniture or a garden or some household thing from the point of view of a small creature like an ant. The poem might be a surprise, where you don’t realize until the ending that what’s being described isn’t really giant, it’s just giant from the narrator’s point of view.

4 – I’m working on a nonfiction book that involves deafness. As I was thinking about a deaf student’s school day, I tried to immerse myself in what that would be like. And I wondered whether that silence was something I might be able to express through poem. The contrast of lots of activity with no noise intrigues me. And expressing silence through an oral form.

5 – At work, I read a reference to Sojourner Truth and her quote about the pain mothers felt watching their children get sold on the slavery block. It made me wonder, as I have before, what a dog thinks when her puppies disappear to new families. I read some melancholy animal poems in the morning by Ted Hughes, and I think that’s part of what made this idea jump into my head.

<<previous pagenext page>>