This exercise is by Jon Simmerman, included in The Practice of Poetry by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell:
- Begin the poem with a metaphor.
- Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
- Use at least one image for each of the five senses, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
- Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
- Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
- Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
- Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
- Use a word (slang?) you’ve never seen in a poem.
- Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
- Use a piece of “talk” you’ve actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don’t understand).
- Create a metaphor using the following construction: “The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun)…”
- Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
- Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in “real life.”
- Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
- Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
- Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
- Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that makes no sense.
- Use a phrase from a language other than English.
- Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
- Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.
Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that “echoes” an image from earlier in the poem.
Open the poem with the first project and close it with the last. Otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like, giving each project at least one line. Try to use all twenty projects. Feel free to repeat those you like. Fool around. Enjoy.
And below is my latest try, but with explanation first. This week there was a rumor that a teacher at another school was deported for driving without a license. That is within the law and expats are deported for that offense, but this was the first time I’d heard of a Western expat deported for that reason. Turns out, this expat wasn’t deported, only held overnight. I started thinking what I would do if I were picked up and taken to the deportation center, made to board a plane without a phone call to Justin. I started thinking why this teacher was allowed to stay in-country. Because he was Western? (Was he Western? I don’t actually know. I assume.) Because his employer lobbied on his behalf? I don’t know.
Also, ethnicity and socioeconomic status put a tag on people. I think this happens everywhere. Sometimes seeing people as equal is conscious work. (Change my heart!) I am uncomfortable with how noticeably differently I am treated as a white Western woman. My skin and nationality play more in my favor here than not, but I don’t like that. Or more so, I don’t like that I sometimes like what leniency white Western gets me. (Forgive me.)
So with all of that rolling around my head, and the challenge of (mostly!) completing twenty little poetry projects, the following draft:
By Way Of Deportation
My legs are roots
this chair a cliff ledge
I sit so still my thighs hurt,
my bladder burns
Around me: gray hum, sparks of yellow orange
when an Indian woman shouts like a song
If I move I will wet my pants
If I am released
there is a God
or wasta, Inshallah
I am called across the room
to an office where I sit across
from a man smoking a bored cigarette
The full knowledge of power
is sitting still and not wetting my pants
Easy-peasy, as my son says
Easy-pee-sy Sarah can hold it
in this windowless holding room
under fluorescent day/night
You’re the one who got caught?
No license? He smokes,
considers my tight pressed knees
I haven’t got a lie
I have one lie
Deportation as escape:
no last anything:
no last drive down Gulf Road
no last shwarma
no last sign-in at work
I don’t lie
I sit. He shifts
He lectures, I hear
Every year hundreds of brown-skinned
workers are relieved to be deported so
quickly and efficiently that suitcases and
passports are unnecessary, and you –
Equality by way of deportation
I will make it all the way to Chicago,
all the way to Kathryn, without crying
And you –
I sit long enough, white enough, that
he stubs his cigarette, lights another,
sighs, waves his hand, dismisses me
My bladder screams when I stand
I get a cot
no phone
no toilet paper
I get a morning taxi to my husband,
who is angry and relieved,
my children who cry
I might be over the Atlantic now
if I’d shouted or wet my pants
I might be drinking wine,
my ears full of gray noise
Piecemeal 