I attempted this writing prompt from Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days:
________________________ but I never told anyone
[repeat as necessary to create the poem]
I sat with pencil in hand, staring at the blank page for a long time before realizing that I've told everything to someone at least once. Sometimes to my closest friends, sometimes to my husband or only to my journal.
Sometimes I’ve talked to strangers with the confidence that we'll never meet again and so can tell each other almost anything.
Maybe I live a virtuous life, or perhaps I have no sense of propriety. I seem to have an irrational compulsion to share and to connect, which may explain why I love writing poetry.
On paper, one can imagine connections from a safe distance, speaking freely and unconstrained by the obligations of true intimacy or real-life relationships.
Paper is a safer space than one might at first imagine. One can lie freely and say it's in the service of one's art. Readers cannot reliably sort out fact from fiction.
Or perhaps in this age of vitriolic divisiveness, the written word is more dangerous to its creator than anyone could possibly imagine. In a less rabid era, Kenneth Koch said, "One expects to be forgiven for what one tells if it's a good poem" (ibid 68). That feels less true for writers today.
It won't stop me from living my life unfiltered.
And since my secret life is non-existent, I have only this blog post - no poem.
Give Kenneth Koch’s prompt a try, and let me know how it turns out. I hope you have good secrets to share, or that you're a better liar than I am and create a poem that tells a hidden truth.
***
Photo Credite: Nma7k3, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
No comments:
Post a Comment