by Christine Swint
There’s a room in my house I like to call “my room,” a la Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” In truth the space also serves as a storage room for family art projects, files, junk mail waiting for the shredder, winter clothes and books that keep trickling into our house, as well as a guest bedroom for Grandma.
Today, thinking about writing prompts, I looked at the shelves where an odd array of novels and volumes of history lean haphazardly. My eyes trained on The Grapes of Wrath, a story that had me in tears when I first read it years ago. It’s a novel my son read last summer and one that’s also close to my husband’s heart. It’s part of my life’s mythology.
Here’s the prompt I came up with:
- Choose a book that calls to you.
- Go to the end of several chapters, and find the final noun or verb.
- Make a list of 10 or so words, and then write a 10- to 20-line poem using those words.
- Maybe the feeling or tone of your poem will come from your emotional connection to the book you choose. Maybe not.
And, if you’d like to collaborate on this prompt:
- Find your book and look for five words.
- Ask a friend to look through the same book and find five more words.
- Each of you writes five or so lines.
- Now combine the lines, alternating between yours and your friend’s lines.
For my poem, I worked solo. I found 11 nouns, and I ended up writing a free verse poem about laborers living in Mexico. The theme of my poem is the misery of poverty and the callousness of the ruling class, a definite connection to Steinbeck.
Here are Steinbeck’s words incorporated into my poem: men, truck, dust, buildings, hunters, head, jail, cars, west, windows.
Happy word hunting!
Ah, very interested in this exercise. I recently reread The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danicat. If you haven’t read it, do. It is beautifully written. It’s the story of slaughtered Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic. I’m going to revisit it for inspiration for this prompt.
Great, Susan. I haven’t read it, so I’ll put it on my list. I’m going to look through another book, one of my faves, The Windup Bird Chronicles. I’ll post my words here. If anyone wants to collaborate, just send me an email, or leave a comment on my blog.
Again, going against the flow. Here is my work based on last week’s prompt. I’ll try to get the new one up soon.
http://eatsbugs.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/numbers-121307/
And we’ll go ahead and post that poem now…
Prompted from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
http://eatsbugs.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/regina-121307/
Hi Derek,
The link isn’t working. The Handmaid’s Tale should be required reading. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
You should also read Atwood’s Penelopiad
I also loved the Handmaid’s Tale. That would be a great book for gleaning words.
I am in the midst of reading Atwood’s The Blind Assassin! Another one I recommend after The Handmaid’s Tale.
I picked Blind Assassin one off the shelf for my mother, who is a die-hard romance reader. I’m trying to break her out. I don’t even know if she read that one.
And try the link again. I edited the time stamp on it so it would show up the next day, so it might have been broken for a while.
Here | snapshot poem…
Once again, the lines are too long for the format, so I’ve done it as an image (click to bring it up larger.) The text, with broken lines, is below the cut: This week was a novel prompt: Make a list of 10 or so words – the final words from chapters of…
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