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read write prompt: #21 family matters (aunts)

by Deb Scott

This week’s prompt is “aunt,” simply because today is my favorite aunt’s birthday. I call her Aunt B (for Barbara), but she is also known as Babs, Barbie, Sissy, Mom, Mother, Grams, Grandma, Grandmother and Mrs. Linn.

Perhaps you have a favorite aunt (or uncle or cousin). But then, so many families are crazy (fun or lunatic or both) that perhaps your favorite aunt is fictional or imaginary. Maybe your Aunt B (or Bee or Bea) is like Andy and Opie Griffith’s Aunt Bee: a fictional aunt fulfilling a maternal roll.

Do you come from a culture that calls every elder female relative “Auntie” out of respect? Or would you like to cloak yourself with that view and honor someone in your real or imaginary life? Re-create that someone as “Auntie”. Perhaps you have a madcap Auntie Mame alter ego, pounding on the stage door. Let her out.

We won’t be the first poets to write about their aunts. T.S. Eliot had his “Aunt Helen” (1917), Dylan Thomas wrote a critique on poetic style (or was it on snobbery?) to his aunt in “A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry” (early 1930s) and Adrienne Rich published “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (1951). Recently John Terpstra penned “Aunt Lucy,” which begins:

Sweet Aunt Lucy, whom I recall most vividly
from Christmases at home, when she sat
at the corner of our couch, smoking
the cigarettes she smoked only then,

Thinking about an aunt at a family event ought to trigger all sorts of real and imagined events and ideas you can write about this week.

A NaPoWriMo chainpoem
If you’d like, post a line here, and count it as one of your daily poems for the month of April. I’ll assemble your lines and re-post it as a poem Tuesday, April 8. (If you are contributing a line please post only that line — no commentary or links — in one comment, otherwise I will get confused. You can make comments, but be clear it is a comment not a line to be added.

Collaboration ideas (sometimes it’s easier to write about someone else’s family than our own)

  • Trade a family photo of your aunt(s) with a fellow poet and write about what you see.
  • Trade four to six lines with a fellow poet and replace at least two of your lines with theirs.
  • Write a poem about Aunt _____ and take out all the important words. Pass it on to a fellow poet to fill in the blanks.

This week let your mind wander to your parents’ sisters –- or anywhere else –- and come back next week, starting after midnight Monday, to Get Your Poem On.

Terpstra, John. (2007). Aunt Lucy. The Antigonish Review #148, 37-1.

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Posted by Deb Scott under Deb Scott, NaPoWriMo, Read Write Prompt

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