by Deb Scott
Did you tell whoppers, fillet the facts, keep truth locked out of the writing room for a while? Tell us how the exercise went for you and leave us a link to your new poem (and it doesn’t have to be in response to last week’s prompt, either).
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Deb Scott is community and news director for Read Write Poem. In her other life she plays with words, her pets, bugs and her husband, in a random but rotating order. She blogs at Stoney Moss.
Mine is titled “Imagine”
( Apologies, as they say, to JL – as to RC, UU, and 4E )
Damian replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 12:32 am
This week I wrote At the Dawn of Time. Interesting prompt!
Only just made it this week! Lies I Have Told
More tall tale than lie:
Nether Realms
The Whoppers Tale (Pt 1)
Geriatrix Rox
What are the odds
at meeting up again
on an internet poetry site
Errick,Dwayne Pitchlo
and tall Sinthia
famous former rock grup
the mismatched ‘Cuban Combo’
Sin the redhead raunchette
belting out rock blues
like a barbed wire babushka
Errick the smooth swanky scot
shimmering in shot silk
laying them in the aisles
with wicked winks and drum rolls
Dwayne pitchlo pleasure bent
mentor of Lightfoot
pelted with roses and knickers
on stage every night
driving the chicks wild
with his hot piano playing
eventually snapped up by Castro
as front man for the Guevara
Guerilla light orchestra
Today the scottish baronet
the title a well kept secret
shuffles about his castle ruin
muttering snatches of metaphysical verse
becoming a world authority
on Aubusson tapestry
Dwayne the reigning rumba dance champ
of Canada and Cuba is poster boy for
Chesty Bond singlets
Sin,high priestess to the
Arizonan Cardinals and a lady
who lunches spends her days
lying by the pool scribbling poetry
on table napkins instructing Emilio
her uniformed steward in the art
of the afternoon cocktail
gautami tripathy replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 3:52 am
Am I going to figure in part 2?!
Rallentanda replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 4:36 am
Consider youself in! Watch this space.
Derrick replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Hello Rall,
What a gas! I feel I should know these people! I think Dwayne got the best role.
Yours,
Still shimmering!
Rallentanda replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 7:53 am
So glad you liked it.I chose victims who I thought would enter into the spirit of this as you have done.Thankyou Errick.You’re a good sport.
PS
Dwayne gets killed off in Pt2 by David Coolton and you become the hero.Cause of death thought to be terminal ennui brought about by interminable monologue.
Deb Scott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 7:57 am
What a fun poem! I love that you took the community along on this wild, wild ride. Thanks, Rallentanda!
Cynthia Short replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Hilarious! and very good, (how do you know about Emilio?) I just love your twisted little mind…
Rallentanda replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Oops sorry! I just made Emilio up.I didn’t realise he actually existed.
Cynthia Short replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Just don’t tell my husband!
Nathan replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 11:21 am
This is wonderful!
Therese L. Broderick replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 11:45 am
The many examples of alliteration lend jollity to the poem. My favorite is “barbed wire babushka.”
Barbara replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
If there is no Guevara Guerilla light orchestra, there ought to be. Subversive verse chamber rock.
David Moolten replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Rall,
This is a great run of consonance, alliteration and pop cultural observation. With the little stories about each character and meaning only positive comparison with respect to poems versus rock songs, it reminds me of early Springsteen.
Linda Fraser replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
This poem was a wonderful read. I loved your impressions of the people you poem with. Well written and fun, Rallentanda.
Rallentanda replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Thankyou to all my respondents for your kind comments and encouragement.I have a very low threshold for the serious so you
may find yourselves irreverently but with affection and flattery immortalised in future poems. No mercy will be shown to the others!
ravenswingpoetry replied:
September 25th, 2009 at 10:18 am
I like this! I especially enjoyed your descriptive characterization of each and your wordplay (redheaded raunchette, for example).
-Nicole
I don’t know what happened there. My connection seems to be playing up. My poem this week was At the Dawn of Time. I can’t wait to read everyone elses!
Deb Scott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Hmm. I got to it using the above link. (Better safe than sorry, though!)
http://koshtra.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html#4579002111657667543
angie werren replied:
September 26th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
this took me to “Dear World” — which I loved!
“I met you when I was nine months old” and “I think there is someone else”
yes, life would be a lot easier if we got to wait until we had more experience, wouldn’t it?
(and I must say — love the Mole!)
http://laughingdove.haystravelogue.com/free-form/2009/09/the-vamp-is-singing/
A touch of fantasy,
an elephant in the closet
I could have written so much more, but not wanting to avoid myself… I stopped.
(Great conversation has been had at the expense of this blog – always a good thing!)
juliejordanscott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Here is the link – I tried to use HTML coding. It didn’t work. Oops!
\http://juliejordanscott.typepad.com/jjspoetry/2009/09/readwritepoem-93-delicious-tainted-confessional-fib-1.html
You’ll find mine in this post:
http://beyondtheblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/justice
A fun prompt
http://conversationsinmid-air.blogspot.com/2009/09/death-of-pop-star.html
Ran with the prompt, then got lost, found my way out by means of an ekphrastic poem.
Like the Clay IV
Which is a continuation on an older tryptich,
Like the Clay
Hope this works:
http://firmlyrooted.blogspot.com/2009/09/tale-of-two-toes.html
Hello everyone,
This is rather different for me, this week. Please tell me what you think.
http://melrosemusings.blogspot.com/2009/09/i-used-to-be-tightrope-walker.html
rallentanda replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 10:55 am
‘I spanned the twin towers’an incongruous image, reminds me of ‘he doth bestride the world like a colossus’Apart from this the rest of your poem rang true.Walking a tightrope without a safety net through life is scary.I can see that telling tall tales is not your bag.
Even so I enjoyed your poem .
http://poemsotherwise.blogspot.com/2009/09/sun.html
It would be a lie to say I wrote this poem this week, as a response to the prompt. But I’m going to take the liberty of posting it anyway, as it is a response to the prompt. And also to Ren’s pithy and complementary post of a week or two ago about lying in poetry. I blogged about the topic almost two months ago, as the issue has dogged me my entire “writing life.” I wrote the poem almost twenty years ago. It was a breakthrough poem, one of my first “mature” or finished poems–very different in voice from the quiet, terse little poems I had then been writing–a cascade of words that came in a rush while listening to an old Steppenwolf song (“Born to be Wild”). The poem was popular with the seminar I was sitting in on while I went to medical school. And it was utterly a lie. Nothing in the poem is true. Not one fact or detail. Had it been obviously a whopper or a fantasy (different gender or time or planet) everyone would have guessed. But because the particulars are painfully “real” everyone who heard the poem assumed it was “confessional.” After a reading I gave, someone was outraged to learn, when he asked how my older brother was, that this brother never worked in a steel mill, nor I, and that he’d never been paralyzed, and that in fact, I didn’t even have a brother. This might sound amusing now (hopefully) but at the time I was quite chagrined. What were my obligations as a poet anyway? Didn’t the poem serve some greater truth with which I’d succeeded in spite of its dishonesty? Didn’t that artistic truth justify the dishonesty? Isn’t that dishonesty just fiction, an acceptable form of art, here versified? As I said, I’ve wrestled with this issue ever since. For one thing, when it came time to put a first book together I had to find a way to dovetail the jarring “facts” of this poem, with more accurate “personal” details. I ended up writing another poem, “The Brother I Never Had” as a means of suggesting this person was a metaphor, a figurative brother in the world. Since then, I’ve never written a poem which dissembles “personal experience” in so blatant a way. This isn’t to say I don’t lie in my poems. I lie in every one. I change colors, objects, names, places, years etc all the time. I just don’t write in the first person about “who I am” or have been in a way that is hard to explain or blend with other work. For me this is a practical issue, rather than a “moral” one. I think it a self-imposed limitation of the form, and/or people’s expectations. I could go on and on about this, but I’ll stop as I have rambled long enough…
’Cuda
Therese Broderick replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 6:26 am
Thank you for sharing your artistic struggles, David.
Deb Scott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 8:02 am
Yes, David. Thank you. It’s helpful to read how others have grappled with this issue — not a new one — and one always in the background, if not the foreground.
(I love this community. Thank you, everyone!)
Neil Reid replied:
September 25th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Yes, thank you for sharing David. I think when all the smallest bits of us are all gathered together, we’ll approach some measure of what is true. But not till then. Otherwise what we have is our one singular point of view, and that’s nothing bad or less. It is just what it is. Our part of the chorus. And what’s a lie? Just one step away from what really is, is all. We all, do it all the time. Does language give us any choice that way? Always one step behind if not aside. Our life more than words ever will, speaks a truth. So it is.
But we write anyway, and I’m still glad for that.
this prompt led me to a strange place; it’s hard to find the “lie” in the final piece. great exercise, Deb!
‘immured’
http://therer2doors.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/immured/
Deb Scott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Glad you liked it, Angie. I’ll be by to read.
(I’ll be reading everyone’s, too. I’m so curious about everyone’s work.)
Sometimes the unbelievable is so preposterous that its premise cracks open the woven logic of ones intellect. It happened to me The night I learned.
“Whopper Haiku”
http://theresebroderick.wordpress.com/
good morning!
http://projectartpoetica.com/blog/?p=163
of course it’s a lie, i’m not a doctor! had a good time with this one deb, thanks for the prompt!
Bye Bye Birdie
http://beatnikprose.blogspot.com/2009/09/bye-bye-birdie.html
-lawrence
Lies, yes; mine, no. Whose? Here:
http://patteran.typepad.com/
Thank you for this idea, Deb. Going to lies to get to the truth is an interesting process that worked for me. Last week my husband heard his cancer had spread, they are not going to operate. George had always been my favorite Beatle. Both my husband and George were born in England, a month apart in 1943. MMMMmmm…. I wonder who this song is really about.
Deb Scott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Oh, Linda.
Dana Guthrie Martin replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Linda, I’m so sorry.
Nathan replied:
September 25th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Linda, I’m sorry.
Sorry, it will be
Living In The Eastern Woodlands. My poem is Read, Write Prompt #93: Make it a Whopper
Here is my raw lie – the oldest lie a man has made – Vampire
Like I said before, “making peach jam with the Dalai Lama” really rang out in me, so this is a similar, yet different, kind of afternoon with one of the greats:
Lunch with Basho
And now for something COMPLETELY different! I wrote in a style I have never done before but really enjoyed this prompt! Hope you all enjoy reading it!
http://cynthiashort.blogspot.com
Cynthia Short replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 10:07 am
Justread my poem to my three year old grandson. At the finish he politely said, “I like it, but where are the dinosaurs?” Everyone’s a critic…..
Deb Scott replied:
September 25th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
(I see a dinosaur poem in his future — we had a dino prompt from Juliet within the last year, I do believe! Find it using search and enjoy!)
Here is my offering this week – a prosey little thing called “Transfusion”
http://djvorreyer.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/readwritepoem-93-liar-liar/
I would love comment – enjoy!
Donna Vorreyer replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Comments – sorry!
Interesting, how some struggle with telling a lie. I just struggle enough with any prompt – but this is only twice. So what! This poem is the third I did. So be it.
http://bearlyaudible.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/you-asked/
Once again, I couldn’t make my weekly Torah poem fit this prompt, so I offer it as an off-prompt poem:
Recording
http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2009/09/this-weeks-portion-recording.html
Lies about mountains: Fujisan.
Mine is Traveling Incognito.
Wow. Reading everyone’s whoppers has been inspirational for me. I’m not entirely happy with mine, but that’s only because of petty issues with verb tenses. Stupid verbs.
At any rate, I give you my Time machine.
Leigh Anne
I wish I had something this week but I don’t. I’ll get around to see what everyone else has done. This should be good!
I’m coming in late, but here I am with my offering for this week:
Eclipse
-Nicole
Deb Scott replied:
September 24th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Late?! Goodness, no. You are not late (she writes while rubbing sleep still in her eye) … it’s morning on the west coast of North America!
http://monthofapril2008.blogspot.com/2009/09/unreality.html
I am not sure if this is appropriate to this prompt – in the assumption that it could be, I am attempting this…
Thank you for the wonderful ideas here.. Way to Go ReadWritePoem!
Thanks for the prompt. Sometimes, it’s just plain hard to write! But…here’s something.
Singing Toward Jupiter
Enjoyed the prompt, Deb. Mine is The Surface of the Moon
I did it! Well, kind of…
By “did it” I mean I actually wrote something.
http://hollyannam.blogspot.com/2009/09/shiny-tin-boxes.html
Finally got my “whopper” on
Speed Reading In A Limousine
http://www.waynepitchko.blogspot.com
Thank goodness rwp doesn’t penalize for tardiness! This was fun…
http://freckledwriter.blogspot.com/2009/09/epic.html