Writing Prompt: The Given Line

PART I______________________________________________________________________________
You may be assigned to write sonnets or other formal poems, or you may undertake such a project
yourself. But, as you revise your formal poems, sometimes you may move away from strict adherence to
form. In such cases, what has been gained from the formal exercise?
The composition process has likely made you more aware of your literary heritage, helped you to
generate new ideas and vocabulary, encouraged you to reshape your usual constructions and fit your
expression into a memorable configuration, and prompted you to compose musical lines. And, even if you
dont end up with a recognizable sonnet, sestina, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal, etc. in the end, you may
have found what Seamus Heaney calls a donne. Read the follow excerpt of an essay The Makings of a
Music by Heaney.

I chose the word makingsbecause it gestures towards the testings

and hesitations of the workshop, the approaches towards utterance, the
discovery of line and then the intuitive extension of the vital elements in
those line over a whole passageThe given line (donne), the phrase or
cadence which haunts the ear and eager parts of the mind, this is the
tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that
out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. It is my
impression that this haunting or donne occurs to all poets in much the
same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a
hankering, a readiness. It is also my impression that the quality of the
music in the finished poem has to do with the way in which a poet
proceeds to respond to his donne.

Well come back to this idea and get down to writing at the end of handouthang in there for the next
couple pages.

PART II_____________________________________________________________________________
Poet Richard Blanco, who read at Obamas inauguration, was recently interviewed on NPR. (The piece,
about being the first immigrant, Latino and openly gay poet chosen to read at an inauguration is here:
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/25/306530056/inaugural-poet-richard-blanco-i-finally-felt-like-i-was-home .)
This prompted me to remember Frosts famous recitation of The Gift Outright at Kennedys
inauguration.
The Gift Outright
By Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the lands.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were Englands, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Opinions on the poem vary. Jay Parini compliments, One can hardly imagine a better brief description
of our national history than Frost's image of the land vaguely realizing westward. Both vaguely and
realizing are unexpected, and perfect. The poet gets the haphazard, unplanned quality of the process in
the former term and underscores the seeming historic inevitability of it in the latterThat they remained
unstoried, artless, unenhanced is also part of the story, and Frost does not (as a lesser, merely patriotic
poet might have done) overly praise these conquerors, who even seem more like a virus than a nation.
Meanwhile Derek Walcott critiques, This was the calm reassurance of American destiny that provoked
Tonto's response to the Lone Ranger. No slavery, no colonization of Native Americans, a process of
dispossession and then possession, but nothing about the dispossession of others that this destiny
demanded. The choice of poem was not visionary so much as defensive.
However controversial the stance of Frosts poem is, it is a piece of writing that sticks in our national
memory, and the reminder of the power of well-crafted lines. One of these lines is echoed in Larry Leviss
later poem, The Poet at Seventeen.

The Poet at Seventeen

By Larry Levis
My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying
Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where
I spent it all, extravagantly, believing
My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.
Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,
And the trees held still or seemed to hold their breath
When the men I worked with, pruning orchards, sang
Their lost songs: Amapola; La Paloma;
Jalisco, No Te Rajesthe corny tunes
Their sons would just as soon forget, at recess,
Where they lounged apart in small groups of their own.
Still, even when they laughed, they laughed in Spanish.
I hated high school then, & on weekends drove
A tractor through the widowed fields. It was so boring
I memorized poems above the engines monotone.
Sometimes whole days slipped past without my noticing,
And birds of all kinds flew in front of me then.
I learned to tell them apart by their empty squabblings,
The slightest change in plumage, or the inflection
Of a call. And why not admit it? I was happy
Then. I believed in no one. I had the kind
Of solitude the world usually allows
Only to kings & criminals who are extinct,
Who disdain this world, & who rot, corrupt & shallow
As fields I disced: I turned up the same gray
Earth for years. Still, the land made a glum raisin
Each autumn, & made that little hell of days
The vines must have seemed like cages to the Mexicans
Who were paid seven cents a tray for the grapes
They picked. Inside the vines it was hot, & spiders
Strummed their emptiness. Black Widow, Daddy Longlegs.
The vine canes whipped our faces. None of us cared.
And the girls I tried to talk to after class
Sailed by, then each night lay enthroned in my bed,
With nothing on but the jewels of their embarrassment.
Eyes, lips, dreams. No one. The sky & the road.
A life like that? It seemed to go on forever

Reading poems in school, then driving a stuttering tractor

Warm afternoons, then billiards on blue October
Nights. The thick stars. But mostly now I remember
The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness
Like party dresses. And parties I didnt attend.
And then the first ice hung like spider lattices
Or the embroideries of Great Aunt No One,
And then the first dark entering the trees
And inside, the adults with their cocktails before dinner,
The way they always seemed afraid of something,
And sat so rigidly, although the land was theirs.

Levis appropriates Frosts phrasing in the last line of this poem to draw different, nuanced conclusions
about the American landowner, in his own, distinct voice.
Consider, what lines have you read or written that haunt the mind?

PART 3______________________________________________________________________________
Find a donne:

Review poems by published writers you respect and select a line so good it deserves an encore.
Recast it for contemporary times. Rebut it. Reinforce it. Draft a new poem that serves anothers
line, but draws your own, new conclusions. (Remember to credit the original author.) Or:

Look back over a draft of what you might have considered a failed formal poem and see if you
can find a line that haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind. Use it as a tuning fork for
your orchestra. Salvage it. Build a whole new poem around your stand-out piece.

Writing Prompt: Digging In, Deconstructing

OPTION 1: THE GOLDEN SHOVEL___________________________________________________
The golden shovel is a form created by the poet Terrance Hayes. Choose a poem from our reading you
want to spend time with and try out this form for yourself. Here are the rules:

Take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire.

Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem.

Keep the end words in order.

Give credit to the poet who originally wrote the line (or lines).

The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the poem that offers the end words.

The recommended length of the line you borrow is 6 to 24 words, which means there will be 6 to 24 lines
in the poem you create. Choose a striking line that contains some unusual words.
This will all make more sense when you look at an example. Rather than one line, Hayes borrowed
Gwendolyn Brooks whole poem:

We Real Cool
By Gwendolyn Brooks
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon

He turned it into the following, original poem. See how each of Brooks words appears at the end of his
lines? (Ive added the underlining to get you started.)

The Golden Shovel

By Terrance Hayes
after Gwendolyn Brooks
I. 1981
When I am so small Das sock covers my arm, we
cruise at twilight until we find the place the real
men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we
drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left
in them but approachlessness. This is a school
I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we
are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk
of smoke thinned to song. We wont be out late.
Standing in the middle of the street last night we
watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike
his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight
Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we
used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing
his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.
The boys sneakers were light on the road. We
watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.
Hed been caught lying or drinking his fathers gin.
Hed been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We
stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,
how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June
the boy would be locked upstate. That night we
got down on our knees in my room. If I should die
before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.

II. 1991
Into the tented city we go, weakened by the fires ethereal
afterglow. Born lost and cooler than heartache. What we
know is what we know. The left
hand severed and schooled by cleverness. A plate of weekdays cooking. The hour lurking in the afterglow. A latenight chant. Into the city we
go. Close your eyes and strike
a blow. Light can be straightened by its shadow. What we
break is what we hold. A singular blue note. An outcry singed exiting the throat. We
push until we thin, thinking we wont creep back again.
While God licks his kin, we
sing until our blood is jazz,
we swing from June to June.
We sweat to keep from weeping. Groomed on a diet of hunger, we end too soon.

OPTION 2: THE SCAFFOLD__________________________________________________________

Is that form too constrained for you? Then trying using a favorite poem weve studied as a scaffold:

Choose a poem that has interesting structure and distinctive syntax.

Replace all the nouns and adjectives with words of your choosing, about a very different subject.
Then replace the verbs and the articles, if you can.
Keep revising until it is utterly your own.

Not sure how it works? Try out this Dream Songs mad-lib generator, which points out the wonderfully
effective inversions and comic timing of Berrymans constructions, for a simplified introduction (and
certainly some laughs):
http://www.wordblanks.com/mad-libs/story/12073