Phrase Acrostic
Here is a great example of an
exercise that allows the mind to write organically by keeping the
logic/reasoning left brain focused on the form while the left brain runs with
wild leaps & associations the left brain would frown upon. Here’s how it works: Start by writing a phrase
one word at a time down the left margin. In the two following examples, I used
an American Sentence (17 syllable poem) to get going:
Another Bird Song
May sun river reflection a
perceived bright silver angle w/ which the
chickadee sings his Thursday A.M. melody going
on bird nerve & the primitive hunger of sound.
The notion of sound as gift cottonwood down
downed in May on the ground under the dream head pillow so
Stuck in its insistence to follow its plan to mitigate
this state we created. A
maple
tree a perch for early brunch surely this
throat
bobbing bird has a tender
vibrato & a word for Thursday but until Slaughter
relents it's only nine cheerful notes.
The River’s Dream
The Slaughter day fades into night & the Stuck
river’s
dream begins as a
silver
shimmer. She is back to a time of red paint power
what
reflects a less fearful state the
outline
of
bare
trees
& a time
before blackberries &
relentless settler prehension. Time of red paint power end of
November
when the harvest is in & her
dreams are protected by miles of
fog.
The
idea in writing the poem is to write something beyond/different from the starter
phrase; to give it more depth, or even change the meaning/content. You may
start with a line from someone else’s poem. As you start off with an image or
line spurred on by the first word, you have to change gears and incorporate the
first word on the next line, which allows for something different than what
your usual writing mind might have conjured. This is one great feature of fixed
forms, they force your mind into different
associations. Notice in both poems that
some lines are only one word, the word which was there from the beginning
in those particular lines. If you subscribe to the notion of the poem on the
page is a score for reading it out loud, this will give those passages a little
extra emphasis. This is not unlike calligraphy, or Michael McClure’s poems
which often have passages that read down the page.
The poem is limited to the space you have for each line and the lines determined by the phrase you started with, so it often prevents the rambling, one of the drawbacks of writing in open forms.
(Other
example poems: September’s Search for Duende
and Letter 13: