Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 20:34:16 -0400 From: Words from the Monastery Subject: EXERCISE: Poetry Afterimages: The History of a Reflection -- Jay Klokker Step 1: Make a list of at least twenty intense physical experiences that you have actually had. Include a wide range of both the ordinary (waiting tables in a busy restaurant) and the momentous (giving birth to a child). Write quickly. If stuck, think of the last time you went to bed physically exhausted or emotionally drained. Step 2: From the list select one item that is especially vivid. This will be your subject. Step 3: Without writing, let your mind drift back to the time when the physical intensity of the experience was over and you could look back at it. Take as long as you need to fully reexperience that moment, including all that you saw, heard, felt, and thought. When you feel ready, jot down what you have recalled. Include as many details as you can. Step 4: Using words, phrases, and memories generated in the previous step, write a poem that shows what went through your mind as you looked back at your intense experience. Pay special attention to thoughts and perceptions that surprised you and to the way you mind moved from one scene, idea, or feeling to another Although designed to encourage beginning writers to trust the language of their own senses, "Afterimages" is appropriate for poets of all levels who are looking for new subject matter to explore. Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking" is a fine example of a poem that shows how the mind works after a day of hard physical labor. None of Wordsworth's recollection in tranquility here--Frost's apple-picker lies in bed while visions of apples proliferate in his mind's eye and the feel of the ladder rung still makes his instep ache. Such obsessive perceptions are the stuff of which insomnia--and poetry--are made. Different poets--whether beginners or professionals--have different strategies in choosing the subjects about which they write. Exhaustion often leads the mind to repeat obsessive images and ideas--Frost's apples, again--and to juxtapose violently thoughts and feelings that would usually be seen as incongruous. This exercise encourages you to use these naturally occurring repetitions and contrasts as a structural principle in a poem. "After Apple-Picking" My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now. Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end an blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Where he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep. -- Robert Frost From: The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach Edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell HarperPerennial, ISBN 0-06-273024-X