Speak, Memory
Poetry Exercise
A Process for Recovering Memories
Sit down with your notebook and jot down a few words or phrases for each memory that comes to you as you answer the following questions so that you will have an abbreviated record of incidents you recalled.
If some of these memories bring with them strong emotions, so much the better. The incidents that you come up with do not have to be memories from your childhood.
- A Pleasant Time in the Past
- A Building in which you lived in once
- A secret you once had
- A magical person from your childhood
- An incident that filled you with dread
- Something dangerous you did when you were young
- Something sinful or bad you did as a child
- Something that happened in a classroom or schoolyard
- Something that happened during a school vacation
- Something that happened many years ago neat a body of water
- Your first romantic infatuation
- Something funny that made you laugh happily
Taking Notes for the First Poem
Choose one of these incidents, one that calls up strong emotions and which might have had consequences for your emotional life, but also one that has a story that would be interesting to tell. Now close your eyes and go back to the beginning of that particular incident.
Then jot down as many specific details as you can recall: not simply a decorated classroom wall, but a poster of Cain and Abel; not simply a train coming to a halt but “the terrible long screech of the train’s braking”; not just a man with a disease but “ankles clotted beneath wool socks.” Write down what things looked like, smelled like, felt like; what someone said, how someone gestured or moved or wept… If you find yourself writing a paragraph or a couple of pages describing the incident that is perfectly okay.
When you have done that, ask yourself what impact the incident had on your life. Why do you remember this? That is a question that is not always easy to answer. Although a poem’s theme, what one is to make of a particular incident, is often one of the discoveries that occurs in the process of writing rather than before the writing begins, it is a useful question to ask from the beginning, for the answer will help to focus on the poem, determining the appropriate mood and how most effectively to organize and shape the materal.
Read the following three suggested poems and choose the one that seems fit most comfortably the memory with which you are dealing. As you read the other two suggestions you might find that other memories brought to light by the exercise would fit those formats. Needless to say, it would be fruitful to write all three of the suggested poems.
- A Pleasant Time in the Past
A little girl rides on a tall male horse with one eye. She knows her pasture by heart enough to guide the horse. So she doesn’t hit a tree branch. She’s in the back, going at a slow pace. They go around a medium tree, the branches hanging low. The horse doesn’t know, so the girl with a free hand pushes the branches aside. The girl is sure the horse the knows this land well enough that the horse probably doesn’t need both eyes to navigate.
- Building Lived In
In the elegant dining room, the floors are a beautiful wood. A dark oak table with a large rug decorated in flowers sits in the middle. Off in the corner, an oak cabinet displays formal occasion dining sets. To the two girls, the floors are perfect for rolling across on wheeled desk chairs, the table and cabinet for pushing off. The room’s only purpose to them is to spin about the massive space until one becomes very dizzy.
- Secret Once Had
I had a friend over for a school project one day, and we were going to write a report on my laptop where I had a story I was writing still up. I had forgotten. We sat down, and I handed her my laptop. My heart hammered inside me, and my cheeks burned. So afraid. Afraid of what she’ll think. I never shared my writing with anyone. Her only reaction was that she was surprised. She hadn’t said anything after that until the next day. She told my — our friends — friends that I write. After that, I felt I had to one up to what they thought of my writing.
- Magical Person from Childhood
There were no magical people in my collection of imaginary friends. They were teachers, students, my own family, friends and parents of my family, some with amazing occupations. I was a mother with about 5 or 6 children — two were American dolls — and a lovely husband. My occupation was a teacher who taught in one of her son’s grades. I was friends with about 3 of the teachers, who also had kids. Thinking back to the world I had created, it was the world I wanted when I grew up. The adults had jobs I wanted. Teachers, wildlife biologists, bus drivers, professionally shows dogs and school dance teachers. And I also wanted a lot of children, for some unknown reason.
Details -
- Wooden fence
- Tree at the end of the pasture
- Large brown and black horse with one eye
- Small barn
- Leather saddle
- Manure
Poem One: A Childhood Memory
Out of all the details and facts you have written down, choose the ones that will permit you to write a poem of no more than thirty-five lines, telling your story as effectively as you can. Tell it in a manner that makes the reader continually want to know what happens next. Make sure the incident is held to one scene-one physical location. Sometimes this means you will have to choose one particular incident out of many. If the memory that you recalled while doing the memory process jumped around from locale to locale, find the one that seems the most vivid and intense, the one filled with the most action, drama and conflict… A poem that begins “Again he took out his strap and hit me” lets the reader know, imply through the use of the word “again,” that this has happened before. Starting with the action rather than with a lot of background information is an important storyteller’s device. The reader must know what the poem’s narrator (the “I” of the poem) is feeling… Try to make the reader feel the humor of the situation or its pathos or the narrator’s grief or something of the mystery of the world, or the small, significant triumph of a character’s life or whatever it is you wish to call forth from the reader’s emotions.
Remember to show us rather than tell us: use vivid, expressive details to give the reader the picture you want us to see before our eyes. Concentrate on describing the action in such a way that the reader will understand the feelings of the characters without having to be told them.
If thirty-five lines doesn’t seem like enough space in which to tell your story, so much the better: the more concise you are forced to be, the more likelihood that you will select your details carefully and maintain the narrative and emotional intensity that you want.
Do not use end-rhyme (rhyming words at the ends of lines) in this poem. Far from making a poem more musical, in inexperienced hands end-rhyme often forces the author to write awkwardly keening a noem from becoming musical and graceful. Instead of rhyme, let the compression, precision, and clarity of your phrasing, the accuracy of your descriptions, the drama of your narrative, and the intensity of the emotion shape this into a powerful poem.
Poem Two: Working with Structure
Take one of the memories generated by the exercise and write a poem based on the structure of Machado’s “Memory from Childhood.” That poem evokes the mood of a place and time in the poet’s past by choosing just a few details. This form might be appropriate for a memory of something that happened over and over, or a continuous action over a long period of time, or one that is significant to you without being particularly dramatic or fraught with conflict. Perhaps it will be about the two years you spent in Idaho or the three years when you lived with your grandmother, or the winter you spent in Alaska when your mother was dying. You might make each stanza a different scene at a different locale.
First, gather four distinct sets of details about the occasion and use one in each of four stanzas. A stanza is a verse paragraph, separated from the remainder of the poem by an additional space. Machado, for example, discusses the weather in the first stanza, the schoolroom in the second, the teacher in the third, and the students in the fourth. The final stanza repeats the first. You will observe that the poet tells the reader in the first stanza what the emotion of the poem is. If it works gracefully in your poem, try the same thing. But even if you don’t tell us explicitly what the mood is, that mood must quickly and clearly be made known to the reader.
Each stanza of “Memory from Childhood” is four lines long. Keep yours the same length. Also, repeat the first stanza as the last as Machado does-or, as an alternative, make the last two lines a repetition of the poem’s opening two lines.
Untitled
A warm and sunny afternoon.
A girl is riding a horse.
The steady amble of a horse
across the pasture.
It is the pasture. In a barn
a pony is eating her oats,
and another horse is waiting,
for her turn at attention.
The girl, with a soft-spoken voice,
is stilly. She is a young girl,
long-haired and with bright eyes,
who is guiding a partially blind horse.
And the horse is
dutifully obeying:
turning a slow corner around a tree
as the girl moves a branch out of her way.
A warm and sunny afternoon.
A girl is riding a horse.
The steady amble of a horse
across the pasture.
(2018)
Poem Three: Family Secrets
If there is a dramatic story that cannot be told as one incident but surveys an entire period of your life, you may wish to use the strategy that Dorriane Laux employs, framing the story with one small anecdote which appears at the poem’s beginning and conclusion. Maybe your story is about a family secret — about alcoholism or drug abuse or incenst or violence or debilitating illness. Whatever the larger story you wish to tell, find a specific incident that you can use to frame it. Do not try to tell us all the things that happened but, like Laux, find the three or four details that will bring the situation to life for the reader. Since you may be encompassing the events of many moments of many months or years, try to pick out just the right details, ignoring a wealth of others that you may have the impulse to tell us. Keep the poem to a maximum of thirty-five lines.
Revising the First Poem
After you have finished writing a first draft of one of these poems, look it over and see if you actually told your story clearly and effectively. Often inexperienced writers find it hard to separate what they know about an incident from what they have told the reader, with the consequence that crucial information never gets conveyed.
Sometimes in a second or third draft, dissatisfied with their previous attempts, writers will start the story at a different point in time or find better details for their purpose.
Looking over your draft a few days later is often an effective way to see the poem with fresh eyes.
(Exercise taken from Steve Kowit’s book In the Palm of Your Hand: A Poet’s Portable Workshop)
